Nocturnal Animals

I moved to the Azores in the beginning of 2017, without ever having been there before. I arrived on the island of Faial on January 7th at night. And the night would mark the first months of my stay. During the first two months I lived in the Flamengos, the only parish in Faial from where it is practically impossible to see the ocean, because it is located mostly in a valley. Isolated in insular isolation, in those early days I lived and worked in the same house, with few means of displacement and almost no contact with the urban environment of Horta and with the other parishes of the island. The only chance I had of wandering around was at the end of the day, already dark night. And that idyllic image I had of the Azores, with green landscapes, the sky and the sea of ​​an impossible blue, did not exist. They were swallowed by the night and the winter. The azorean winter is grey, cloudy, rainy and windy. Winter obliterates the 'great landscape'. And when one loses the great landscape and the night shortens the depth of field, one starts to see other things. And in my late-afternoon strolls, my attention began to focus on the breath, the faint movements and the steady gaze of the animals that, from time to time, appeared in the middle of the lands and backyards. Contrary to what I was used to in Minho of my childhood and adolescence, in the Azores it is rare for animals to be collected at the end of the day. I began to photograph them in an uncommitted manner. Over time, the late-afternoon wanderings, once confined to a small area, became long hours of walks and miles across the island. Other animals appeared on the streets, in the houses, in the cars, transforming the uncompromised photographs into a series that, through various representations, constitutes a kind of showcase of Faial's fauna.