no barking aRt
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If no barking aRt is an Academy, we will grant an Honorary doctorate to an artist like Guilherme Bergamini who works from his core of being; each of his projects requires your full attention to the essence of things. For more than two decades, with his belief that photography has the aesthetic potential and transformative agent to our society, Bergamini has been developed projects after projects which touch on the topics ranging from human rights, slavery, injustice in the society, poverty, natural resources and the most moving of all, his own family stories.
With his impeccable technique in photography and the unique directorial decision, his photo projects often tell stories from within or borrow meanings to achieve a deeper conversation on the subjects he wishes to address us to see, to learn and to ask questions. Never shy away from the taboos: birth, death, the element of time, inequality in human rights are some of the subjects that have been his long-standing concerns throughout his works in the last decades. His most pronounced project ( also most awarded) ‘Education for All’ although on the outset, it sets out to talk about the free education which should be one of the most fundamental human rights and to point to the State highlighting that it is their duty to provide it to all children; yet with his directorial decisions, his photos capture a time and a world that has ended; in this world there are stories untold, one could even almost hear children's laughter in the air when viewing these haunting images; these aesthetic of colours, the textures of the architecture, the abandoned classroom furniture are leading to more questions than answers, that is the fundamental element in all good art; these pictures of the destroyed doors, the sockets on the wall, the tired paint and muted colour of the classroom paint a series of almost-could-be abstract paintings; in the meantime, these leftover classroom chairs piled up as if in a dump have the quality of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s installation which thousands of chairs piled into the space between two buildings to evokes a sense of monumental loss. Bergamini’s 'Education for All' is like all his other projects which viewers are invited to be at the scene just like the artist himself; to witness by being in the place and space is a very powerful invitation that one could not escape but to care. The action of being in a place while the history unfolds ignites viewers’ imaginations, that is the moment when a picture more than thousands of words, it transports us to a timeless state. These images are here to stay, ‘Education for All’ will always have its place in any time, any country and any history, free education for all indeed.
Speaking of the timeless quality, in Bergamini’s 'Amazon River Series', time is the essence of this project. The location of this open-sea has made these pictures of the ocean carrying the weight of a nation; the story of a football field built in the sea, and the football games which bring the people of Macapa together have to be granted by the changing of the tides. One finds impossible not to be moved by the story behind these seemly normal ocean pictures, this kind of ‘magical element’ could be found throughout Bergamini’s works.
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Like this 'Amazon River series', the ‘magical moments’ are in his more personal works, ‘Four Generations’ and ‘In Memoriam’; in ‘Four Generations’, Bergamini captures an antique suitcase on a mattress on a wooden bed tucked against a faded yellow wall with cracking, the sign of the time; again, time is the essence in these pictures just like the tides of the ocean, here in ‘Quatro gerações, Four Generations’, it’s the tides of the memories which give the ‘magical moment’ to these pictures, paintings and maps hung on the vast empty wall like in a Van Gogh's painting, only here this room tells more years of a family's stories: the memories of an artistic grandma, the memories of aging ill grandfather, the memories of a child (Bergamini himself), these pictures tell an intimate story of hundred years of bittersweet memories. In another project continued in a magical location, his childhood home (now, an empty house) Bergamini changed his approach, cooking up a new dish with same magical elements, this time literary writings and photo-documentary were in play, mashing into one poetic murmur of childhood memories in this project ‘In Memoriam’.
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Childhood is a key element in many of Bergamini’s works, the most personal yet would be the witness of his daughter Malu’s birth at home on 29th June 2015. He took on a project to commemorate the joy of fatherhood titled ‘Contrações/Contractions’; you can imagine Bergamini collages dozens of postcards with his photos of the city ('Latin American lef, Izquierda latinoamericana'), he re-edits these original images to give a metaphoric new visual language of entrances and doors as if the birth of his daughter could be seen as the door to new possibilities in these collections of the postcards; but as Bergamini does what Bergamini would do, he goes the distance, literally, to post these cards to his daughter who was still only days old; day after day, he posted one card a day from 19th June to 10th July 2015, and then collected these postcards into a box filled with magazines and newspapers of the day when Malu was born (29th June 2015) and then sealed it, waiting to be delivered to Malu on her 15th birthday, 2030.
If art is a tool to say love louder than love itself, Bergamini’s ‘Contractions’ certainly does just that. It is one of the proofs that art does have power beyond many worldly things.
Contrações, Contractions.
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As the matters of life, with the birth there comes also the death; in Bergamini’s most heart-aching project to date, ‘Meu Johnny, My Johnny’, he arranges a simple collection of pictures of his then, companion and protector for 12 years, Johnny the dog; he marks the memory of his best friend with images from an energetic creature to an old body then to the grave. Anyone who ever loses a loved one could identify with that gutted hatred of witnessing how aging and illness takes the lives away from our loved ones; these images make one couldn’t look away but heart-wrenchingly to go through the journey with him and his Johnny.
Animals are also portrayed in his other powerful piece ‘Marcados, Marked’, here Bergamini hides the message of human slavery behind these tortured animals, the powerful images without a drop of blood in sight are enough to move anyone who is with a heart to be a vegetarian for life and think of one of the darkest human histories, slavery. 
Meu Johnny, My Johnny
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Marcados, Marked
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There are different ways Bergamini manipulates photography into collages and films, these works are the testaments of his boundless creativity; these projects often embedded with political and social agendas in seemly light-hearted images; in ‘Conto com você!, I'm counting on you!’, he applied modern references of the colour blocking borrowed from the lineage of John Baldessari who covered the faces with colored dots to evoke deeper observation on the characters behind the colour blocking; in Bergamini’s latest works on Covid-19, he puts red dots to address the inadequacy of Bazil government on how it tackles the spread of the virus, these lives and blood of the millions on the politician's hands are vividly portrayed through these red dots in this latest photography project.
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Copyright Guilherme Bergamini ©
As all the humanitarians do, they bring beauty in the most brutal circumstances; in this pandemic, artists like Bergamini would not cease to create, and as in every project he does, he sees the beauty in human nature, for example, even in the most extreme of poverty captured in his project ‘Lixão do Roger’, Roger's Dump’, all viewers could remember are these purest smiles on these rubbish recyclers' faces; through these smiles, not one of them could make you think that they have no food on their plates nor roofs of their own. Arts can paint the darkest time with the brightest colours, just like Bergamini’s Covid-dots photography does, arts carry us to a better future, in arts, we trust.
Lixão do Roger’, Roger's Dump
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