Amazon city: São Luís de Mobi in an unprecedented exhibition

The Vale Maranhão Cultural Center opens to the public this Tuesday, the 14th, at 19:00, the exhibition Renounce/Mobi. In all, 300 photos were chosen to make up the unprecedented exhibition about the work of the photographer Mobi from Maranhão, who documented the city of São Luís from the 70s to the 2000s. It is curated by Gabriel Gutierrez, director of the CCVM.

The exhibition presents Mobi’s work in three narrative lines: the official city, the cradle of urban transformations and political mobilizations; the marginal city, which, although forgotten, constitutes the foundations for its greater functioning; and the people, agents who build, transform, assist, and inhabit urban spaces.

The collection used to compose the exhibition belongs to the Federal Institute of Maranhão and was digitized by the CCVM. Altogether 5 thousand photos were searched. “Mobi was a photographer who was on the fringes of what was widely exposed, published, and publicized. He documented what we can call an ‘Amazon city’, which is a complex city that does not fit the mold we are used to conceiving and constructing. The work is a manifesto about the importance of everyday life and of the human in shaping and sustaining specific urbanity. Behind the great achievements are the people who, in psychological depth and experience, look at themselves in this great mirror. Mobi photographed the street, the squares, the buildings, the animals, and what he encountered as a citizen, a popular subject, of São Luís, and revealed the flagrant opposition typical of this urban space,” says Gabriel.

The photographs on display include news coverage of political moments, such as the visits of Ulysses Guimarães, Teotônio Vilela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to Maranhão, in addition to the recording of important figures from Maranhão, such as the doctor Maria Aragão, the mimic Gilson César, and the cordelist and poet Raimunda Frazão, with whom Mobi lived and worked for 17 years.

Complementing the exhibition, the unpublished documentary directed by filmmaker Beto Matuck presents Mobi through the testimonies and reactions of friends and Raimunda, who immersed themselves in the artist’s photographic universe, unknown even by those who were part of his cycle.

Resign/Mobi runs until June 3rd. Vale Maranhão Cultural Center is located at Rua Direita, 149, Historic Center of São Luís. The program is free of charge.

About Mobi

Luiz Gonzaga Araújo Frazão, Mobi, was a photographer from Maranhão born in São Luís Gonzaga in 1953. He began his career in 1978, holding his first solo exhibition, Facets of the Island, four years later. During his career, he worked in news coverage, headed the promotion board of the Professional Association of Photographers of the State of Maranhão, taught as a photography teacher and founded Moversarte – Regional Ecological Health Movement with Art, a project responsible for social, environmental and cultural initiatives aimed at residents of São José dos Índios, in São José de Ribamar, where he worked until his death in 2007.