MuseoMag: MuseoMag 2023_04

MuseoMag 2023_04

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Title:: MuseoMag 2023_04

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Title:: "Every series has a Lady Gaga touch": The photographic world of Bruno Oliveira

24 MuseoMag N°IV 2023 Bruno gives us an insight into his photographic practice. Pictured right: Bruno Oliveira, Amplectendo copulabis, In ore gloria, 2021. “EVERY SERIES HAS A LADY GAGA TOUCH” The photographic world of Bruno Oliveira Bruno Oliveira is a young visual artist from Luxem- bourg who has a made a name for himself by documenting the people, places and communities close to his heart. Capturing scenes charged with meaning and emotion, he transforms personal expe- riences and memories into poetic images that blur the boundary between fantasy and reality. Bruno’s work is currently on show at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart as part of our European Month of Photography exhibition Je est un autre. In the final month of the exhibition, we sat down with the artist to find out more about his work. We start by speaking about his lifelong fascination with photography. His family moved to Luxembourg when he was two years old. His parents ended up separating soon after. He notes that there are no fa- mily albums from those early years in Luxembourg. “Looking back at the pictures, it was weird,” says Bruno, “You see me as a baby, then suddenly I’m in kindergarten. There was this gap in the records.” When he got his first camera age seven, he started to make one family album after the other, documen- ting his life with his mother, stepdad and siblings. In a sense, he was filling in the gaps – an act of re- claiming the past that informs his work to this day. REIMAGINING THE WORLD This strong link to the past plays a key role in the artist’s visually impactful renderings. In Tales of Junior (2022), for instance, he uses the name his mother originally wanted to give him – Junior – and explores an alternative version of his childhood self, whilst in Sonhos de Menino (2021-2022), he revisits and reactivates childhood memories in the forest. This act of imagining what might have been – and what might be – permeates many of his series. Bruno’s need to tell the rest of the story, to supplement a narrative that is lacking in some way, is apparent in our conversation. At one point, he mentions Edward Steichen’s monumental project Family of Man; “I find these images so fascinating, but they don’t really show the family of today. Some families are missing. Being queer, we often speak about chosen families as well.”

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