Robert Capa's final photograph, taken during the Indochina War in 1954, would inspire a series of works in landmine-riddled areas of Cambodia, Angola, Bosnia, and Colombia. This photo shows only the horizon, which Capa could never reach when he stepped on a landmine while taking this final shot. Although the photographer is not in the frame, he remains an active force in the image, and his presence can still be felt. This idea is also present in my work. The series "In Depth (minefields)" began in 2014, the same year I won the PIPA Prize, which helped fund the project. I wanted to explore similar impenetrable landscapes in countries with the most severe landmine situations across different continents. All the preparations had to be made in contact with official and non-governmental organizations in order to gain access to these areas. The idea of "risk" is fundamental to the work, as it was developed along two axes. One was to capture the images seen in the exhibition, while the other was the performative aspect of my body, demonstrating how I traversed these mined landscapes. Therefore, the images can only be understood as a series, not as isolated images. The number of photos taken in Colombia was seven, while in Angola it was fifteen, all based on the distance between each photo and where it was safe enough for me to step. Of course, there was a real risk of stepping on an explosive. Shortly after passing through Bosnia, I learned that the chief engineer of the demining team had died trying to expand the area. But I did not take this risk for the sake of it. I compare this work to extreme sports, where preparations are made to increase safety as much as possible. And such an access is of course safer than entering a minefield in a war situation, which would be something else altogether. Anyway, I think we take risks all the time, also in art. Simply picking up pencil and paper to write a poem is a process with no guarantees. What I do in my work is extend that risk.

My interest in images began in my childhood through cinema, and then expanded into painting in my adolescence. After studying cinema in Paris, I worked as an assistant director, but realized that I was more interested in the study of images than in working directly with audiovisual material. I wanted to go back to school, so I got a master's degree in architecture and art history at PUC-Rio. I also attended Charles Watson's Provenance and Property Workshop. The workshop probed various artistic problems at a conceptual and formal level. It was so enlightening that I decided to re-attend it few more times to gain a full grasp of the manifold ideas discussed.

My first work in the visual arts was the video installation "Interim: A Self-Portrait" in 2003. The following year, I embarked on a project that took me to Cambodia for the first time to examine the photographic record of Khmer Rouge victims in the 1970s at S-21, which now houses the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. An estimated 14,000 people were executed there, of which 6,000 were photographed on arrival. Photos of only 88 of the executed survived, giving the work its title, "88 of 14,000. I did not know what form the work would take until I arrived at the prison. I made enlargements of the images, the last photographs taken of these prisoners, and projected them onto a machine made curtain of sand. The amount of sand poured was determined by an equation that took into account the amount of time each prisoner had before their execution. These projections, recorded on video, attempted to restore the humanity that had been stolen from these people. In these two works, I explored some specific questions related to classic formats of art history, such as self-portraiture and portraiture. Later, I began to explore another common element in the visual arts, the representation of landscapes. In 2007, I moved to Berlin to develop the "Chernobyl Project," in which a pinhole camera was designed to take images generated not by light but by gamma rays, which are invisible to us and are present in the exclusion zone of the region affected by the 1986 nuclear accident.

I was 6 years old when Chernobyl's reactor 4 exploded. I remember well the news coverage of the accident. My parents fought against the military dictatorship and were communists. In 1986, they were university professors, critical of the regime, but that was still the political identity of my family. When we saw the accident on television, it was almost a mourning. When I arrived in the exclusion zone, those images came back to me, it was something that captured my imagination.

Perhaps the most striking thing is the realization that the greed behind such tragic events in capitalist countries did not escape the communist regimes. We are talking about Chernobyl again because of the HBO series, about which I have some specific criticisms, but I recognize they got a lot right, especially in terms of art direction and period reconstruction. And it's good for this generation to know what happened in the past and what's happening now as nuclear radiation continues to change the Earth. My interest in these issues comes from situations that go beyond a traumatic event. Both Chernobyl and landmines are exclusion zones not limited to the past. We will die, and the radiation will continue to physically change this region, as will the explosives still buried in most of these fields.

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