Genesis or Around the World in Sketches of Light
If “there is no right way to travel,” Andrei Polessi moves through the world without rehearsal, learning through missteps and discovery. A draft, we might say—ourselves complicit in the idea—is also a book of photography.
We are all made up of scribbles, doodles, and erasures. A journey is like a pencil stroke that can be erased or redrawn, a mark in a diary, made up of detours and overlapping experiences, layer upon layer. Everything consists of points that reinvent our history. “Sketching,” losing himself and finding himself, the restless Andrei Polessi embraces his erasures—for no text is born ready—and in them finds the most authentic side of our world, “far greater than we can imagine,” in the form of “human landscapes.” “It is people who give me perspective, who reach any horizon for me.” Rascunho is “an atlas made of individuals, much more than of places,” a book of questions that is also a book of photography.
“My life in 240 pages,” sums up the photographer and writer—who is neither one nor the other—and artist, “whimsical and curious,” “bold enough to think it relevant to use so much paper and ink,” who one day decided to “go after this world” that eludes us and who has since lived with “more uncertainties and more doubts.” “That’s what living is: moving forward without a script, making mistakes and learning.”
“Rascunho” is a map drawn by people Polessi meets along the way, in the four corners of the world, which, he says, “belongs not to the clever, but to the awakened.” “To travel is to know oneself. Perhaps this distance from our daily lives is the most important thing about travel. A journey of discovery can take place anywhere—in traffic, on a street corner. We don’t need to go far. What matters is that the journey strips us of the comfortable, secure references that shape who we are. And that it strips us bare. And that we become who we truly are. I find it fascinating when we don’t have a faucet we can turn on and water comes out. That’s a step that puts everything into perspective. In travel, there is this encounter with our truth.”
“What drives me is not knowing,” he writes. We step into a time machine to meet Andrei, a native of Itatiba, São Paulo, Brazil—a visionary and innovator who has made his mark in every field he’s explored, whether in advertising or in graphic design that’s rough and scribbled, perfect in its imperfection, and who has always kept photography as a parallel passion. The last photograph in the compendium he is now releasing is precisely a photo he took on a trip to Rome (1991) with his parents when he was 17, and which he considers to be a piece of the same puzzle, of that “pile of sediments” he keeps stored on film rolls and external hard drives in an endless act of preservation.
Looking back on his life, one could say that the turning point came when he lost the chance to watch his two daughters grow up due to a premature birth (“that really knocked the wind out of us”) and the moment he asked himself, “Does what I’m doing with my life today contribute in any way to making the world a better place?” “The answer was no, and that left me very concerned.” Then came the flip side of the coin. In 2014, Andrei received the love of two girls (adopted). And the following year, it was the fateful earthquake that devastated parts of India and Nepal that gave him a purpose. He took a handful of photos he had taken in 2007 and turned them into a book, the proceeds from which went not only toward building a school in Nepal but also toward supporting some disadvantaged communities in Brazil — and the subsequent founding of the Dharma Institute, a team of professional medical and non-medical volunteers who today dedicate themselves to bringing basic healthcare to isolated communities in various parts of Brazil and the world. “We live in a bubble of privilege and opportunities that most people will never have. So I think we have an obligation to do our part. Thinking only of ourselves, our children, and our friends is a very narrow perspective given the possibilities we have for transformation. As Chico Xavier [author, philanthropist] wrote, ‘it is not possible to make a new beginning, but it is always possible to make a new ending.’”
Andrei Polessi began working as a tour guide around that time. He planned humanitarian trips, taking doctors to “remote, exceptional, and wonderful” places. Sometimes he would stay in a village for weeks. Often, people would open their doors to be treated. “It was a very deep connection,” he recalls. “I had the chance to get to know people’s daily lives, to share a meal with them. The freedom to enter someone’s bedroom is a very intimate thing. That showed me how important it is to dive a little deeper.”
That’s the kind of experience he offers on the trips he organizes. And it was one of those cultural exchanges—in Ladakh, India—that really shook this agnostic’s beliefs. “You know that the world we live in reveres a certain person, Jesus, and suddenly you realize that those people on the other side of the world have absolutely no idea who he is. So, I realize I’m living in an illusion. I think that’s when I began to realize that the world isn’t what we imagine it to be. I think that’s the perspective traveling gives us: that we aren’t the center of the universe, that this is a ridiculous and petty illusion.”
The camera was the “tool” that allowed him to “tell stories that weren’t being told” and to “amplify” the work of the Dharma Institute, earning one humanitarian award after another. But this tool never ceased to be “an affront, a weapon, an act of aggression” to the people who opened their doors to him and shared a meal with him. “Humanity comes first, right? I’m still a photographer who feels tremendously uncomfortable invading other people’s privacy. I still lose most of my photos because of the idealism of wanting to get to know the person.”
“I don’t think there’s a right way to travel,” he says as he wanders along the paths. Andrei Polessi, “restless, persistent, nonconformist,” who is “against those who lay down the law,” who says he’s more of a traveler and less of a tourist, who wants to “seize the power of truth and reason.” “Everyone chooses how they want to travel.”
He himself manages to draw more out of things when he doesn’t have a set plan. “I’m always lost. I’ve gotten lost in medinas, I’ve gotten lost in Varanasi, in Lalibela…” He goes about “sketching” without any certainty about what he’s building. *Rascunho* didn’t start with a theme, but with “a flood of images that was overflowing.” I wanted to publish it. He had to publish. And I realized that nothing was formatted, that everything was a draft. That’s a good theme—that uncertainty, that doubt, and that not knowing—which, incidentally, won’t leave me anytime soon.”
Polessi—and her *Rascunho* —is made up of literature (“it shapes me”), of disciplined and committed cultural exchanges (“we must realize that some of our actions, which are not very ethical due to a lack of understanding, can jeopardize these places”), of wise people (“My grandfather, who struggled his whole life, never went to school, made baskets, and worked in a dry cleaner’s. And he was one of the wisest people I’ve ever known. I’ve missed talking to older people. I miss it so much”) and a sense that cannot be explained and that we only grasp with the wind in our faces, the road, and silence. Polessi quotes The Book of Disquiet. “What we see is not what we see, but what we are.” Accepting the scribbles is embracing the human condition itself—fragile, changeable, and deeply poetic. If we are made of drafts, our essence lies in movement, in the search, and in the journey.
