When Beyoncé and Jay-Z joined forces as The Carters in 2018 for their On The Run II tour, they recreated the poster for Senegalese feature film Touki Bouki in their promotional images, a controversial move that brought the film into the mainstream. Considered one of the first avant-garde audio-visual works produced on the African continent, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 masterpiece was already well known on the cinema circuit - and by young photographer Gus Hof.

As a child, Hof was hypnotised by the power of image, whether it be on television or the pictures his mother took on her analogue camera. These photos, rich in colours and textures, were crucial to the development of his photographic eye and awakened in him a notion of image poeticity. The cinephile also used to enjoy precious cinema sessions with his father, which played another important role in his trajectory. From Glauber Rocha and Jean-Luc Godard to Dijibril Diop Mambéty, the role of cinematography helped Hof discover the power of light, framing and colour to transmit messages and sensations.

During this year’s pandemic and subsequent social isolation, the streets were no longer a viable space for visual creation, so the focus of the boy born in São Paulo and who migrated to Mogi das Cruzes, returned to what is closest and safest to him: the figure of his grandmother, Maria Elzira. Born in 1926, a cook, worker and communist, she has been an emblem to Hof of what he wanted to be since childhood. “She is the agent structuring every practical condition of affirmation, ancestral recognition, self-evaluation and personal identification as a black person,” he states. “In addition to irreverence, strength and beauty, such a legacy is contained in every portrait I make of Maria.”

“Contrary to what preaches the hypocritical order in force, the way we seize our surroundings, from icons and cultural currents, directly interferes in the way we think, act and relate. We, black people, are receivers and code makers. We are the authors of realities that we want and need to see materialised in this sick society,” he continues.

In this way, even if it is still a beginning of a potent artistic and personal evolution, Hof's photographs, above all, reflect personal processes of recognition and construction of meanings. Besides encouraging the development of a more attentive photographic gaze towards the beauty of daily compositions and using this space as a place of experimenting with concepts, his work aims to make explicit the power to externalise the aesthetics he wishes to see disseminated, by provoking his authorship into every one who sees this.

Does he think the curatorial gaze, so long dominated by the Global North, is finally being shifted to the Global South? In conclusion, he responds:

“Considering the historical processes and determinations, the North has always been outward looking to the South. But such attention, instead of recognising and valuing our rich expressions, has always possessed as a backdrop the despoliation of codes and cosmologies, the exploitation of bodies and resources, and the violent appropriation of artistic and cultural systems. Therefore, the Global North has a historical and material debt to the South. Moreover, the apocalyptic contemporaneity through which the world passes is a direct legacy of northern actions. It is worth remembering that the artistic project of the Global South is, above all, one of vitality and resistance, of ancestry and renewal. Detached from models of bankrupt artisans, the South is once again the only current that points out alternative and tangible paths to a project of humanity other than this one of death and exploitation, which the Global North insists on dragging us to the end.”

Words Ode
Visit Gus Hof

From Brazil, With Love And Optic Games is a Nataal series spearheaded by Ode, a São Paulo-based stylist, writer and independent curator. Brazil, which has the largest black population outside the African continent, is home to a new generation of young black photographers who are creating fresh perspectives on fashion and art. This series of interviews sees Ode explore how their work both expands ideas around representation and participation and challenges Western perspectives that ignore the Global South as part of black life and diasporic conversations

Read our other stories in this series here.

Published on 06/12/2020