And isn't it that I suddenly lost my voice?

Serious. When we stop to think about it, talking about the voice is something so complex that we don't even know where to start. It's just that few things are as important to human existence as speech, and by extension, the voice. One of the first forms of communication, it was the main means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. That's before we imagine any kind of written language. I would summarize our evolution like this: fire, voice, writing, iPhone. Okay, that's about it (well, maybe "Gisele Bündchen" had to go into that equation somewhere, but that's just my opinion). ?

As a photographer, art director and writer, my voice has always been different. Or rather, others: light in photography, image and typography in graphic design, words and exclamation points in texts. Personally, I was born with this insistent mania for a tangible graphic representation of everything, in the way I express myself and represent the world I perceive around me.
But isn't it amazing that you IMAGINE ME SCREAMING WHEN YOU READ SOMETHING WRITTEN LIKE THAT? (…or whispering, if I write like that next?). And who can not hear an echoing cry when they see the photos from the series Êxodos, by Sebastião Salgado?

And this is where I wanted to get: the voice is inseparable from the human imagination. Even when you can't hear it, it's there. The same happens when I say: imagine this sentence being narrated by Fernanda Montenegro. Okay, you can hear her voice reading this, deep in your head. It's as if the voice makes the world more palatable. As if it translated – in an instinctive-ancestral way – the whole damn thing. We even gave God a voice! A collective unison of the voice of all of us, through the “voice of the people”. It makes me think that if the eyes are the window to the soul, the voice is the intercom. And it is not by chance that “voice” is synonymous with “expression”. It goes far beyond the simple communication tool and the cold theoretical definitions that determine sender, receiver and message.

The voice brings out what we carry inside. It exposes lies, desires, fears and insecurities. It expresses certainties and doubts, joys and sorrows. It represents us very well in our ambiguous human complexity. Whether in a voiceover, music, photography, a painting or a text. Coincidence – or divine wisdom – the one who has the responsibility of expressing our soul, could not have chosen a better place to be born. Right next to the heart, deep in the chest, it springs from a breath. Just like life.

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Andrei Polessi is art director, photographer, writer and Head of Branded Content at Pitaya Filmes. Co-founder of Instituto Dharma, an organization that promotes humanitarian aid in several countries around the world.