Bafrika - ColágenoAfro

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Daymares

Bafrika is a solo exhibition celebrating ten years of photographs taken in Togo, Africa - in 2013 - and in Bahia in the following years. With ancestral roots in Brazil and Africa, photographer Wendell Wagner revisits photographs he took there and here and merges them into collages that bring him closer to his sense of belonging in this world. The images feature scenes from Bahia and abstractions that dialogue with portraits of Africans photographed in Aného and Lomé, in Togo, West Africa. The possibilities of bringing together worlds, people, objects, and elements of nature and transforming them into new idealized images is what makes the narratives proposed in the ColágenoAfro project real. "The emotion of having set foot on African soil still fills me with the same feeling I had when I was on a shopping street in Lomé, the capital of Togo, and came across its population that said a lot about me. It was a sea of ​​black people undulating over the asphalt, concrete and red earth and, even though I live in Salvador, the impact that that event had on me was stronger and more familiar than being where I was born. It was comfortable to be in a new world where, even though I didn't understand its different languages, it brought me immense joy to be there, because I was filled with a welcoming representation, even though I was a stranger to them. Everything was different, but it brought me familiarity; the sun, covered by fog, was always a round red ball, very well drawn in the sky, regardless of the time; the crowds that occupied the spaces divided between motorcycles, pedestrians, cars, carts and the strength of the women balancing a lot of weight on their heads - adorned with wigs and supports - to carry their goods. Thousands of giant bats hanging from the trees and flying at dawn; Sunday mornings when the seafront was full of people doing a variety of physical activities, fishing and pulling nets, and people bathing in the sea with their clothes on. The reception, on the first day, of a Vodun ritual, after traveling along a road that connected the capital to a neighboring city that offered a landscape that revealed customs and ways of life, in addition to the abundant nature and on the horizon, a forest of baobabs. At the end of the afternoon, the start of the dance festival, which brought shows from the African continent and overseas, bringing more charm and magic to what was happening. The union of these aspects with my experience in Bahia gave shape to the collages that almost always have a Bahian landscape in the background, decorated with people and elements that say a lot about dreams, projections, knowledge, spirituality, travel, admiration for the stars of the universe and about what my photographic eye learns about the world, creating new experiences connecting pieces scattered throughout my mind and the environment that suffocates me and gives me breath.”

Daymares - Awakened dream surfacesLandscapes, bodies and characters that recreate an atmosphere between the dream environment and awakening. Fluid surfaces delimit in their horizons the fine line between dream and reality, in an image fantasy open to the senses, of a character who cannot define his vital stage. Contrary to the nightmare, Daymares is the sleepwalking awakening in a watery environment.

About Wendell Wagner |Wendell Wagner is a photographer from Salvador, Brazil, with a Bachelor's degree in Communications with a specialization in Cultural Production and Journalism, both from the Federal University of Bahia. He began his career at Labfoto – the Photography Laboratory of UFBA, where he was a monitor and produced original works, participated in group exhibitions and produced two photography books (Martin em Cena, 2009; and Suspenso, 2014) as his final course projects. He worked as a photographer for the city governments of Salvador and Camaçari and currently has a photography company called Caixa de Fósforo. He specialized in Stage Photography and collaborated with the Castro Alves, Vila Velha, and Martin Gonçalves theaters, in addition to accompanying the Balé Folclórico da Bahia on its tour in Togo and its closing at the TCA, resulting in the book entitled Balé Folclórico da Bahia (2016). He has held two solo exhibitions with his most recent hand-collage work, entitled Bafrika ColágenoAfro, which was first exhibited in Salvador, at Bar Oliveiras in Santo Antônio Além do Carmo (2023) and at the Instituto Guimarães Rosa in Maputo, Mozambique, Africa (2024). He was part of the Afro Arte Art Fair at the Cardume gallery in Pelourinho, Salvador, Bahia with the sale of a previously unpublished hand-collage work (2025).