“Creamery”

Luiza Baldan graduated from Florida International University and holds a master's degree from UFRJ. She is an artist who uses photography and video as her main means of expression. Her exhibitions include those held at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Paço das Artes, Travessias 2 (Galpão da Maré), the Moreira Sales Institute, the Maria Antônia Cultural Center, and the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in Rio. She has received several awards, such as the IPHAN Art and Heritage Merit Award (2013) and the XI Marc Ferrez Photography Award. She has also participated in several artistic residencies in different regions of Rio de Janeiro, such as the Rapozo Lopes building (Santa Teresa), the Península (Barra da Tijuca), and the Pedregulho (Benfica). In 2012, she held her first international residency, in Chile.

The artist is guided by reality, but at the same time by the constructive capacity of photography, and creates compositions that are not necessarily credible. She produces images that in a certain way create a temporal cut, generating a sensation that time has been suspended, an aspect that is closely related to the light and the cuts she makes. Furthermore, the places in her works are full of memories and traces, however, we do not know when the places were left and whether the departure is permanent or not.

Most of her photographs speak of absence. They are images without human presence, but they do not intend to highlight the place and its architecture itself. Luzia shows that these spaces were used, lived in, occupied. There are marks of human presence in them, but at the same time there is the absence of their inhabitants.

She treats human presence in different ways in her work: as in the “Urban Diary” series, people are not characters, they are not portraits, they are elements in the composition of the image; in the “Christmas on the Minhocão” series, the relationship is different, because, as the artist comments: “Interestingly, I only take portraits of people with whom I have some intimacy, to try to establish a kind of dialogue through the camera.”1

Luzia points to her residency at “Minhocão” in 2009 as one of her most important. The residency lasted two weeks in the building known as Pedregulho (Rio de Janeiro), designed by architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy, an icon of Brazilian modernist residential architecture. Luiza proposed a project of portraits of residents in which they would be both objects and authors (the artist would teach them how to use the photographic equipment).

According to Felipe Scovino: “As an open work, its places are situated between times and territories, filled with silences and voids that offer themselves to be unveiled by the spectator, now in the role of a guest, detective or intruder. It is at this intersection, with the absence of clear boundaries, between discomfort, estrangement and recognition that we place ourselves before Baldan’s images. A kind of archaeology of inhabitation is present, but ambiguously it never is or can be an exercise or a place for this function, because it does not wish to be so.”2