Violence in peacetime
By fighting evil, we only feed it. Caught up in the spiral of events, we become unwilling prisoners, replicating the fate of our predecessors. This endless repetition turns into a nightmare, reducing mankind to beasts and destroying the world. The vision of human nature is bleak, even from an aesthetic angle. The insane will to power only makes matters worse. Attempting to conquer evil leads inexorably to bitter failure, like a mirror reflecting our double. The world is a Greek tragedy, a Shakespearean drama: running away from our destiny is futile; it always comes to pass. Lucid but blind, we are carried away by a derisory will – which is propagated in a dilapidated world, populated by beings broken and bruised by existence. There’s nothing divine about our humanity any more; it’s eaten away by uncontrolled desires. We are the ghostly image of a negative waiting for its developer, before the final shock.

SERIES TITLE Farewell Rio
They move forward, transfixed, petrified among the spectres, invisible but there, engulfed by the relentless flow of a city that roars relentlessly, its maw wide open. Each drags their burden like a second skin, rough, raspy and flayed. In this compact mass, each is an island, a solitude in motion, moving to the rhythm of the asphalt, drowned in the incessant din of voices and engines. Frozen beings, statues of flesh shaped by their environment, sculpted, eroded, then ruthlessly cast back into the icy abyss of urban oblivion.
And then there are those who give up, lie down and let time go by, crouched between two cardboard boxes, hidden under a scented sheet, their immobile, almost dead silhouettes frozen on the sidewalks, exposed to the indifferent gaze. A young mother and her son, barely two years old but very much alive, also wait for the night to pass, sitting on a low wall near the Avenida Atlântica’s Zona Sul, hungry, offering a faint smile to passers-by who deign to give them a furtive glance.
Children tread the streets in this polymorphous atmosphere, meandering with the insouciance of those who unknowingly brave the world. They play on the potholed sidewalks, dodging onlookers with the agility of those who have nothing left to lose…
An ephemeral vivacity that the metropolis will eventually crush without mercy, but which it seems, for the space of a moment, to allow to blossom before swallowing it up. They embody the promise of another possibility, nipped in the bud. And in every alleyway, we come across those who look without seeing, numb silhouettes, frozen solitudes, weary, reduced to the status of silent martyrs, trapped in the hubbub. They wander on the bangs of existence, at once present and invisible, modern silhouettes of the absurd and anonymous, living embodiments of the existential paradox that the city absorbs, digests, then spits out without memory.

Manuel Besse, Rio de Janeiro 2024, Ipanema.