by Pedro Matallo, creative director
 

Brasília has a particular relationship with what cannot be seen. As a city exhaustively planned, it exists to be contemplated on monumental scales, favoring a wide view of the horizon while often forgetting that its streets were, in fact, made for people.
 

Within this logic, many people simply do not appear in the city’s plans and projects. They are not mentioned in urban planning proposals, nor remembered in social initiatives. This is not unique to Brasília, of course. But unlike other cities, where the urban fabric is shaped by sporadic real estate developments, in Brasília we can say that everything we choose not to see is part of a project.
 

For example: in the Setor Comercial Sul, one of the busiest areas of the Federal District, there is a single public restroom. It may seem insignificant, but it is not. For twenty years, the space remained closed. It was reopened during the pandemic, when the health crisis made it impossible to ignore that hundreds of people had no access to water, a mirror, or basic conditions of hygiene. Today, it serves around a thousand people per week—people experiencing homelessness, street vendors, workers, passersby. It operates through donations, and for that reason, its continuity is never guaranteed.
 

A restroom should not be rare. The fact that this is the only facility of its kind in the area is not a detail—it is a diagnosis. It says something about what the city considers essential, and for whom.
 

Faces begins from this place. Not as a backdrop or a pretext, but as a real point of departure: it was there that photographer Ana Lima met the eleven people who make up the exhibition. Men and women, cis and trans, who use—or have used—the restroom in the Setor Comercial Sul, and who agreed to be photographed and heard. The portraits are tight, direct: close-up faces, with no surrounding landscape. The images do not show a social context; they focus on the most human aspects—the skin, the gaze, the marks of life.
 

The accompanying audio testimonies do what the images cannot: they allow these individuals to speak for themselves, in their own time, in their own words.
 

The exhibition does not explain these stories. It presents them. And in doing so, it raises a simple, uncomfortable question: what do we all choose not to see?