Mirage Bureau
Brazil
Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?
Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?
How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?
Artist Statement
Description
Poker Guest is a visual series about social tension and intimate-emotional conflict, and the constant interaction between these two worlds. The project unfolds as a series of videos in which, at a rapid pace, the guest, positioned as the viewer, arrives and moves through surreal environments until coming face to face with the poker players. Everything happens in an agile and unstable way: scenes form and dissolve unexpectedly. Identity slips, bodies fragment, and gestures exceed intention. The poker game functions as a metaphorical structure: a space of anticipation, concealment, and unstable power dynamics. Rather than documenting a match, the images capture what leaks out of it: anxiety, desire, aggressiveness, fragility. The figures appear suspended between presence and erasure, as if caught in the interval between a decision and a collapse. Through distortion, motion blur, and fragmented bodies, the series investigates how contemporary subjectivity performs under pressure, when control is demanded, but uncertainty prevails.
Process
The work emerged from an interest in moments when social rituals begin to fail. I intentionally embraced misalignment: bodies that cannot fully sustain themselves, gestures that overflow, faces that refuse to settle. At the same time that the images may feel entertaining, they also generate discomfort. The work draws a parallel with social relationships and the masks we create to navigate them, strategies of survival, performance, and disguise within a system in which, in one way or another, everyone is playing the game.
Tools
I created the images in Midjourney using a series of highly specific prompts in which, while technically defining what I expect to see, I also introduce subjectivity, poetry, and metaphysical elements. I used Magnific to enhance detail and increase image resolution, applying the same approach, balancing technical precision with expressive intent.
Description
The noise between us and the world shapes the reality we perceive and invent. It's a noise we both absorb and produce, becoming simultaneously a confrontation and a creation of our present. This work poetically explores this abstract boundary, this invisible edge, between our existence and reality itself. It addresses our inability to clearly perceive how we interact and communicate in everyday life, highlighting constant disturbances that become invisible, ones we tend to silence and reshape to survive socially.
Process
My motivation emerged from reflecting on how deeply noise influences our interactions and perceptions, and how we often fail to acknowledge its pervasive impact. I was driven by the desire to reveal and make visible these disturbances and the subtle tensions within our daily attempts at connection, prompting viewers to acknowledge and reflect on these silent disruptions in their own lives.
Tools
I used Midjourney for the initial image generation, incorporating personal photographs into poetic, metaphysical, and descriptive prompts. Subsequently, I enhanced the piece using Magnific multiple times to add details, and finally, blended the treatments cohesively using Photoshop.
