Work

LAÍS LOPES

North, South, East, West

This work stems from my discomfort with a particular Brazilian imaginary that has long framed nature as pristine abundance and territory as an inexhaustible resource to be converted into national development. Entitled North, South, East, West, the series consists of digital photomontages built from my own documentation of Brazil's five macro-regions, layered into hybrid landscapes where nature and human intervention can no longer be told apart.

Each image is constructed from multiple layers recombined to bring together fragments of different times, scales, and geographies. Montage, in this project, operates as both a material process and a critical strategy, allowing disparate cultural and natural elements to coexist while revealing the fractures between them. The seams and overlaps remain visible. By exposing how the image is assembled, the work proposes landscape not as natural fact but as something continuously negotiated, oscillating between document and construction, memory and projection.

Faced with the urgency of climate change, the series resists the dichotomies that continue to frame Brazil's environmental debate. Rather than proposing a counter-image, it attempts to inhabit the contradictions within the same frame, and ask, through the instability of the photographic image itself, what other ways of imagining collective life and belonging might still be possible.

Entangled

Entangled is a series of six constructed photographic works that critically examine photography as a hybrid medium in which nature and culture are intertwined. Drawing on natural elements, forests, flowers, bodies of water, and mineral forms, the project employs digital montage the project uses digital montage as both technical strategy and a conceptual framework to investigate photography’s inherently hybrid condition. The images are composed through layered exposures, repetitions, and subtle displacements. Vegetal forms are multiplied and partially misaligned; reflections and transparencies collapse distinctions between surface and depth; seams and reversals remain visible rather than concealed. These visual strategies produce spatial fields that resist stability, where organic motifs appear simultaneously vivid and unsettled. Each work is printed with mineral pigment ink on cotton paper and mounted between acrylic plates using double-sided polymerization, enhancing color depth and optical intensity.