Léo Azevedo is a Brazilian artist, writer, and designer born and raised in Baixada Fluminense, a peripheral region of Rio de Janeiro often overlooked in dominant cultural narratives. Having lived, worked, and built businesses within the territory, his practice is rooted in direct observation, urban research, and the creative potential hidden within
everyday life.

Working across collage, visual poetry, digital illustration, typography, photography, and intervention, Azevedo investigates how local symbols, labor, memory, and informal design languages shape collective identity. Xerox textures, handwritten marks, vernacular graphics, and appropriated visual systems frequently appear throughout his work as tools for transforming ordinary cultural artifacts into new narratives.

The works submitted to TORN emerge from an ongoing investigation into the symbolism of the orange in Baixada Fluminense. Once associated with agricultural prosperity, the fruit becomes a vehicle for discussing labor, aspiration, survival, and transformation. Through collage, visual fragmentation, graphic disruption, and poetic intervention, familiar images are displaced and recontextualized.

Influenced by the photography of Rogério Reis, street culture, editorial design, and experimental typography, Azevedo approaches the city itself as both archive and medium. His practice seeks to reveal overlooked forms of imagination and invention that exist within peripheral territories, proposing alternative ways of seeing places often reduced to stereotypes. These works are less about documenting Baixada Fluminense and more about uncovering its latent visual mythology.