The Embassy of Brazil in Beirut, together with Guimarães Rosa Institute-Beirut present, from November 6 to December 5, the exhibition Paths of a New Sertão (Veredas de um Novo Sertão), by Brazilian photographer Fred Jordão, as part of the Institute’s ongoing cycle dedicated to photography, literature, and cinema focused on Brazil’s Northeast. The opening will be attended by the photographer.

The exhibition draws inspiration from the literary legacy of João Guimarães Rosa, whose 1950s masterpiece The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertão: Veredas) reshaped the cultural imagination of Brazil’s backlands. In his pages, the Sertão ceased to be seen merely as a barren landscape of impossibilities and emerged as a space of journey, struggle, silence, and mystery—a territory where human existence reveals itself in both epic and poetic dimensions.

Seventy years later, the Brazilian Sertão continues to evolve. While the central hinterlands have been transformed by agribusiness, the Northeastern Sertão has established itself as a land of family agriculture and renewable energies. Despite these changes, the region preserves centuries-old traditions—the “Leather Civilization,” the labor on small farms, the distinctive rural architecture, leather garments, and customs that keep alive the identity of a Brazil where past and future meet.

It is within this landscape of contrasts that Fred Jordão has traveled over the past three decades, tracing the many paths of the Northeastern Sertão. His work seeks a balance between the world of the 21st century and the symbolic universe of the 20th. In his images, reality expands into poetry: the imaginary, the fantastic, and a unique visual calligraphy emerge, redefining the Sertão as a territory filled with light, color, and form, where simplicity and harshness coexist with intensity and beauty.

The Sertão portrayed by Jordão converses with the great tradition of Brazilian regional literature, which turned the country’s interior into a symbol of identity and resistance. His photographs capture the striking visual power of the Caatinga, a biome unique to the Sertão, marked by its radical transformations between drought and the rainy season.

With Paths of a New Sertão, Fred Jordão brings to Beirut a renewed vision of a contemporary Sertão—a place in constant transformation: rich, vibrant, and endlessly reinvented. The exhibition invites viewers to explore these multiple spaces—real and imagined, visual and poetic, historical and contemporary.

As in Guimarães Rosa’s The Third Bank of the River, the real merges with the symbolic, and the Sertão reveals itself as an infinite crossing, a living metaphor, a borderless territory that pulses at the very heart of Brazil.