If you feel the SOUL and makes known
Just because you forgot to remember,
We live, breed, because there
Memory nodes in your instinct *

Nothing better than go through the footage shot by Ana Lucia Mariz, recalling the Lisbon (1888-1935). Appropriate, although not a recurrence, because as many say, photography is not explained. They also suggest that analogies are unnecessary and that the photograph is worth more than the words that describe it. However, the quotes of those who write in Secret Soul (Ed.Terra Virgin, 2006) allow for freedom.

In a succession of images, whose main theme is an allegory of abandonment, are recorded punctuated moments of light, as if to indicate ways to highlight details in places destroyed by time or by the hand of man, serving as a backdrop in the midst of darkness that surround them. There are rare moments where life appears. If she existed, is shrouded in secrecy that the photographer tries to unravel.

The curator Diogenes Moura, responsible for displaying part of this work in the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo in 2005, refers to the architect Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778). More precisely their Prisons, a series of prints in etching, produced by the Venetian in 1761, which, as the title says "Carceri d'Invenzione" was imagined by him. However, to see them is hard to believe that they really did not exist, because realism is atrocious. Curator of the right analogy, because they lead us immediately "creations" in fact inserted by Ana Lucia found Mariz.

But the critic and curator Agnaldo Farias is more subjective to resort to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and his celebrated Picture of Dorian Gray, where the character "is paralyzed by the beauty, while his portrait aged in the rhythm of their villainy" . Also appropriate, because as characters in our own villainy, we see the aging of landscapes captured by the photographer, while we are paralyzed by the beauty of them.

Ana Lucia Mariz walked for a few years, with flashlight in hand. Not looking for a virtuous man, as the other Diogenes (413 BC-323 BC), but the search for remains in shambles throughout Brazil. Between cities and Itaparica, Salvador, Santos and Sao Paulo, glimpsed architectural ruins and drew photographically in "light-painting" in abandoned historic mansions, and even between humans and the rubble remains of the late Carandiru prison.

It is also not difficult to make an analogy with two other books: The spirit of the places (L'esprit des lieux), the Sao Paulo Eduardo Muylaert and Zones Of Exclusion: Pripyat And Chernobyl, the Canadian Robert Polidori. Although different, keep some links with Soul Secrets.

The first for the aesthetics, which although not enjoy the same technique, the closer the shade of its desert night, where is predominantly black, with flashes of white, forgetting the chromatic nuances of gray and the absence of human means used by the photographer as well.

The second, the void is the leitmotif of both. The ruins are your scenarios, and the way each one, a complaint is made, whether obvious or veiled. It also approaches this in the end, when using color as a resource to register places that are being demolished.

It seems clear that the intention of the photographer is not to report the sad end of the Brazilian historical heritage, or what happened in these places, and yes, use them as the setting for his performances of light, but there's no forgetting this destination. Mainly, as well as alert Farias, in the case of Carandiru, subtitles previous alert us that we are entering the ruins, influencing their reading.

Impossible not to be taken by this suggestion that warns us. The abandonment of houses and factories also produce the same feeling of ingratitude over time. This can manifest can be seen as something more. As a means of his poetry and not as a simulacrum. After all, there is beauty, even cruel, in all this.

It is this contradiction that the book goes: art and destruction, so well explained again by Farias, saying that "(...) most of the photographic tradition fed from the chimeric desire not to bend the destruction of things, tried to retain them in this, eternalize them in what would be the time of its splendor (...) ".

However, it is wiser to forget as much reference and indulge in the pleasure of the photographic moment determined by the photographer. Follow the paths indicated by their light needs, the scenarios chosen - carved by the time the force - imagine what happened behind those walls intact once, and now mere jumble of memories possible.
We assume that good photography is to raise the "before" and "after", immortalized at that moment the "gift" selected by the photographer. Difficult task that Ana Lucia performs Mariz. And like any work, watered by time, talent and technique, does not break down into mere rhetorical imagery, being great in herself.

* From "The castles", the second part of the coat. Poetical Works of Fernando Pessoa, Aguilar Publisher, 1960.

Addendum editor: on Aug. 31, the photos of Ana enter the poster Magnet Photo Gallery in Sao Paulo. The expo is called Mind the gap is curated from our more-than-beloved Juan Esteves. Learn more!