THE FESTIVAL

What happens when, after touching the bottom of the abyss, we insist on imagining luminous times: What happens when we rearrange our anger and our grieve to keep up the fight? How betting on joy can become a daily, life-affirming strategy? How can dreams build a world? 

Fotofestival SOLAR’s second edition will take place in Fortaleza, Ceará, from December 7 to 11. We’ll meet to foster and celebrate coming together, embracing, thinking, talking, joy, and dreams. 

We’ll present a broad programming that will encompass the Estação das Artes, the Pinacoteca, the Centro de Design, and the Ceará’s Museu da Imagem e do Som, institutions belonging to the Ceará State Department of Culture’s network of cultural facilities, managed in partnership with the Mirante Institute.

A SUNNY PLACE 

Ceará is commonly referred to as the “Land of Light”. The term stems from its pioneering abolition of slavery in Brazil, but can also be linked to the brightness which characterizes its territory, a powerful symbol that makes light a path for artistic expression, memory building, and social transformation. With important cultural and historical heritages, Ceará is the land of photographers and visual artist who made the region the ideal setting for Fotofestival SOLAR. 

A PLATFORM OF EXPERIMENTATIONS

While debating the pressing issues of our time, SOLAR is an experimental platform for dialogs between photography and other artistic languages and different areas of knowledge. 

SOLAR’s first installment happened in December of 2018 and saw the gathering of photographers, researchers, curators, artists, and the public at large during a moment that led to deep reflections about the staggering times we are facing. Besides activities geared towards training, portfolio reviews, projections, and debates, SOLAR also held five exhibitions in different venues within Centro Dragão do Mar de Arte e Cultura, in Fortaleza. 

The second edition, scheduled to happen in December of 2020, was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, in this interlude, SOLAR was present at Ceará’s International Book Biennial, in 2019. In 2021, it coordinated the travelling of the exhibition Terra em Transe, curated by Diógenes Moura, to the Museu Afro Brasil, in São Paulo, where it received the Best Photography exhibition of that year award from São Paulo’s Association of Art Critics (APCA).