Eustáquio Neves is a self-taught photographer who, since the late 1980s, has produced sharp reflections on the historical and social fractures connecting the past and present of Afro-diasporic presence in Brazil.
In the Biennale Arte 2026, Neves presents two series. Arturos (1993-1995) is the result of an extended period forging ties with a centuries-old Black community in Minas Gerais. The series may be read at once as an archive, a record of the plurality of Black modes of sociability in Brazil, and a demonstration of the artist’s early aesthetic strategies including darkroom manipulation. Cartas ao mar (2016) follows research that Neves undertook amid the ruins of Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro, once the world’s largest landing site for enslaved Africans. Confronted with the traumas that permeate the place, Neves did not make images in situ but turned to his own archive, altering each of these seven images to the point that no individual remains identifiable. The portraits are layered onto photographs of tombstones and printed on old emulsion-coated paper, lending them the patina of an archival document. If Arturos reads as an affirmation of life, celebrating the collective strength sustained through kinship, Cartas ao mar insists on remembrance as an ethical imperative, unfolding as a mournful meditation.
—Thiago de Paula Souza
