URBE-RUGE

URBE RUGE is the photographic work by the Brazilian photographer Fernando Bianchi, who creates a visual chronicle on the sensory perception of living in a large metropolis in the 21st century.

To do so, the photographer uses his references from the history of photography, cinema, and music, social spheres in which he was raised, and has formed his ways of seeing and contemplating the world.

Entirely shot in black and white, this photo essay brings together a series of images taken during the 2020 pandemic that led cities to go through social isolation policies, changing their flow and urban pace completely.

URBE RUGE puts together fragments from the urban sprawls, creating a fictional
inner-city that Fernando shapes his chronicle full of mysteries, accidental lights, and lengthened shadows, announcing the arrival of night and its wandering characters.

When daylight reveals architectural volumes, we are taken to a kaleidoscopic experience, in which we go through a city made of fissures, reflections, duplicities, mosaics that interconnect, forming a web that involves and holds everything.

We quickly see ourselves surrounded by references that consider the urban landscape as a place of attraction and retention, a catchy trap!

Soon we find ourselves in scenes that recall Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis", Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", or the experimentations of modernist photographers like Man Ray and Geraldo de Barros, among others.

Fernando develops a parallel city, imaginary and fictional, that we recognize ourselves, either through our references of mass culture or our experience of wandering in search of adventure and meaning in this dystopian moment, which allows us to see new possibilities of existence in the contemporary world.