Sabrina Moura: Decolonizing Lenses, Insurging Memories

How old are you? Where do you currently live and work?

I am 41 years old, I live in Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará, “I am the cream of the trash, I am the luxury of the village, I am from Ceará,” borrowing the verses of Ednardo (a composer from Ceará). My work as an art-educator, inscribed by photography, has inhabited non-formal education spaces, namely: image ateliers with atypical children from Iprede (Instituto da Primeira Infância) – Vincular Project; in addition to teaching classes/workshops in public heritage spaces of art and education in Ceará.

Tell us about your journey in photography. When did you start photographing and why? What role does photography play in your life?

‘Say cheese!’ became a state of being since my childhood, initiated by playful experimentation. I got my first camera when I was 12 years old. It was my favorite toy, a basic Yashica analog. For financial reasons, given the imperatives of capitalism, it took me a long time to own a digital camera. In 2012, I took my first photography course, the Basic Course at Casa Amarela, at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), which opened my lenses to the optical variations of this art as a social, human, political language, strengthening my passion. After this first course, capturing knowledge related to photography made me wander through auto-, hetero- and eco-formative processes.

The knowledge of how to teach also involved me as a core, related to family flashes, leading me to the Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at the Federal Institute of Ceará (IFCE), producing a reading of photography with transgressive education. From this perspective, and imbued with the markers of gender and territory, I joined the Sol para Mulheres group, a collective of female photographers from Ceará. The singular-plural territory of photography as a reading of the world calls me to be more, a Freirean concept moving within me, to encode and decode through images the existences and resistances.

Tell us about your finalist work for the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025. When and where was it created? What is its concept? How does it fit into your photographic practice?

The Essay “Which Story We Tell” evokes a space of resistance to slavery in Ceará that still produces marks of coloniality. In 2021, I made a new visit to the “Museu Negro Liberto” (Freed Black Museum), located in the municipality of Redenção-CE, the first city to “free the enslaved in Brazil”. The space is a private property that, for marketing purposes, dereferentialized the history of Black men and women in Ceará by falsifying the architecture and the oral accounts of the local guides – “They were good masters.”

A customized and romanticized slave quarters through the lens of the whiteness pact. “This environment is a memorial collection for the Black men and women who lived here.” In capturing images, I tried to record the environments of the Museum, mirroring the dualism emitted in the distinct realities of whiteness (spaces of the Plantation Manor House) and blackness (Slave Quarters). This work was carried out in 2021, analyzing the concealment and historical dualism about slavery in Ceará. It represents, therefore, a mode of photographic inscription in the anti-racist struggle, which also constitutes my identity. As a technique of manual and experimental photography, I built a support of paper and pieces of mirrors that I used in front of the lens to generate this junction of images.

What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?

I have several projects underway, but I would like to highlight the project “Mar de Simoa” (Sea of Simoa), which, in continuity with the historical reading of the peoples of Ceará, also brings inferences of gender and race, through an intersectional lens. As a movement of alterity, I am developing biographical research through experimental photography in a heuristic movement about Black women in the context of slavery in Ceará. The generative thematization is mobilized by the biography-image of Preta Tia Simoa, a Black woman active in community mobilization that led to the “jangadeiros’ strike” of January 1881, when the embarkation of enslaved Black people through the port of Fortaleza was decreed to end, defining the course for the abolition of slavery in the state of Ceará, which took effect three years later throughout the Brazilian territory.

In the becoming of my photographic self, I point towards imagistic utopias that compose ideas to postpone the end of the world (Ailton Krenak), having the ancestral future that connects to a triad: affective memories – nature – ancestry. An always transgressive imaging.