For five beautiful months, photographer Lucas Cordeiro and musician Monique Nascimento spent time together in the place of their birth, Salvador and Reconcavo Baiano, to create a visual world for Nascimento’s debut album, ‘Tempo’. These independent artists composed images inspired by the mood of each lilting song as well as intimate portraits of her family in and around her grandmother’s home. The results are a gentle journey into the heart of Bahia.

“This work talks a lot about our love for Bahia, the Black state of Brazil, and uses the waters as an aesthetic reflection of the spiritual energy of this special place,” says Cordeiro, adding: “One of the characters that appears in story, Pai Chico, passed away recently and never saw the finished photographs, so in some ways this work is a tribute to him, too.”

From verdant landscapes to the ocean’s tender surface, we encounter Nascimento embracing multiple generations of her family and the nature that cares for them all. Likewise, ‘Tempo’ unites the past and present of Brazilian music, its diversity of sounds an ode to her heritage. “Through Lucas’s analogue lens, we produced an eternal aesthetic that shows the ancestral bonds between the people that entangle the songs,” she explains. “We stroll through my grandmother’s memories of how her family supported themselves through making handmade cigars, and of my memories of my mother taking me to dance to the sounds of a gramophone, filling the house with fresh rhythms.”

Thus ‘Tempo’ promises to become a new family album, one that feeds her soul, and ours. Due out later in the year, singles ‘Pele Fresca’ and ‘Correnteza’ pave the way for more experimental melodies that see this emerging talent take wings and fly. “This work is the story of those who gave me ways to honour my spirit. It carries my singing and my way of being in the world, together with the beauty of realising my dreams.”