The texture of the backlands: metalanguage and meta-image in the work of Euvaldo Macedo Filho

Abstract

In this text, we analyze a section of the written and photographic production of the artist Euvaldo Macedo Filho (1952-1982), which lived in Bahia, Brazil, aiming to problematize the recurrence of other texts and images, particularly in his photographs, which constitute a metalanguage and a meta-image. Through a methodological selection of writings and series of images, we inquire the artist's gaze, informed by his poetic and visual references, in an attempt to understand, in addition to his creative processes, certain social processes of the hinterlands of the Brazilian Northeast (the "Nordeste") in the end of the 1970’s and the early 1980’s. Showing the body-to-body between subjects, in their different social practices, and the texts and images that populated those spaces, the artist, who worked on the two creative fronts of poetry and photography, displaced the notion of art, which had been questioned, since the 1960s, by photography.