Photographic Exhibition | re(born) | Paulo Peixoto

Photographic Exhibition | re(born) | Paulo Peixoto

The Photographic Exhibition “re(nascer)” by Paulo Peixoto, FEUC Professor and UC Student Ombudsman, is on display in the Teaching Block of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra.

Re(born)

We didn't choose to be born. Therefore, we are obliged to be reborn. To be reborn is to find the meaning of life. It is to give ourselves a life. It is the eminently human power to invent and reinvent ourselves. We are reborn from the ashes of a failure to learn from it and not go back to the same mistakes. We are reborn because we die. But being reborn is also a powerful process that allows positive changes and transformations in our lives... even when life goes well for us. We are reborn because we believe in ourselves. We are reborn because we live and because we want to live.

To be reborn, as the poetess would say, is to learn with the springs to let ourselves be cut and always come back whole. It's learning the importance of a fragment of something bigger and the relevance of moments that allow us to fill our days and lives so that we can be part of everything. It's making the detail greater than the whole and a ray of light greater than the sun.

As long as life has a story to tell, while there are memories captured in a ray of light, while there is room for us to discover ourselves, not even the most ordinary lives can do without being reborn.

Paulo Peixoto | Mangualde, 1969 | Coimbra, 1989 | Belgium, 1991 | Rio de Janeiro, 2014

No one is born just once. Whoever is born once decides not to live. I was born at least four times. The last three by choice. It is fantastic that we can choose to be born, because that is what allows us to “always be the same… always be different”. Starting over, reinventing ourselves, without having to leave the past behind and without having to stop believing in the future. To be or not to be born, that is the question!

There is always a moment in our lives for photography, even if it is when we do a more or less colorful self-portrait. Photography is a passion. It's a hobby. It's a profession. It is a technique or even an art. It's a universal language and other things. For me photography is, above all, and often nothing more than that, a methodology. It is a visual path, through photoelicitation, to do sociology.