Day Shift/Night Shift/Forest Time
Artur Silva
Visual Artist and Prof. of Digital Art, CSU Stanislaus
My earliest memories are stamped with the constrictive imaginary of a conservative, right-wing military dictatorship in Brazil, subsidized by the United States. As I spent my formative years during the transition between a military regime to a democracy and the writing of a new constitution in 1988, my interest in history grew, eventually leading my art practice to explore a place between memory and political reality. My lived experiences caused me to be very interested in imperial histories. I learn about them by researching the circulation of plants, foods, people, cultural artifacts, ideas, etc.
I spent the summer of 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, photographing a sample of the Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlantica in Portuguese) of which only 15% is left in the entire country. My focus was in the dense rainforest located in The Tijuca National Park. Though its green rainforest seems untouched today, it was deforested by multiple colonial economic cycles, specifically the need for space to cultivate sugar cane and coffee crops and the demand for timber and fuel for the growing capital city of Rio de Janeiro. The Atlantic Forest pre-colonization occupied the entire city.
By the second half of the XIX century, as water shortages intensified, emperor Dom Pedro II appointed a reforestation czar, who assigned 11 enslaved people to replant 185,000 trees, forming what we now know as the Tijuca National Park.
This history of extraction, crisis, and labor provides the critical context for my street photography in the city center. My images, categorized into Day Shift and Night Shift, explore the relationship between the city, the forest, and the labor that sustains their axes.
Throughout the Summer, I went out everyday to photograph Rio de Janeiro’s Centro neighborhood where I partially live. It’s a combination of narrow roads built in the colonial period and tall buildings built by financial institutions, oil companies, the government, etc. I wanted to spend time with my camera, to really get to know it technically and also to understand its limitations, to attempt to operate near those limits.
I didn’t intend for labor to become a synthesizing theme in this body of work. I proposed myself to develop the perception that makes visible what would otherwise be seen and archived outside my peripheral vision, trapped in familiarity created by my own routine. I saw everyday people, circulating through an infrastructure that depends so much on them and offers so little in return for their labor.
In a way, street photography is similar to walking meditation: to be present and aware in a way most people grappling with their routines won’t be. In The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson talks about the photographer being ready to “trap” life as it unfolds. I think many of the people in the frame might be trapped in realities they haven’t chosen. The photography I want to practice is, in its core, liberational. It duels with a certain kind of intersubject relationship in which the camera is a tool of social awareness collecting fragments to construct a more complete collective subjectivity.
Rio de Janeiro Centro went from a colonial town to an industrious neighborhood occupied by brands we know on a first name basis such as Petrobras, Santander and Starbucks. While creating this work I thought about the anonymous crowds of laborers who participate in construction and maintenance of this urban apparatus. The reality is that Rio exists because Tijuca Forest exists. Tijuca exists because of the eleven people who replanted 185,000 trees. I dedicate this publication to their memory:
Eleutério, Constantino, Manoel, Mateus, Leopoldo, Maria, Sabino, Macário, Clemente, Antônio, and Francisco.