Romeu Silveira, winner of the Institut français residency programme at the Cité Internationale des Arts, publishes Contretemps

Born in 1988, Romeu Silveira is a visual artist based in Brazil. His work focuses in particular on the practices of photography and publishing. Since 2011, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and has worked on numerous publishing projects, notably through the online publishing platform zero-editions.org. In 2019, he was awarded the Alliance Française contemporary art prize, which enabled him to obtain a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris the following year. Since 2015, he has also been editor-in-chief of the independent magazine Under Pressure. He recently published the books Ruínas (2019), Everything and nothing (2020) and Contretemps (2021), which form part of the collection of the Moreira Salles Institute's photo library in São Paulo, and the library of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris. 

Contretemps is a publishing project developed during a residency at the Cité Internationale des arts between January and March 2020. The book is presented as an inventory of events, as a visual diary documenting a world that was about to experience a global pandemic. The research proposed by Romeu Silveira thus takes as its starting point the possibilities of translating the word "contretemps" into French and Portuguese, to generate an experimental process and a reflection on the relationship of images to temporality. The result is a series of collages, photographs, and collected and assembled objects that cohabit within the same publication. 

Romeu Silveira gathers images from the internet and from the street. He folds them, glues them or photocopies them to create montages, thus developing a reflection on "poor" images, often depreciated and destined to be recycled or forgotten. During his stay in Paris, this practice gave life to Contretemps, a collection of images that bear witness to unexpected events, and that play with linguistic and cultural barriers, with the limits and invisible boundaries of the city. A true reflection on the city as a space of circulation and constraint, Contretemps documents both an intimate experience and how it connects to an urban reality. 

To develop his book project Contretemps, Romeu Silveira was able to benefit from the residency programme of the Institut français at the Cité Internationale des Arts, which is aimed at international artists who wish to develop a research and creation project in Paris for a period of three or six months. His residency was marked by the interruption of the pandemic. In the pages of this publication, we find images that bear witness to this event, which mix and resonate with photographs and documents from other eras. Contretemps has recently joined the collection of the Romeo Martinez Library at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.