The Berlin Atlas
In 2022, I was awarded a DAAD grant (Proposal for Study Visits for Academics - Artists and Architects) to carry out the artistic, pedagogical and experimental project The Berlin Photo Atlas. In addition to the academic activities at the Technische Universität Berlin, I proposed an extensive photographic survey of the Berlin metropolitan area. The work consists of 70 photographs, taken using a rigorous practical and theoretical method initially developed during my academic activities in São Paulo (Brazil). I stayed in Berlin for three months, but I still had to make further trips to the city to refine the work.
As the name evokes, the Photo Atlas is close to the universe of maps, guides and other objects of cartography, and intends to be an instrument of orientation in these vast territories. While raising important questions about the contemporary city, the work is also part of a tradition of cities photographic documentation started in the 19th century and taken to the state of the art by contemporary German photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and their disciples at the so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography.
The work deals with the the various possibilities of representation of urban space in an increasingly fragmented and accelerated world and was conceptually guided by a classic book in urbanism. In The Image of the City (1960), American scholar Kevin Lynch suggests that if we can’t read the city properly, we can’t act on it. And if we can’t act on it, we will be creating an alienated experience. Therefore, the “legibility” of the city is a requirement for political participation. This problem becomes even more serious in the face of the contemporary world, where direct experience is increasingly replaced by virtual.
To create the Berlin Photo Atlas, I used a similar method, taking a photograph for each page of the city's street guide (Berlin Atlas BVG 2021). The method seeks new ways of representing and perceiving the contemporary city, in a world increasingly governed by the speed and fragmentation of time, where spaces are exhaustively mapped, without there being a better understanding of their dynamics. To this end, the work relies on the transition between the field experience brought by the photographic survey and the theoretical questions that the process evokes.
