Occult Surfaces is a photographic investigation into what lies beneath and beyond the apparent. It builds on Giovanna’s ongoing interest in the poetic and political potential of abstraction, now expanded into the layered, textured urban environment of New York City.
This project departs from a visual language developed in the landscapes of Northeast Brazil, where Giovanna spent years working closely with stones, water, pigments, and movement: often alone, in silence, building images from solitude and material intimacy. Her photography there was not documentary, but observational in a radical sense: grounded in presence, time, and the will to see what resists visibility.

Now, in New York, she brings that same sensibility to the city, not to contrast nature with urban life, but to explore their continuities. Concrete replaces stone, metal replaces root, but the methodology remains: walk, observe, wait, receive, photograph. She works from proximity, often moving so close to her subjects that their function or identity dissolves, and what remains is surface, light, shadow, reflection: a residual aura of the thing itself.

Occult Surfaces is not about decoding the city, but about perceiving it differently. It is an attempt to displace the habitual logic of what should be seen, and how. What are the textures, colors, and visual rhythms that carry the hidden pulse of a place? What does the city conceal in its walls, its storefronts, its sidewalks? What has been erased, overwritten, or made too ordinary to be noticed? Giovanna approaches these questions through abstraction, not as an aesthetic choice, but as a strategy of resistance, to fixed meanings, fast images, and flattened realities.

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Residency: Aug 24 – Sept 15
Exhibition on view: Aug 1–15
Reception: Sept 1 | 6–8:30pm

Location: Saphira Ventura Gallery
4W 43rd Street, Suite 416, New York, NY – 10036