BELLA CARDIM

Feira Livre S.A. began with a series of photographs made in 2005, driven by my interest in the visual language of Brazilian street markets. I was drawn to the way food was displayed, to the repetition of gestures, and to how colors, shapes, and textures came together in almost accidental compositions. At the time, I approached the market primarily as a visual exercise, searching for beauty and rhythm in everyday life.

Twenty years later, after living in the United States for five years, I returned to these negatives. The geographic, temporal, and emotional distance allowed me to see the archive through a different lens. What had initially been an aesthetic study began to reveal itself as an informal portrait of labor, social exchange, consumption, and the structures that organize access to food. Through this new perspective, I re-edited the series and included photographs that had never been shown before.

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The title Feira Livre S.A. reflects this shift in perception. Feira livre evokes the street, improvisation, direct exchange, and the apparent freedom of the open market. S.A., the Portuguese abbreviation for a corporation, points toward the larger and often invisible systems that determine what we eat, how food circulates, and who profits from it.

 

Revisiting this archive transformed an observational exercise into a gesture of both affection and critique. The photographs examine the politics of eating, the labor that sustains the spectacle of abundance, and the ways desire is organized, displayed, and sold. At the same time, they preserve the vitality of the markets, the warmth of the vendors, the movement between the stalls, and the social encounters that remain vivid in my memory, as alive as the colors that first drew me to photograph them.