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Biography:

My name is Hugo Santarem Rodrigues, and my work brings together studies of long-term structures and connected histories with the production of humanist visual narratives. I am guided by the principle of engaging with alterity, through which portraits and daily life images become instruments of human connection. My aesthetic, shaped by my interdisciplinary background, combines the hybridity of vernacular documentary with staged cinema, evoking truth and identification with the subject.

My point of view is grounded in my family background, with roots in the countryside of Bahia, and in my experience of living alongside my parents’ work in social assistance in Brasília, where they migrated as adults and where I was born. Being immersed in the “real Brazil” motivated my search to understand how the structures of our society were formed.

I temporarily moved from Brasília to São Luís, Maranhão, in 2004. During my time in Maranhão, I began my authorial research on contemporary slave labor in Brazil, which resulted in the feature film project Pureza, released in 2022. I continued to develop the research that gave rise to Pureza independently, and this authorial path allowed me to understand how collective memory is constructed through historiographical frameworks that operate to sustain the prevailing colonialist structure.

Aware of the existence of these structures, but still not knowing how to name them, I began the project Interior in 2014 in order to recover the historical roots of Brazilian popular cultures. The research gained another dimension when I connected the search for Brazil’s cultural ancestry to my own ancestry: through a DNA test, I sought parallels between my lineage and the formation of Brazil. Migratory movements in the construction of Brazilian popular culture thus became the central axis of my methodology.

After conducting empirical research across Brazil and Africa, I expanded the field of investigation to the former Portuguese colonial territories and their connections to colonial Brazil. It was along this path that I recovered the historiographical frameworks I named Indo-Brazilianness and The Myth of Immigration, which I developed as interpretive categories and critical methods of socio-historical reading, contextualized in my academic thesis.

My academic investigations, supported by documentary work, broaden interpretations of Brazil’s social construction by focusing on historiographical frameworks that concealed the hybridizations and cultural transfers between former Portuguese India and Portuguese America. These frameworks also obscured the systems of settler colonialism and internal colonialism operating in Brazil, where official discourse renamed “colonization” as “immigration” and “colonizers” as “immigrants,” thereby avoiding real decolonization measures and working to maintain the colonialist structure.

My work as an independent photographer has received recognition in festivals and competitions such as The Independent Photographer, the International Photography Awards (IPA), Monovisions Awards, Xposure Festival, Chromatic Awards, Spotlight Awards, and has been featured in the publication 200 Best Ad Photographers Worldwide by Lürzer's Archive.

Academic Background:

M.A. Candidate in Brazilian Studies – University of Lisbon (ULisboa)
Postgraduate Degree in Visual Arts – Senac (Brasília, Brazil)
Studio/Advertising Photography and Lighting for the Magazine Photographer – School of Visual Arts (New York, USA)
Cinematography for Film – International Academy of Cinema (AIC São Paulo, Brazil)
Screenwriting and Series Bible: from Creation to Sale – Roteiraria (São Paulo, Brazil)
Branded Entertainment & Content Bootcamp – Miami Ad School (Brazil)
B.A. in Social Communication – IESB (Brasília, Brazil)