Inside you
Valter Vinagre's work focuses on a critical analysis of the human condition, directing the viewer's reflections towards the contiguity of our vital horizons with failure. Much of his work abounds with themes that allude to uprooting, social alienation and ruin as a metonymic scenario for the collapse of individual dignity. These photographs present the daily lives of homeless people through the settings they inhabit. They show places as metaphors for their forced resilience. But they also aim to be a mirror of how the majority of the population sees those who have been expelled from society: anonymous spectres who, despite being present in the daily life of the city, become invisible. The improvised spaces where they shelter are the silent account of a subsistence, of a circular journey full of wounds and scars, which took them from the precariousness of their origins to the nothingness of their present.
The ruins are an elliptical portrait of the changes that society has undergone, particularly the working class. The dismantling of the industrial fabric that flourished during the 20th century on the outskirts of cities gave rise to what are known as working-class belts. These infrastructures were gradually abandoned due to the implementation of technological advances and the relocation of factories, now reinstalled in countries offering lower wage costs. What remains of these neighbourhoods, these suburbs that contained an autonomous social ecosystem, are the traces of a past way of life and abandoned architecture.
Alejandro Castellote, Lisboa.2023
To carry out the work of capturing images, Valter Vinagre had the support of the street teams of the CRESCER Association.
The ruins are an elliptical portrait of the changes that society has undergone, particularly the working class. The dismantling of the industrial fabric that flourished during the 20th century on the outskirts of cities gave rise to what are known as working-class belts. These infrastructures were gradually abandoned due to the implementation of technological advances and the relocation of factories, now reinstalled in countries offering lower wage costs. What remains of these neighbourhoods, these suburbs that contained an autonomous social ecosystem, are the traces of a past way of life and abandoned architecture.
Alejandro Castellote, Lisboa.2023
To carry out the work of capturing images, Valter Vinagre had the support of the street teams of the CRESCER Association.
