Mica Costa Grande is an explorer, a photography, a builder and a man who is always working on interesting plans. And perhaps not surprisingly, both his kids have inherited a strong artistic vision too.
“My kids were raised in a camera,” says Mica Costa Grande, when we sit down with him and his two, now adult children, Eloi Scarva and Saskia Salgado, around the kitchen table in their home in Coloane. And he doesn’t mean metaphorically either… Eloi and Saskia literally grew up travelling around the world with their parents, Mica and Sofia Salgado, in a truck that had been converted into a giant moving camera on wheels.
“We drove around America in a big truck and then took it down to Brazil,” explains Mica further. “Then, while we were there, I got a phone call from Volkswagon and they offered me a bigger, newer truck. My idea was to make the biggest camera in the world by drilling a hole in the side of it, and collecting the light and making photos. We went all around Brazil driving in a camera.”
Such was the life of the family, exploring the world, experiencing different cultures and showing off their marvellous camera-truck.
“We had lines of 200 people waiting to go inside, 20 people at a time,” recalls Mica. “I don’t do tourism. I go to visit people in their environment and I try to fit in for a while. I try to know people, and with a cultural project, you get to meet very interesting people. I learned about Brazil more than any other country, because I interacted with thousands of people.”
We meet Mica, Eloi and Saskia in their home in Hac-Sa Village, Coloane, tucked quietly away behind Hac-Sa park. The home used to be a compound for a group of missionary families, before they left and it fell into disrepair. For the past few years, Mica has been renovating it, and creating a beautifully eclectic home, often using scrap material that he finds lying around. As well as the standard bedrooms, kitchen and living room, the home also has a jacuzzi and sauna, and an office space complete with a small room that is actually a camera.
“We would like to open this home and make it a live gallery, with images hanging all around the house. I’ve always liked this cooperative idea, my house being open to people. And Macau is a very good place to do it because it’s so safe,” says Mica.
Given their adventurous upbringing, it’s little wonder then that Eloi and Saskia are following in their father’s footsteps and have both developed a keen interest in photography. And while neither of them work full-time in the profession (Saskia is a graphic designer and Eloi is a stage manager at The House of Dancing Water), both are very passionate about photography, and it is clearly more than just a hobby.
“We were educated by travelling and seeing the world, meeting all kinds of different people from different cultures,” expresses Saskia, “So for me, I engage with photography because my father is a photographer and my mother is a journalist, and all these things combine together. It’s this idea of wanting to capture things in a different way, wanting to keep a memory, keep a landscape, or the people, somehow, with photography. Photography connects a lot of things,” she notes. “I think photography was always a thing that came naturally. I was always the one who wanted to hold the camera, not be in front of it.”
“I was always around photography, but never really actually focused on it at first,” adds her brother Eloi. “But everything ended up making me return to it again, even though in the beginning I had ideas of studying architecture or focusing on drawing. And of course the travelling influenced me, because you have these images passing by all the time, and you create your own memories, like memory photography. Photography is the easiest tool to use when you’re travelling, and in the end, the focus is travelling, not photography. That’s just a way of working while you’re doing it.”
“I think poetry is a good description of what we do, even with photos, it’s more like telling a story rather than commenting on the world,” explains Mica.
“It’s just non-verbal and people can find their own meaning in it,” adds Eloi. “In the end, the images are stories, and that’s why travelling makes sense. You can of course try to make stories about your local place, but I feel for me it’s easier to always have new places and to find new stories.”
“You don’t always know what’s happening in a photo,” says Saskia. “Sometimes you need to think, ‘what’s happening here?’ And you create a story in your mind. That’s the interesting thing about taking a photo – not giving away all the information.”
Eloi agrees, continuing: “The best part is, even though photos are reality, it’s just a fragment of time, so you don’t exactly know what the context is, so you can create for yourself what is the past, the present and future of that situation; that’s what good photography can make you do.”
Given their common views on the profession overall, how do their approaches differ?
“Eloi is more reflective, inquisitive, but sometimes when you have lots of ideas, they collide on the way out,” notes his father. “Saskia is a more natural born photographer, a very fluid learner. She is more abstract, practical, and has less mental concerns about the activity. Eloi and I always go for the ambiguous. Saskia is more pure and intuitive.”
“Saskia has the most concise approach, she has a style,” offers Eloi. “I’m very floating in that sense and take photos more randomly. But there’s a connection between our work for sure,” he continues. “Not only because we are family, but because my sister and I have the influence of always being around the imagery and imagination of my father, so in the end it’s impossible to say that it hasn’t influenced us; it’s like a language that we have all learned. We all focus on more candid street photography and of course travel photography, which is about the places we go and the things we experience. Sometimes I think if we did an exhibition together of Black & White photography, it might be really hard to tell who took which photos.”
“Our work is like our faces: we are not similar, but you can see something in common,” notes Mica. “I don’t envy their work, because they are my son and daughter, but sometimes I see their work and think, ‘oh shit, I should have done that picture,’” he laughs.
As the men of the family talk on, Saskia sits quietly listening to their comments. Finally, I have to ask her what she thinks.
“Yes, I’m more practical,” she says, concisely. “I just see something and take the picture.”
Photo: Saskia SalgadoSaskia’s more intuitive approach to her work is something both her father and brother clearly admire.
