What remnants of ourselves, and our experiences, could we find beneath a drastically transformed space?

In Azinhaga I seek to explore the inseparable relationship between life stories and the physical spaces where these stories occurred. Every memory has its setting. Equivalently, every scenario also has its own story. Mutually we contain it and are contained in it. We mark and are marked by it. If, on the one hand, with the historical processes that inevitably transfigure landscapes, many places come to exist only in memory (and in old photographs), on the other, the physical spaces that served as stages, and the materials themselves that gave shape to these spaces, which were being buried, uprooted, piled up, also contain the memories that passed through them. Invisible to the naked eye, but present as a spectrum.

 Starting from this premise, in Azinhaga I explore sometimes the encounter and sometimes the confrontation between memory and matter. In reference to the first, which is fragmentary, I use photographic crops created from appropriate images of families whose stages, like Saramago's, have been transformed. In parallel, the use of elements characteristic of civil construction, such as concrete and cement blocks, materializes the idea of ​​the constant transformation of cities.  I go through different strategies such as juxtapositions of scenes of affection and implosions; visual parallels between stacked concrete blocks and memories of the past, physical experiments between photographic support and cement. From these strategies, memory and matter constantly touch each other, reflecting on what remains or disappears. What remains after all?

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This project was selected by the Nova Fotografia 2023 notice, through which it won a solo exhibition at the Image and Sound Museum of São Paulo  (MIS-SP). The exhibited works became part of the museum's collection.

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