Everything happens for a reason

Artistic Residencies — Memórias da Cidade

Everything happens for a reason

One of the great wonders of photography lies in the illusory preconception that we can control almost everything that gives it form, from deciding what, where and when to photograph until it reaches its concrete body, in all its infinite variables. This trap has grown immensely as we have also been able to climb many steps in the sophistication of technical, technological and computational devices that are no longer only prepared to record photographically, but also to generate images à la carte, Frankenstein visual surfaces chewed up by AI engines and not fitting into what we (somewhat archaeologically, let’s say) see as photographic. What is certain is that it is from the implosion of many starting certainties (a wonderful thing) and the emergence of imponderables (another wonderful thing) that major works in photography (and other arts) are often born, which can sometimes be the result of chasing the ‘loss’, or attempts to savour sweet illusions, such as controlling the uncontrollable.

When several days of rain in a row scuppered the plans of Augusto Brázio (Brinches, 1964) to capture Braga’s most recent Holy Week, the photographer went into serendipitous mode – wandering around the city and its surroundings, scrutinising, studying, finding; strolling, being surprised, being moved to the point of ‘attracting favourable events to himself in a fortuitous way’, making ‘good discoveries by chance’, which is like saying ‘seeing beyond the obvious’.

What at first would have been a more closed look at one of the city’s most charismatic moments – where the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus is celebrated at its most explicit and spectacular level – was transformed into a powerful prospective essay in search of identity, which can be read as another chapter of Viagens na Minha Terra, not those of Almeida Garrett, but those of Augusto Brázio, a far-reaching study of the human landscape and occupation of the territory that the photographer has been undertaking for several years in Portugal, having already visited cities such as Águeda, Covilhã and Ponte de Sor.

We’ll never know how Brázio’s rain photographs of Holy Week 2024 would have turned out (we get a glimpse of this ambience in two triptychs of gatherings of people waiting for the processions). But when we look at the result of this exercise in flânerie, we feel like saying: it’s a good thing it rained cats and dogs; and that the photographer was thrown out on his feet. Because in this Braga, both inside and outside the historic centre, other splendours rose up; other Bracaran identities were revealed, far beyond the sacristan; other universes came together (in harmony, in disharmony), from the pagan to the religious, from cute kitsch statuary to the representation of violence on sacred canvases, where two punishers hammer pegs into the head of a saint (?) while a soldier draws his sword.

In this Brázio’s Braga, with a smell of wet earth, it doesn’t even seem to be cold, because even the bodies of the mannequins are undressed, although the others do it too, but more to compete in beauty contests; to try to provoke drunk bachelors on farewell nights; to parade their pride in this or that; or just to show tattoos on skin that hasn’t been tanned by the sun, because it rains a lot there and some protection is necessary. For example, on the bare back of a woman wearing a white top and her hair in a ponytail, words in English were inked with the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’, a popular aphorism from the depths of self-help determinism, which is said to have sold many books and comes from the same family (perhaps a great-uncle) as nothing happens by chance or as fate willed it (second cousin).

In this very fervent Braga, the promises of eternal salvation coexist with human passions, vices or ‘weaknesses’, all things also known as ‘sins’ – the seven most famous are almost all in these photographs, starting with gluttony, very well represented by the Goretti churraria, where you can imagine frying oil always boiling, but more for funnel cakes than for punishments, because religion also serves to redeem. And the sinful menu goes on and on, with lust beating all the others and printed, for example, on the front grille of a Rolls-Royce, on the selfie of the Queen’s lookalike, or on fake dollar bills with Marilyn’s face on them (yes, the one with the flying pleated skirt in the film The Seven Year Itch).

It rained a lot this Holy Week in Braga. Good thing too – ‘everything happens for a reason’?

Sérgio B. Gomes

Casa Rolão/Centésima Página
Av. Central 118, 4710-229 Braga

Opening Hours:

Wednesday – Saturday:
14:00–19:00

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday:
Closed