The forest

When the first colonists reached the Brazilian coast, they found themselves face-to-face with a flamboyant, rich, perfumed and colourful natural habitat. Rio’s Atlantic forest was reminiscent of the Paradise Lost spoken of in some European texts, and which was associated with Brazil as early as the 13th century.

Rio is a 1,255-km2 city lapped by the Atlantic Ocean and nestled in between two bays, Guanabara and Sepetiba, with numerous islands, lakes and lagoons, the most famous being Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas (2.4 km2) in the heart of the city and surrounded by the Ipanema and Leblon neighbourhoods and the Botanical Garden.

As Rio’s heart is big, there are two other green hearts that beat there: the Tijuca National Park, the home of the Corcovado mountain (with the statue of Christ the Redeemer) and the Pedra Branca Park. Both contain preserved ecosystems, giving them the name the Atlantic Forest – with birds, snakes and monkeys living among the creepers, orchids, bromeliads and ferns -, considered to contain the greatest biodiversity in the world.

If you do not understand the topography of Rio, you cannot understand the Cariocas (Rio inhabitants).

The city

On Fridays, the streets in the financial district are filled with tables and chairs, samba, sweat and beer, and a few fried sardines. And funk parties take over in the outskirts.

The cultural melting pot can be seen in every part of the city, where new rhythms are created day by day. Bodies move in new, reinvented ways.

The suburbs are the beating heart of Rio – here is where new funk rhythms are experimented, translating all the influences that have shaped Brazilian culture. The body, through dance, music and street sport, takes over the city, invading it and using it as a backdrop for its creations.

More than a style of music, funk is a whole culture, with its own clothing and language codes. In the 1990s, funk parties were particularly popular, blending social classes, like a spontaneous response to a city that was increasingly divided and trapped in apartment blocks under close surveillance. Funk revitalises the Cariocas, who face a demanding daily life.

Celebration

Celebrations are markers of the rhythm of the city of Rio: the Carnival, New Year in Copacabana and the religious ceremonies that link Catholic worship with African influences.

Celebration is also a key to understanding the Brazilian identity. A moment of merging between people, regardless of their colour, geographical origin and social class.

During the Carnival, the air seems to be less dense, as if another season has arrived and modified the landscape, more specifically the human landscape. Monsters walk the streets and people greet them. Skeletons take the metro, unveiling their masks and bones. Everyone joins in, and everyone smiles! It’s the period when people come out from inside their shells, putting aside their fear and pride. The streets are filled with colour, bodies are bared in the heat, and everyone, in one voice, sings the famous marchinhas behind the Carnival groups – the same songs year after year, some for nearly a whole century.

The Samba rhythm that accompanies the Carnival is also a mixed-race one, coming from the blending of sounds that arrived from Europe and the chants of the African slaves.

The beach

The beach is the epicentre of Rio life, a place where people live and make contact with each other. Here, the body finds a place to express itself through sport (beach volleyball, foot-volleyball) and by exposing itself to the sun. The beach is also the place to listen to Brazilian Portuguese, a rounded, gentle, blended, singing language that reflects the spirit of the Brazilians and their taste for musicality that extends to their movements.

The Cariocas divide their days into "beach days" and "non-beach days". The vast stretches of sand are filled with people, basking in the joyful voices of the walking vendors which blend with the sounds of the sea. Here, the language is gentler, free of daily chores. It can be expressed without a rush or a deadline.

The beach is a perfect reflection of the fundamental aspects of the Carioca culture: its corporal music, its relationship dissociated from time, its sunny soul, the heat of its intimacy, its gentle way of singing when speaking and speaking when singing.

The bossa nova rhythm, gentle and whispered, mixed with the sounds that animate the beach, set the tone of this theme.

Football

In Brazil, football is omnipresent: on the beach, in the stadiums, in the favelas. It sums up all the traits that mark the Brazilian identity.

In football, you find the taste for roundness, for dodging, dance, acrobatics and rhythm – it is the product of a blending that has given birth to a blending of influences, whose mix has created a unique style, which characterises this sport in the eyes of the whole world.

Having initially been rectilinear when it arrived from England, football has become more sinuous, more rhythmical through the contact between mixed-race bodies, revealing a tempo, movement and balance also based on capoeira and samba.

Any object with any sort of spherical shape is transformed into a ball, and improvised football pitches (peladas) spring up in streets or empty areas.

Football fills stadiums and turns people into stars, demi-gods whose prowess feeds people’s imaginations. With Pelé and Garrincha, it even became a type of art.

It is also a place of democracy, where the whole country’s inhabitants, whatever their origin, are equal.

In Brazil, the World Cup is anticipated as the greatest event, as if the fate of the nation depended on the result of each match. The echoes of the World Cup defeat in 1950 in the Maracanã Stadium in Rio still weigh on the collective imagination. The victories in 1958 and 1970 still inspire awe. People’s identification with football is so deep that the Seleção (Brazilian team) brings the country together in a rare feeling of union.

Music

Rio de Janeiro is a microcosm of Brazil; all the rhythms of the country can be found here. A 360-degree film and a bewitching soundtrack will encourage you to dance before you leave the exhibition.

The exhibition photographers

These photographers, either native to or lovers of Rio, were chosen for the scenography to open the visitor’s eye to the rhythm of the body, and the culture that characterises the city of the cariocas.

Custódio Coimbra has produced more than 300,000 shots of Rio. There is not a single mangrove, slope, mountain top, lake or beach in this photographic fresco that has not been recorded with the photographer’s loving eye. He is even able to transform photos into real mirages!

Cláudio Edinger lives in the São Paulo megalopolis and is crazy about the carioca beach and the strange things people do there . He captures them in out-of-focus and enigmatic images, which have only the centre in focus, as if the artist were dressing the bodies only with light, revealing their “indigenous” nakedness.

www.claudioedinger.com

Adenor Gondim comes from the region of Bahia, the epicentre of Brazil’s mixed-race origins, where Africa meets Europe, and where Brazil is even more “Brazilian”: slick, impactful, physical. It was the Bahia drum that led to the invention of carioca samba.

Ivo Gonzalez is a local photographer with 26 years of experience in photography. He worked for O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, for 25 years. During this period he specialised in sports photography and had the opportunity to cover five Olympic Games and seven World Cups, among many other sports events. He is now working as the Photo Chief for the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

www.ivogonzalez.com

Born in Düsseldorf, Claus Meyer lived in Rio de Janeiro for 30 years, where he was a partner of Tyba Photographic Agency and representative of Black Star Agency. In 1981, he won the Nikon International Grand Prize, and in 1983 the Gold Medal at the International Exposition of Photographers of Japan. His work was published in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Elle and the series of books “A Day in the Life”. He took part in Cousteau’s scientific expedition to the Amazon. Meyer was the photographer for most of the books published by Edições Alumbramento: Atlantic Rain Forest, Cerrado, Caatinga, Amazonia and Brasil Flora Fauna.

Claus Meyer on enciclopedia.org and tyba.com

Rogério Reis is the king of Rio’s suburban zones and favelas: an authentic journalist who seeks to capture reality at its most raw, as it is, reflecting the people, liberating the body to the spirit of the carnival, where even beggars can be kings!

www.rogerioreis.com.br