Future Boy Bernardino

Interview and photos: Miguel Barbot (except those from JB's Instagram). Translation Rodolfo Oliveira / Nevoazul.

Nevoazul Magazine published this interview for the first time with the title "The Boy from The Future".

Something is intriguing about João Bernardino's feed. If we skip through images, all of his references make themselves visible - something that the photographer admits. The object is almost every time industrial, and the picture is at an uneasy scale. The infrastructure dominates the aesthetics. Although at almost every stage of João's work, there's the presence of either a worker, the labour or object from that activity, even when the first is (apparently) absent.

On a small square, we observe a particular notion of progress that sends us back to the early modernist movements or the constructivists and futurists from the early 20th century. Only to get thrown into a post-industrial age, to the world of Comics and 70s or 80s science fiction.

Conan, the boy from the future reading Álvaro de Campos' Maritime Ode, painted on a barrier of containers on the South Terminal of a post-apocalyptic Leixões harbour.

Miguel Barbot: On most of the sets we find on your Instagram, you always seem to be away and invisible. In some of the pictures you are indeed far away, and someone who knows the geography will know where you are. In other pictures, you appear isolated because the context doesn't exist anymore, like the abandoned mines, and in those cases, there's a radical change in the language, such as the colours or the editing. When I look at all these nuances, it reminds me of the work by the New Topographics, a movement from the 50s' where people photographed abandoned structures, where, in some cases, we see that some elements were sought to be removed in order to give emphasis to the object on the foreground.

João Bernadino: People have told me about a German couple, Hilla and Bernd Becher, that was probably part of that group. I like their work on water deposits. Nowadays I do less removal of elements, but in the beginning, that was fundamental. I even committed the sacrilege of using Photoshop to clean up a little try once in a while. Some people even told me that I had a very minimalist approach, a sort of industrial minimalism. I really didn't feel that but I understand it. I had this belief that I had to isolate a certain object, and that the rest around it was noise. Now I've moved away a bit from that, I use Photoshop sporadically, but it's more a case of surgical editings, like when I have an area that I want to be less obscured and can't do it on mobile editing. On the mines, the colours also change because of the light, it's a completely different geography.

MB: You once said that your works reside on the outskirts of the cities, where the industry lies, and that that imposes a gaze, often removed from space as if you were a distant and casual observer. Recently I came in touch with the work of Marten Lange who does the exact opposite, he also removes himself, but from within the city centre, where demography and geography are very different.

JB: I would like to live in a city where I could do that. Some of my work is like that, like the billboards for example, but somehow I have little territory and which is already very explored, the objects are too worked upon already. Because of that, I can't feel the same magic.

When I pass by one of such places, at the most I'll make a mental note to return there at 5.30 in the morning during a thunderstorm, if it's Summer. That's how far I go. My partner freaks out because I'm always leaving home at any moment because, all of a sudden I remembered that there is a fallen billboard somewhere and that's the moment when it shines.

MB: Documenting the periphery is also very dear to the psycho-geography movement. I don't love it but I relate to it partially. It bears a certain negative tone to it, bordering on the urban-depressive aesthetics. Many times it turns into documenting a territory in transformation, on how the city is absorbing the suburbs and the suburbs are taking over the rural areas. It's basically looking at all those social and geographical layers in constant change.

JB: There's a lot of people doing that on Instagram. They might not formalize it that way, but in the end, they are capturing that. I also think there's a feeling of loss. We're talking about a group of people in their 40's, designers, architects, engineers, reporters, that feel those spaces are going to be lost and they want to chase them, capture them before they evaporate.

For example, the other day, I was at Arte Xávega, I went to the fishermen's neighbourhood in Espinho, which is very genuine and traditional, but where we have a clear feeling that it's all coming to an end, that it won't last another generation or two. I think there's a lot of people trying to immortalize that, consciously or not. Recently I've also been to Santa Cruz do Bispo, a territory where you really notice this idea of transformation.

MB: The ring of the railways from Leixões and Leça valley, to where the city is also evolving.

JB: On that area, you have a lot of people that use that train track. They walk through the tracks to their vegetable garden and so on. A while ago they built a wall with a fence and that got me thinking 'how am I'm going to get down there?' And kept thinking that the guys from the gardens would tear the fence. And so they did! The first time I returned there I found, at the end of the wall, a hole in the fence that allowed them to pass. And it stayed like that, the garden near the tracks where the freight trains pass.

MB: You get this urban-depressive feeling. You have a foot in the garden but you're aware that if you raise your head a little you'll see Senhora da Hora and a modern bourgeois scenario. You'll see Porto Business School, Efanor, Norte Shopping and that new building where the French bank will be placed. This is all on that line of sight of Leça line, then you walk a bit further and you realise it you're deep in Leça do Balio, that looks like a territory completely apart.

