“In my work, in my life as an artist, I am as fascinated by the immobility of photography as by the movement of cinema,” said Agnès Varda. The slippage between the photographic instant and the filmic flow, fundamental to her work, is one of the central focuses of the exhibition opening on November 29th at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), as part of the France-Brazil Season program. Bringing together 200 photographs – many of them never before seen – the initiative not only rescues Varda the photographer, a lesser-known side of the acclaimed filmmaker, but also shows how her work is connected to contemporary issues such as feminism, the fight against racism, and the defense of civil rights. “She is interested in the artistic possibilities of photography,” says João Fernandes, artistic director of the IMS and curator of the exhibition alongside Rosalie Varda, Agnès' daughter and partner.

Varda took many photographs, and very well. Besides attesting to the importance of photography as a seminal language in her career and highlighting important moments in her biography – such as her trips to China, Cuba, and the United States – the exhibition reveals the acute sensitivity with which she recorded fundamental revolutionary movements of the second half of the 20th century. “She is never affected by rhetoric; the images gain a vivacity that gives them emotion and relevance. Because utopias sometimes grow old, but Agnès's dreams never died,” adds Fernandes.

Her photographs give the impression that she is always attentive to people, to everyday life, "articulating politics and tenderness," as Horrana de Kássia Santoz, assistant curator, writes in the letter-text she published in the catalog accompanying the exhibition. Even though it is, as Horrana summarizes, "a form of thought that permeates everything," photography plays a central and little-known role in the formation of the young Varda: it is her first means of expression. It is the language – and the profession – that she decided to adopt when she was still looking for a way to earn a living. She took a professional course, observed the work of other creators, and followed the advice of masters like Brassaï.

Theater was also fundamental in this process of shaping her perspective. Jean Vilar had just created projects that would become unavoidable references, the Avignon Festival and the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), and he invited her to document these productions. Agnès also collaborated with the magazine Realités, and was involved in other theatrical projects such as the staging of Papa Bom Dieu – a play performed by the first French black theater group with connections to the Teatro do Negro that Abdias Nascimento founded here in Brazil.
In 1954, breaking the logic of the art market, she held her first exhibition, which did not take place in a gallery, but in her own home-studio on Rue Daguerre, where she lived until her death in 2019. A potato sprouting in the shape of a heart is one of the photos in this selection of anthropomorphic works, strongly experimental and with a certain Dada touch. The image becomes recurrent in her creative universe, and is revisited, for example, at the 2003 Venice Biennale, which she attended ironically dressed as a potato. It was on this occasion, when the octogenarian Agnès debuted in the visual arts circuit, that João Fernandes, a fan of the filmmaker, met her personally. Five years later he held an exhibition of his films and video installations at Serralves. He tried, at the time, to revisit her photographic work, but she refused, saying: "I prefer to be a young artist than an old photographer." "I didn't have time to go to the boxes, I wanted to do new things," he recalls.

When Varda died in 2019, her family found boxes full of enlargements made by the artist herself in the 1950s and 1960s and thousands of negatives (28, to be precise), placed in the care of the Institut pour la Photographie in Lille, which now form the basis of the São Paulo exhibition. Among the discovered treasures is a 1958 essay from when she was pregnant with Rosalie: a series of self-portraits of great audacity and beauty, in which the artist appears nude, in radical, yet not erotic poses, fully pregnant.

From the same period comes the film “Opera Mouffe,” which has the fantastic subtitle “Notebooks filmed on Rue Mouffetard, in Paris, by a pregnant woman, in 1958.” In it, several taboos are broken: the proud confession of being a woman, a mother… And a camera attentive to the surroundings of the Latin Quarter, capturing, for example, Black figures in a Paris that was still very white and elitist. Attention to the other is at the heart of the artist's work, who persistently recorded the anonymous daily life of the streets.

According to Fernandes, Varda's work is "an expression of a particular relationship with life, an exercise in empathy that brings her gaze closer to the excluded of the city, to women, to the elderly, to people who sleep on the streets." It cannot be forgotten that this is a woman making photographs, making art, and making films in a world dominated by men. "I like to say that she had a flying, magical carpet with which she moved freely from one place to another in her imagination," says Rosalie about her mother's creative fluidity.

It is undeniable that Varda's best-known persona is that of a filmmaker. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in European cinema, even though La Pointe Courte (her first film) was only later recognized as the inaugural work of the Nouvelle Vague. Therefore, it is important to highlight that, alongside the exhibition "Photography – Varda – Cinema," the IMS organized a screening of 20 of her films, allowing the public to see an important selection of her work on the big screen.

The curator explains that the exhibition presents a more precise curatorial focus: “we sought to create an exhibition conceived from Brazil and for Brazil.” Within this scope, travel, the artist's movement towards the other, and the attraction exerted on her by the great political and artistic movements of the 20th century gain particular importance. Therefore, in addition to the retrospective, two fundamental works by the artist, with important echoes in the Brazilian art scene, will be permanently displayed in the exhibition space: Salut les Cubains (Greetings, Cubans!) and Black Panthers. The first title, from 1963, is an exercise in freedom built from her enthusiasm for the nascent revolution. By attentively observing a reality that was simultaneously strange and familiar, Agnès transformed her enchantment with the revolution into formal subversion. She created a documentary from the editing of photographs she took when she visited the “cigar-shaped island” at the invitation of the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry). He rearticulated these records affectively and rationally in a syncopated way, to the rhythm of the cha-cha-cha.

"Black Panthers" offers rare footage of the American movement in 1967 and 1968, when she lived in the USA. "Black is Honest, Black is Beautiful" are the opening lines of this film that combines "artistic talent, brilliance, and empathy," as Jacqueline Lyanga notes in the text reproduced in the catalog. The publication is an important complement, as it includes not only photographic records but also analyses, essays, and testimonials about Varda's work.

Also included in this collection of travelogues is a selection of moving images taken by Varda in China in 1957. Similar to her previous trip to Cuba, documented in *Salut les Cubains*, she arrived in China again encouraged by her friend Chris Marker. Since it wasn't made into a film, the material is largely unknown, and many of these photos are unpublished, especially the color ones, a technological novelty that gained significant importance in the 1950s. "It's a China before the Cultural Revolution, where ancestral forms still coexist with the new society that was being built there. And she focuses her gaze heavily on women, children, and scenes of daily life, often with humor," describes Fernandes. Filmmaker Joyce Prado, testifying about the impact of her work, quotes a key phrase said by Agnès: "I don't want to spy on the people I'm portraying, I want to be their friend."


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