TROPICALIA
A photo essay about sea evocations.

TROPICALIA in Brazil was an artistic movement inspired by the Cannibal Manifesto, written by the poet Oswald de Andrade. While de Andrade's short polemical text had a major impact on music, it also had an influence on other artistic fields. Published in Spanish in 1928, Manifesto Antropófago argues that Latin America's post-colonial heritage is  jeopardized by a European dominance. That dominance fails to recognize the ways processes of cultural cannibalism had redefined local identities. The popular served as the raw material for new forms of expression.

In 1979, as a child I visited Acapulco with my parents. It was the first time I went to the beach and also my first trip on an airplane. The place fascinated me since I grew up in a small town near the U.S. border, a semi-desert zone of Mexico. The sand, the water, the food and the boats printed powerful images onto my mind. Later in elementary school, I met my good friend Paco. His parents had moved from Acapulco to my town and opened a small restaurant next to the river. The most striking feature of the restaurant was an enormous wall painting with a mural of the sea, palms, birds and coconuts. For me, these kinds of images represented the exotic world of the beach.

TROPICALIA is a reflection on the way the sea gets evoked in places like seafood restaurants. My goal is to archive a series of pictures in different cities where the elements of the sea build on emblematic images that brings the presence of the beach into the local. Also I am interested in how geographies become represented in an artificial manner through objects, colors and images.

To realize the photo essay, I would like to travel to different cities in my region. Inspired by the other’s nostalgia, the places I am interested in photographing become a representation of paradise as advertised by the leisure industries. I am interested in emphasizing the aspects of simulation.