JB: You have two major structures there, on one side you're almost at the airport and then you have Porto's Subway terminal, the repair shops. That territory is very hard for me to photograph. I know people who like to photograph that, like Diogo Lage. I struggle with it. It's a bit too rural for me.

@joao.bernardino: "Constructivist dream. Driving through the coast of Asturias, crossing high green mountains, small fishing villages and beautiful beaches and coves we arrived at center of the historical asturian heavy industry...between the cities of Avilés and Gijon the density of industrial infrastructures comes as a landscape of a future past. ⁣"

MB: There's this road that runs parallel to Via Norte, that goes through Leça do Balio and leads to Sonae, and then you go down, where you reach the Leça river. That bend, for me, is the key point for the weird vibe in that area. You have the river arriving at Maia, on Moreira bridge, you have Sonae, the Stonemasons Cooperative - which I don't know if it's abandoned or not but surely is a pretty phantasmagoric place - and then you have these lots up for sale and some soccer club right in the middle, completely abandoned. It's a super weird territory, but one feels like the city is galloping in that direction.

JB: Do you know this place by the side of the refinery? Where all the gas tanks lie and such? You have the backyards and the rural setting, but also the heavy industries. It's not the bucolic house anymore, it's living by the refinery. A curious thing about these issues with the industry is that the criticism around pollution has been around since the industrial revolution. Even at an artistic level, you have George Cruikshank, for example, that made illustrations about the Thames' water quality. As soon as the industrial revolution began they started to see the river water turning black, the sky filled with smoke, people dying and families living in poor conditions. It's almost instantaneous.

MB: Getting back to your photographs in Leixões. This area has a life of its own and everything revolves around the sea and the fish. We're talking about leaving home at 6 AM and everyone you see on the streets has a job to do. Even the communities that are arising here, they're coming to live off the sea. I don't know if you saw Canijo's film about Caxinas? At some point, he mentions the number of butchers and hairdressers that they have there. Here is the same. Men spend their lives on the sea and on Fridays everyone starts preparing for their return. On their absence, it's the women who to take a central role in the lives and businesses of the community.

JB: The photograph is about the life around Leixões harbour. Even when people are not present in it, they're there. But that's something I would like to further develop right now, to portray the people more than the infrastructure.

When it comes to fishing, there's always the human element. The fishermen return and that image of the boat arriving, that's a completely different moment to shoot. It's something very Portuguese, with the nostalgia and the fog. It's not something I look for, but I love the atmosphere.

While in the Basque Country, I recognise myself better shooting that sort of environment. For someone from Lisboa, this is even more noticeable. I'm used to the sun and a lot less haze, and when I get to the north of the peninsula I immediately notice this idea of a 'Northern Shore.' Mostly because of the weather, by the barrenness, which is strange because we're not even in a very arid area, but there's this harshness in the wind that eventually moulds people.

The work I've done in the Asturias is a real flashback! I was standing there, in the middle of 'constructivism' and only realized that when I saw the pictures after I took them off the camera. The chromatic scheme was already perfect, I only needed to pull a bit on the red, the yellow. Then I ended up with a sort of reconstruction from that series. They were planned compositions, meaning, one plane alone, because the thing here had to do with the lenses I was using - a 100/400 - that gave me a diabolical compression. So, I was looking down and it immediately seemed like a super constructivist composition. This brings us to labour, socialism, the idea of coal, machine, men, worker, blue-collar, the factories and the proletariat.

MB: Living in the midst of industry, literally, because I am surrounded by little factories, by Leixões harbour and the fish market, when I look at these images I can't separate them from the people working there. The image refers me to the conversations I hear daily when doing my errands in the neighbourhood.

JB: But that happens because you know them better, we're on opposite sides. Me, at most, I know some refinery engineer or football player. Because Leça da Palmeira has that particularity of being a beach that stands between a harbour and a refinery.

@joao.bernardino: "Into a dense fog. There is always something deeply melancholic that touches me about a vessel leaving port and often when seeing it i recall Carl Jung's genetic memory theory. Some would call it "fado".

MB: On an interview, you said you started doing photography for real in this digital era of Instagram and apps. With social networks, you get this sense of time that seems limitless. Time is now seen as a continuum, unlike books or exhibitions where you're confined to a certain narrative contained in space and that has a beginning and an ending. On Instagram, on the other hand, you have a feed on which you can take different paths.

