JTF (just the facts): Published in 2025 by Familia Editions (here). Semi-softcover bound in Swiss otabind with jacket on transparent paper (22.5 x 30 cm), 144 pages, with 44 black-and-white and 27 color photographs. In an edition of 450 copies. Edit and design by Maria Lago. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Onda Avalanche Vulcão is also available in a special edition (link). This version includes a signed book with a gelatin silver print (18 x 27 cm), and comes in a handmade box closed with magnets. In an edition of 50 copies, each signed and numbered.
Comments/Context: Onda Avalanche Vulcão by the Brazilian photographer Mauro Restiffe, made in collaboration with the artist (and his partner) Maria Manoella, is another carefully crafted book from Familia Editions, a publishing initiative founded by Maria Lago. Dedicated to unique, collaborative projects, Familia Editions works with Brazilian artists across photography, painting, and performance, producing one of a kind publications. The book binds intimacy and geology, human tenderness and natural violence, into a single poetic gesture. The title translates as “wave avalanche volcano” but was kept in Portuguese to preserve its poetic nature, signaling the oscillation between fluidity, collapse, and eruption found in the photographs inside.
Restiffe and Manoella weave together portraits of themselves with landscapes that seem to breathe and tremble: snowfields, volcanic ridges, steaming geysers, etc. These juxtapositions are not simply decorative; they are conceptual, suggesting that the body and the earth share a language of vulnerability and force. The photographs of skin, hair, and breath are tender, sometimes erotic, yet never gratuitous. They offer meditations on presence, on the fragility of touch, and on the way desire mirrors tectonic unpredictability. Against these, the landscapes assert their own corporeality: fissures, eruptions, avalanches, all processes of transformation that echo the erosions and renewals of human intimacy.
Onda Avalanche Vulcão has been produced with exceptional quality and designed with refined elegance. The cover photograph of a nude woman gently leaning forward (we can assume it is Manoella) is overlaid with a landscape printed on a transparent jacket. The title appears in the left top corner of the jacket, in three lines, while the artists’ names are placed at the bottom. The photobook immediately feels intimate and tender. Printed using four different types of paper, it invites tactile engagement, and the photographs move between full-bleed landscapes and close-up portraits, creating an exciting visual flow. There are no captions, page numbers, or any other design elements, directing our attention entirely to the visual flow, and the book easily lays flat, making the interaction even more deliberate and enjoyable.
Restiffe, known for his contemplative studies of architecture and urban space, brings compositional rigor and tonal subtlety to the project; Manoella, whose practice spans theater, cinema, and visual arts, infuses the work with a performative and poetic sensibility. Their collaboration feels comfortably organic, a merging of disciplines that produces images both formally precise and emotionally resonant. The series debuted as an exhibition at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, where large-scale prints amplified the inherent tension between intimacy and immensity. In photobook form, that tension becomes more private and meditative, as the viewer turns pages slowly, encountering bodies and mountains in an alternating sequence.
This editing is intentional, with image pairings carefully constructed to elicit conceptual resonance. One juxtaposes a vivid blue geothermal pool, its surface steaming against the dark, textured earth, with a black-and-white photograph of two pairs of legs gently touching, a quiet gesture of intimacy. Together, the pictures evoke a dialogue between the cosmic and the corporeal, and a meditation on the deep interconnectedness of humans and nature.
In Onda Avalanche Vulcão, Restiffe and Manoella have created a work that is both personal and planetary, intimate and unruly. It asks what it means to inhabit a body and a world at once, to feel desire as a seismic force, and to recognize that intimacy and geology share a vocabulary of rupture and renewal. Rather than offering resolution, the work embraces instability, proposing vulnerability itself as a generative condition. It also reminds us that coexistence (between bodies, between humans, between humans and the earth) is never really static, but tender, fraught and continually in motion. In an era of accelerating environmental and emotional precariousness, it a meditation on coexistence – on the fragile, fierce, and fleeting ways we touch and are touched by the earth.
Collector’s POV: Mauro Restiffe is represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo (here). His photographic work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
