Palimpsesto (Palimpsest) explores the encounter between the intimate and the unknown, taking as its starting point a single photograph retrieved from the Acho archive in Campinas/SP, a collection that houses photos discarded in the trash and salvaged by a group of waste pickers. It is an old, faded photo showing a young girl accompanied by a man and a dog.

We live in an era of massive image production and, as Joan Fontcuberta states in La Furia de Las Imágenes (2020), more important than generating images is to assign meaning and give them new life. In this context, the work weaves an aesthetic and poetic investigation into the anonymous portrait in contemporary photography, focusing on a small part of the photo in question – the girl. The research dwells on the body of the image and the layers behind the photo, exploring elements such as memory, dream, and fabulation. The marks and skins of the body of the image are removed – both materially and literally, as well as imaginatively – while new marks and skins are created. For this purpose, fire, water, and other materials are used, along with cutouts and stitches, in an attempt to answer questions such as: What is a single image capable of? How many layers exist behind an image? How many memories can be found in the body of an image? How many presences, stories, words, and fabulations can an image bring? How many metamorphoses can a single image undergo?

Fontcuberta sees images as living entities, which are born, grow, die, and return to the cycle of life. When I came across the photograph of the girl, her absent eyes – faded by time – pierced me and stirred memories. I wanted to return the image to time, yet we were intertwined: the girl and I. Her eyes fixed on mine; her skin stitched to mine; her silence amalgamated with mine; her story contaminated by mine. A girl I do not know who she was, and who looks frighteningly like me – the same haircut, the same shoes, and the same childhood silence. As I investigate the unknown portrait, I no longer know whether I am researching her story or mine, or whether I am chasing her memories or my own.

Images have this capacity to blow memories out of darkness, and in this sense, the work understands photographs as living, organic bodies that move between temporal latencies and restore disappeared bodies: the bodies that occupy space in the images and the bodies arising from the memories (and new memories) they evoke. Valter Hugo Mãe, Portuguese writer, in the book Contra Mim (2020), says that“life is made of constant resurrections".Through artistic research, I resurrect and construct new memories and meanings for this anonymous portrait, returning it to life, including through sculptures and objects that go beyond the frame of the image – like overflowing memories. The work also employs visual metaphors, such as tree bark and a shell shaped like a butterfly, which evoke photographic paper and the metamorphoses of the image.

Palimpsesto (Palimpsest) began within the scope of two artistic residencies carried out at Acho – archive in Campinas/SP, and unfolds into the essay Retrato de Um Quase e Sempre (Portrait of an Almost and Always),as well as poems, videos, audios, objects, and sculptures.

Medium: digital photography; installation composed of objects and sculptures built with photographs; written and spoken word across multiple video and audio recordings.