Bahia living rooms

Bahia living rooms The light emanating from the television sets the central role of this object in the series conducted by Mauricio Pisani, in Bahia, Brazil 2011. Rather than questioning the dominant role of television as the only source of "information", leisure and "cultural content" in a significant part of the Brazilian homes, the images also point to other important roles of the object - of material, aesthetic and symbolic order: a presence that organizes and distributes light and fills the space. The images show us shades of color and the presence of certain recurring elements - curtains, plastic flowers, religious images - and suggest an aesthetic standard that could set up a typology of housing in interior of Bahia. The rooms portrayed here suggests to us, moreover, geographic charachteristics of the region and cultural aspects of its inhabitants. We are intentionally not shown everything so that we can imagine: the natural and human landscape beyond the frame, the warm night, a clear sky, the red clay, the colors of the land. Colors and contrasts already announced inside the rooms guide us to another place, the place of the other. The form and content covered in the series refer to crucial subjects for the photographer, whom graduated in International Relations: space, territory, identity, borders, and its many possibilities. The private or public spaces, the identity that brings us together or apart, the territory which we belong to or we explore, the boundaries that separate us or interpellate. The strangeness and the approximation that such images trigger indicate the existence of physical and symbolic differences between the photographer, the social landscape that he captures and the perception of the viewer. The lens of the artist steps into intimate territories. Here they offer us a brief view through the interiors of the living rooms in Bahia, no more private spaces in the perception of the viewer. by Anna and Camila Fialho