Silent Regiment 01, 2013
Photography, acrylic and tea wash on raw canvas
187 x 100 cm
unique piece
Series: Silent Regiment
Amid vending machines, illuminated shop windows and packaged goods, Simulacro portrays a landscape where immediate gratification reshapes the ways relationships are experienced.
Developed during a journey through Mongolia, this series of portraits reflects on the ways images carry traces of time, history and ritual.
The photographed soldiers appear suspended between individuality and collective identity. Their presence evokes the long historical continuum of military structures that have shaped territories and political imaginaries across centuries. Yet the images avoid heroic representation. The figures emerge instead in a state of quiet stillness, where the body becomes a surface upon which historical memory quietly accumulates.
Each photograph is printed on canvas and subsequently subjected to material interventions. In some works a single brushstroke crosses the image in a brief and decisive gesture. In others the surface is immersed in baths of tea, allowing oxidation and staining to gradually alter the photographic field.
Tea introduces a temporal dimension to the image. As a substance associated with ritual and daily practice across vast regions of Asia, it operates here not merely as pigment but as a material agent of time. The stains produced through this process evoke aging, erosion and the slow sedimentation of memory within the photographic surface.
Rather than stabilizing the portrait, these interventions destabilize the image, opening a space where representation, gesture and material transformation intersect. The resulting works exist somewhere between photograph, painting and artifact, suggesting that the image is not fixed but continuously shaped by processes of time and matter.
Exhibitions
Atemporal, Galeria Graphos Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil