Moscouzinho - Gilvan Barreto

In the 1940s, Jaboatão dos Guararapes, in Pernambuco, elected the first communist mayor of Brazil and for this reason it is known as Moscouzinho. Born in the seventies, still under Brazil’s military dictatorship, photographer Gilvan Barreto returns to his homeland to recreate this little Moscow from his parents’ reports. For the production of the book’s images, he used old albums and family archives from the Department of Political and Social Order, DOPS. Inspired by Russian political art / leaflets, he produced new photographs and fotocollages representing dreams, nightmares and memories. He created, in his own way, what he imagines that Pernambucan Russia to have been. Moscouzinho is not intended to be the work of a party, nor does it pursue a partisan objective. It seeks the politics of affection, of memory. It seeks to recognize an emotional territory situated between the past and the present, reality and fable, between the documentary and the imagination.