Ofereço meu retrato como lembrança (I Offer My Portrait as a Memento ) is an archaeology of the intimate that investigates the voids of memory and image through the reinterpretation of family photographs. The work began with the discovery of old portraits of my maternal grandmother, a teacher and an embroiderer of fabrics and memories, in which she appears young and smiling – contrasting with the serious and reserved person I came to know. Who was, after all, the grandmother in those portraits? From this estrangement, the work explores stories and fragments forgotten by the photographs.

Photographs, especially family ones, tend to record only happy moments; they don't reveal the pains and sufferings experienced. For this reason, every photograph carries both presence and absence: presence, because it revives a moment that has passed; absence, because it doesn't fully translate reality, capturing only a fragment of it. What do these images leave unseen?

The work intertwines photography, sewing, and memory to dive into the in-between spaces, gaps, and the absences. Through interventions, I deconstruct my grandmother’s original portraits, emptying them to fill what is missing, questioning what they reveal and what they conceal, and reconstructing memories and affections. These portraits were re-photographed, cut, torn, sewn, and layered, incorporating crochet pieces that belonged to my grandmother, along with other elements and embroideries created especially for the project. In the act of dismantling, I seek new framings that highlight parts and details of the images, as well as the backs of the original photographs, the affectionate dedications that accompanied them, and the marks left by time on the photographic paper. Authorial photographs and traces of photographs of strangers— found in the trash and collected from the Acho archive in Campinas/SP— join the compositions, exhausting the original narratives of the images and proposing new ones.

Ofereço meu retrato como lembrança (I Offer My Portrait as a Memento ) explores emptiness as an affective potency and as a space for imagination, reconstruction, and presence — for, after all, with every attempt to empty the images, they resurface full of life.

The project comprises the eponymous photographic essay, the photobook (dummy) Ofereço Meu Retrato Como Lembrança (I Offer My Portrait as a Memento), the photo-film Olhe para a Câmera e Sorria (Look at the Camera and Smile), 9 minutes and 37 seconds long, as well as small objects and embroidery.

Medium: digital photography; video from photographs; stitching, embroidery, and crochet on photographic paper; affective objects and mixed materials.