“In the end the photos can come out more pure and interesting because you’re not so focused on what you’re doing and your taking pleasure in the moment. I feel in art and poetry it’s like that,” say Eloi. “If you’re relaxed, you do it better. And sometimes you surprise yourself, because you are so instinctively working that you don’t even know exactly how you did it, but all the things collide into making it happen.”
Mica concludes: “You show yourself through your photography, you don’t show the world. When you look at the work of a serious photographer, you see the person behind it. You see their pictures and their soul is there. So we are showing ourselves more. An artist does that.”
Big vehicles, big plans
All in all, Mica has travelled to around 90 countries with his photography, and the kids, around 50. And even though they are now based back in Macau, the adventures are not over just yet. Following on from previous mobile projects, Mica’s next plan is to get a double decker bus and convert it into a camera too.
“I’ve always travelled in big vehicles, so I want to get a very technologically advanced bus, an electric vehicle. And we can have a gallery on the lower deck, and a huge camera inside,” Mica explains enthusiastically. “I’ve identified one manufacturer in China, so I want to try to convince them to give me one of their buses and help me to transform it. Since I have a cultural project, I can bring their bus with me all around Europe. People will gather around and we can show off the bus, and also what Macau and China, my second home, are able to do in terms of advanced technology. And perhaps we can make a small gallery to show what local Macau residents are doing creatively.”
Think this sounds a bit crazy? Wait, there’s more! Mica hopes to combine this plan with another ‘big’ project that he is currently working on – a photography magazine entitled Stare. And this is not your ordinary publication. Initially, Mica is designing and publishing the magazine from his home, featuring one or two photographic portfolio’s together with a short story, some of which he is writing himself. The main aim is to feature photography in a large format… very large!
“We are publishing in A-zero size, so we have to print it in China because nobody can print it here in Macau. They use this huge machine to publish publicity for big brands, but they’ve never published a magazine, so even in China there are some doubts,” he admits.
Mica’s inspiration for this over-sized publication came from when he was a teenager.
“I came across a very large format magazine, from Germany, and I fell in love with it when I saw this huge publication and I subscribed to it. When I started to think about reinventing this idea, I thought about my 17-year-old self.”
The target is mainly artists and art schools and galleries, but ultimately Mica sees the magazine as “an art object” not a commercial project.
“What we’re doing is going against the tide. It will not be a normal publication for the masses or to inform people. Most of the modern painters we know today are famous because they didn’t need to serve a particular purpose of illustrating, so they could go mad and paint whatever they wanted.. and we are a bit like that. We’re going mad, we publish what we want with no regularity, and we publish where we want.”
“The target market is crazy people,” he laughs. “A very practical person will not believe in this project! But madness, if it’s under control, is a good method.”
Mica has already prepared six issues of the magazine and published a short run of copies from home, using ink-jet durable inks. “The quality is archival, it lasts forever,” he says.
The ultimate plan is to combine his passion for travelling and his new love of publishing, and to take the magazine production on the road, moving from city to city, gathering interesting content and contributors along the way.
“I can publish the magazine from inside the bus. As soon as we finish the magazine, people can walk in and buy the magazine from us,” he explains.
“The themes will be very arbitrary. I want to park the bus downtown, very visibly, so people will be curious and come, and I will meet people, and this is how I will develop the content of the magazine. In the beginning I will not know, it will all depend on my interaction with the city and people, just improvising.”
While many of the projects Mica has been involved in have a sense of scale to them, they are also based on very simple concepts – from displaying local photographers in a small gallery in Coloane village named The People’s House, to gathering local artists to paint blank statues of animals corresponding with the current year of the Chinese zodiac – an initiative that continued here for a number of years.
His most recent cultural project took place last November, this time focusing on moving images.
“We did the Gaze Film Festival last year for the first time, without any promotions. We started from scratch. We found a beautiful empty lawn near the Science Centre, with the bridge in the background, set up a screen and a projector and held eight sessions with some of the most beautiful movies, not really mainstream films but classics of cinema,” says Mica. “Fellini, Tarkovsky, Zhang Yi Mou, Wong Kar-wai.”
Mica admits that November was a bit cold, and is hoping to hold the event in October this year, once again with the support of ICM. And despite the chilly night air, he was encouraged by the response he got from the local audiences.
“The first session we had only six people, but by the end we had around 150,” he says. “For all my work, I believe in popular acceptance, I could do a lot of promotions for all the activities we do, but I believe that it’s the people that have to appreciate it, because if people don’t appreciate it, then I’ll shut it down.”
“It’s not really an intellectual aim… The common theme of our work is to organise old-fashioned activities that people can enjoy just by itself. To have a big magazine, to lie around on the grass and watch a big screen – simple stuff.”
The final objective is to combine all his ideas into one, on-the-road, grand cultural expedition.
“The bus will be a combination of all these things. I want to take photos with the bus, I want to project movies on the bus, I want to print the magazine inside the bus, have a gallery of artists from Macau on the ground floor. Combining together different concepts and using the resources efficiently, just like this house. That’s my aim, to combine my interests, with the interests of the public, with the smallest amount of resources I can use.”
“I don’t believe in sacrificing yourself for a cause you don’t believe in. You have to believe in it and it must be a joy for you to do it,” he concludes.