JB: That's something that I find very interesting! Instagram's non-linearity expands this possibility even further. It's this kind of narrative, native to the platform, that I like the most. I don't know if there are lots of people using it, meaning, I see a creation that can be related to a narrative, but that focuses mostly on chromatic questions or with tone and not so much with the theme. I've always taken Instagram as an open book, an endless space on which I would be creating, assembling, and removing (because I also remove them) stories. There are times when I do a shutdown on a certain narrative, but later I feel that it makes sense to return to it further ahead and resume that story.

MB: The truth is that you are not limited to a gallery's white cube.

JB: My struggle right now is a bit like that. At some point, you also have the need to formalize, to have that formalization where work is closed, that it begins and ends or that it's contained in space. I feel that I'm entering a phase where the industrial theme is closing down, it's the end of a cycle. I'm sure that I will continue to shoot and publish that aspect, but slowly, the force with which it appeared to me, and I with which I shot it has been diminishing and new interests arose. The idea of a book pleases me a lot, and somehow, it's the closing of a chapter, to formalize a discourse into closed objects.

@joao.bernardino: “City of Dreams”

MB: The thing with having that timeline and freedom is one of the reasons why many artists are saying that Instagram saved them because it allowed them to reach a wider audience, but also to open direct communication channels with those audiences. On the other hand, and I get that, the truth is that when you're on such a technically limited and saturated medium like Instagram, you end up with not having the comfort of a controlled audience. When you have an exhibition at a gallery you know you'll have a critic audience, while on digital platforms the audience is probably more passive.

JB: I might sound a bit presumptuous but, at a certain moment, I became very confident in what I do. I end up having that dialogue because there's a huge audience, but I also end up having your own references and getting interested in the work that fits your circle. We think we're in an open field, but there are also lots of small bags, we end up demarcating things. In the past year and a half, I only failed to meet, outside Instagram, three or four people that were some of my major influences. This social side, more community-driven, is one of the reasons I dedicate so much time to this platform.

MB: Do you think this pessimism we're living these days, like a heavier phase of the Triumphal Ode, is reversible? Do you think that we'll ever be enamoured by the Internet again?

JB: No (laughter)! I think that it's like most examples that we've seen associated with technology. Things have a period and then they start to lose the charm and magic they had in the beginning. It's a bit the tendency of analogue, in the sense that there's a comeback of the physical. Of course there will always be with a fringe of the population, but there you go, we're talking about Instagram, and everyone is on Instagram. Artistically, the ones producing digitally are either natives to digital since the beginning or feel that need intensely. I find it super interesting to see kids using #shootonfilm. But it confuses me because I came from analogue and switched to digital, but I don't miss at all having a film roll with 36 images, which is expensive, that will need to be developed and then enlarged. On top of that, you can take apps like VSCO and have Kodak 100 there. And let me tell you, people have been testing and making reviews and it comes out looking just the same. Now, the mood that analogue brings, and I find that on VSCO's presets, that, I love.

@joao.bernardino: “All quiet on the western front. Leitmotiv Monday.”

MB: I'm not questioning digital as a tool, but overly digital living.

JB: I've always been very anti-social on social media. I was a late bloomer to Facebook and arrived at Instagram because of this one guy telling me about that every day. During some summer holidays, I decided to give it a go. I might be at a moment where I may be shining a bit more, but it's because this network is a meeting point of people doing the same as I. It is mostly because of it that I use it, as a way of meeting people working on photography. I don't feel like I'm living in the network, although the almost technological validity of Instagram as the foam of the days is also a part of it. What I would like to do would be to guard myself against that, and 'guard' is really the correct word. I want my work to have a continuity that's not dependent on the app, which is subjected to totally random factors, like suggestions. Above all, I would like to be more solid than an app.

@joao.bernardino: "Down the memory lane. A year ago today i was anxiously packing my bag on my way to north Russia. I miss the arctic. I miss #norilsk, the people i met there and even the cold.”

MB: You're adding, maybe more frequently and recently, text to provide some context and explain each image.

JB: There were times when I would take a picture and add some sentence, but now I really enjoy thinking about what I'm going to write and I feel a bigger need to contextualize. Maybe because they're things a little bit outside the box, outside my regular work, so I find pleasure in discovering a story that aggregates that same work. Off course it also works another way, that is to give the opportunity to people to read and then comment on what is being written and not just the picture.

MB: Do you spend a lot of time waiting for trains you're not taking?

JB: Yes, but I usually know their schedules (laughter). I just don't know the freighters' schedules. But only station masters know those, so no one can tell me what they are. Except that, yes, I usually know the schedules of the trains I'm not taking.

@joao.bernardino: “Scale and detail”.