BETWEEN DREAM AND AWAKENESS:
Celso Brandão: Between Dream and Wakefullness

Celso Brandão lives on the seafront of Maceió, capital of the state of Alagoas, in the northeast region of Brazil, his house is surrounded by a coconut grove and populated by sculptures made by popular artists, many of whom discovered by himself, huge anthropomorphic totems of wood, animals carved from trunks and the remains of trees painted in bright colors are scattered throughout the rooms of the house and in the gardens that surround it.

At the back of the land, a mangrove separates the land from the road that runs parallel to the coast and behind the road, after the urban area, begins the sertão, a mythical region that spreads across several states of the country, the land where the descendants of native peoples and African slaves mixed with whites who came with the Portuguese have subsisted for centuries in a daily struggle against the inclemency of the sun and droughts, against the large estates and the arrogance of the powerful.

An arid land, populated by myths and entities that survive in the beliefs and imagination of the artists of the people with whom Celso has lived for more than five decades. His films and photographs are not just documents of an era and a people, they are like doors that open to a world where the real coexists with the imaginary.