Dias & Riedweg's CameraContato Exhibition Explores Charles Hovland's Erotic Archive

The artistic duo Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg presented their exhibition CameraContato at Galeria Vermelho in April and May. Their work incorporated the extensive erotic photographic archive of American photographer Charles Hovland, who operated from a Manhattan studio in the 1980s. Hovland advertised his services in The Village Voice to photograph clients' sexual fantasies, amassing 3,000 rolls of black-and-white film over two decades. He also produced over 450,000 color slides of male nudes for magazines like Mandate and Honcho under the pseudonym Chuck. The exhibition featured two major installations: Arquivo fantasia (2017), which transformed Hovland's contact sheets into digital video animations with audio of his notes, and Arquivo romance (2018), which projected fragmented nude bodies through a kaleidoscope. A documentary film, Esperando um modelo, offered a subjective portrait of Hovland in his surreal studio. The show positioned itself as a necessary response to a conservative wave and institutional self-censorship of queer themes in Brazil. Dias & Riedweg, who have collaborated since 1993, are known for a collaborative methodology that incorporates communities, as seen in their 1998 work for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo involving São Paulo's northeastern porters and caretakers.