RODA (portuguese for ‘circle’) began with a pull towards something I had never fully reached. Growing up half Brazilian and having spent part of my childhood in Brazil, I always felt connected to the country. Yet part of its culture remained something to truly encounter.

Capoeira was never present within my family, which made my relationship to this practice somewhat distant. Making this project became a way to reduce it.

Capoeira is difficult to hold in a single definition. It is at once a martial art, a fight, a game, and a living archive of resistance, born from the bodies of enslaved Africans in Brazil who disguised combat as movement and survival as rhythm. It carries history in a way few practices do.

Drawn by this complexity, I travelled through Salvador, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro in search of capoeira and the people who sustain it.

This work does not try to define capoeira, but rather offers a visual reflection of where I stand in relation to it. These images were made from a place of curiosity and humility.

This project became a way of stepping into that circle, of moving closer to a culture, a country, and a part of myself.