Hardcover, ilustrations by Arthur Duarte, text by Rodrigo Grota, 93 images, edition of 500, August 2014.

Intergalático, the published debut of Brazilian photographer Guilherme Gerais, is some kind of a visual literary essay. Comprising a narrative in black and white filled with photographs, illustrations and small traces, the book is presented as a map, a guide, a trail to a ritualistic journey, but with an enigmatic starting point: a missing space, although preceding.

Captured over four years (2011-2014) in cities like Londrina, Capadocia, Istanbul and Prague, these images are alternated in an order that requires immediate participation of the reader / viewer: from the beginning there is the invitation to a game, an outcome, a challenge between what is seen and what remains. The strategy, in this case, articulated spontaneously by the photographer, always points to the random, the disorder, the primarity of an alleged previous life - something that is divided between land space and the virtual universe, a journey that would be for the past but also for the future (liquid material).

The structure that defines this route is always multiple: There are collages, records, re-readings, plots, effects, cancellations, besides the sharpness and graininess that evoke upper atmospheres, invisible units, always in a subtle trend to the tragic: "The images are for me, always something that I could not find, "says the photographer born in Londrina in 1987, already with a solid work in Cinema, and with a language that approaches an aesthetic of disappearance: "what we cannot see, perhaps, it's a possible way."

With illustrations by the graphic artist Arthur Duarte, and graphic designed by the photographer himself, Intergalático also assumes that any visual narrative always has a secret, a desire that is not revealed completely, but that is always present. This way, the opening for a spatial imaginary, filled with technologies already abandoned, reinforces the thesis that the world in which we live is always the world we create: being alive as something close to being in constant confabulation.

The clues presented in the book, an arrangement that takes us to board games, always indicates this existential possibility that the hero in the background is always the denial of oneself: the will to throw yourself in the world is the will to lose yourself. And the escape, this ancestral dream, reigns supreme as the only way to challenge this self-comfort, this safety zone that we invariably recognize as our identity.

What images suggest us, so, besides an intense and silent mutilation, is the outstanding and affectionate news that we are only, in the end, what is hidden, that magical idea of non-appearance that can only be touched when the music restarts. And Intergalático, the book, just feeds this power: it restarts on each image to always return to an origin of the world, not our world, to make it clear - but the only universe of that hero, of that unidentifiable being that crosses 184 pages of this publication as someone who is reflecting on his search, seeking what is not acknowledged.

Godard, the filmmaker, said that the mirrors should think before returning us an image: Intergalático shows how that thought should be - unfinished, multiform, imprecise and stodgy, because the journey without identity is almost as a spectrum - you can see but never touch: this is the game.

More info and order at http://www.guilhermegerais.com .

Pages: 184
Place: Londrina
Year: 2014
Publisher: self published/Avalanche
Size: 20 x 30 cm (approx.)

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