Interview with our Top Jury this year, Angela Ferreira, artistic advisor of the FotoFestival SOLAR

You have an interesting profile because you are both a photographer and a curator, which makes your CV quite special. How did this transition happen for you? And at what point did you decide to step to the other side of the scene? Do you think that your background as a photographer gives you a particular advantage when it comes to curation ?

For me, there was never a radical transition from one role to another. It has always been a continuous, hybrid gesture, in which photography, curating and education intertwine. I see photography as a form of thought, a way of asking questions about the world and about myself. Curating emerged as a natural extension of this impulse: instead of working only with my own images, I began to create dialogues between the images of others, weaving constellations that could open up new meanings. Education, in turn, grounds both practices by creating shared spaces of reflection and encounter.

My background as a photographer gives me a very embodied sensitivity to the artistic process: the vulnerability of exposing oneself through an image, the doubt and the intimacy that each work carries. This allows me to curate with empathy and responsibility, creating contexts where the voices of artists resonate fully and where audiences are invited not only to look, but to think and to feel with the images.

In your opinion, what are the main qualities a curator should have in order to execute their role successfully ?

To me, curating is not about authority but about care. A curator must listen deeply—to artists, to audiences, and to the urgencies of the world. At the same time, they need vision: the ability to imagine narratives, to place works in resonance, to shape exhibitions that open possibilities rather than close interpretations.

The essential qualities are curiosity, sensitivity, generosity and critical thought. A curator should act as a mediator, a translator between different languages and worlds, while also leaving space for silence and the unexpected. Curating, in this sense, is also a pedagogical gesture: it creates conditions for learning, for questioning, for transformation. It is about cultivating encounters in which art can touch life and life can transform our understanding of art.

Street photography is a growing discipline which was long included in the field of documentary but which has gained full independence during the last years, several photography festivals are starting to include it in their programming. Is this also the case for the festival you tend to collaborate with in Brazil ?

Yes, street photography has gained an important visibility in Brazil as well, but I tend not to think of it in rigid categories. What moves me is less the idea of a genre than the way photography in public space becomes a gesture of relation—with community, with chance, with the world unfolding around us. In festivals like FotoFestival SOLAR, this form of photography is valued precisely because it carries the pulse of life: the unpredictability of encounters, the narratives that emerge from the everyday, the way an image can capture both fragility and resistance. It is less about a style than about an ethics of presence, about being attuned to what happens in the street as a space of collective memory and imagination. In this sense, street photography is not only an aesthetic practice but also a way of thinking-with the world.