The Big Neighbor
In the case of sui generis in the history of Brazilian modernist architecture, the city of Ipatinga, in the Steel Valley (located in the state of Minas Gerais), was planned and built in the mid-1960s in synchrony with the steel mill it houses. The municipality is founded in 1964, a landmark in national political history – the year of a military coup in Brazil – and develops within the formality that a military regime and an industrial discipline require.
Considered one of the largest in the world, the plant is located in the geographical center of the city. Unlike the native inhabitants – accustomed to the omnipresence of chimneys and steaming blast furnaces in the Ipatinga skyline – any visitor is strangely aware of the proximity between urban area and industry.
As an Ipatinga citizen, I spent my youth looking naturally at these colossal structures. However, ever since I returned to my hometown, after some years of living out, my attention was focused on the incongruity of this architectural amalgam and how the city relates to it.
The name of this series is clearly a reference to George Orwell's masterpiece 1984. As well as the Big Brother, who watches everything and everyone in the book of the english author, the towers of the plant seem to watch everything that moves around the city full time.
In the construction of this work, I submit to the solicitude of locals. With the aim of emphasizing the proximity between daily social and steelwork, I place the windows and balconies of the buildings in the foreground of the image. Then I require the participation of “extras” on the scene, at strict times – in the darkest hours – and ask them to remain immobile to resist as clearly as possible the long exposure.
Choosing to shoot at night brings the personal motivations of those who grew up listening to the myth of the “night monster,” an urban legend according to which, as the city sleeps, the factory launches multiplied quantities of waste into the atmosphere – a supposed assumption that fewer people would be observing the sky during this period. Still alive in the popular imagination, the chimera of the “scarlet sky” is actually the fruit of the optical illusion caused by the refraction and reflection of the lights – mercury vapor lamps – that illuminate both the power plant and the city, generating an aura of warm tones over urban perimeter, fusing smoke, steam and clouds.
Considered one of the largest in the world, the plant is located in the geographical center of the city. Unlike the native inhabitants – accustomed to the omnipresence of chimneys and steaming blast furnaces in the Ipatinga skyline – any visitor is strangely aware of the proximity between urban area and industry.
As an Ipatinga citizen, I spent my youth looking naturally at these colossal structures. However, ever since I returned to my hometown, after some years of living out, my attention was focused on the incongruity of this architectural amalgam and how the city relates to it.
The name of this series is clearly a reference to George Orwell's masterpiece 1984. As well as the Big Brother, who watches everything and everyone in the book of the english author, the towers of the plant seem to watch everything that moves around the city full time.
In the construction of this work, I submit to the solicitude of locals. With the aim of emphasizing the proximity between daily social and steelwork, I place the windows and balconies of the buildings in the foreground of the image. Then I require the participation of “extras” on the scene, at strict times – in the darkest hours – and ask them to remain immobile to resist as clearly as possible the long exposure.
Choosing to shoot at night brings the personal motivations of those who grew up listening to the myth of the “night monster,” an urban legend according to which, as the city sleeps, the factory launches multiplied quantities of waste into the atmosphere – a supposed assumption that fewer people would be observing the sky during this period. Still alive in the popular imagination, the chimera of the “scarlet sky” is actually the fruit of the optical illusion caused by the refraction and reflection of the lights – mercury vapor lamps – that illuminate both the power plant and the city, generating an aura of warm tones over urban perimeter, fusing smoke, steam and clouds.