Fontainebleau, a small town in France, composes the atmosphere inspiring the first lines of the story of this book in early 2018. Silent days, either blue or gray, in a place where instants did not compete to end. Seemingly suspended, the time in Fontainebleau made visual artist Juliana Arruda immerse in the aura of childhood, promoting a reunion with expressions of ‘times when life passed slowly.’

Such inspiration created luminous and dense photographs, delicate and often spectral masses, in nearly similar duplicates. Photographs, almost tactile, genesis of images, emerged as skins of the photos, ripped from the deep and obscure images of memory. Surfaces, sometimes opaque and fragile, sometimes rough and resistant, appearing in a mix of senses, emotions, desires and interjections.

Words like poems enriche the photographs and spread in successive lines. Words lying at the edge of the pages, poetic notations on which the images rest, become an invitation for an abyssal perspective.

In a lyrical disorder, images and words are enhanced by calm and tender textures, taking readers of this photobook to times of sweetness, resistance, absence, and scars.

It’s an invitation to forget about where we are now and (de)populate labyrinths and other skins between threads that weave small repairs of losses. Second Skin , as a combination of photographs and poems, is able to renew stories and genealogies as revelations about times and minimal existences. It is a long look that nurtures the poetry of silence as a gesture vibrating against the numbness of senses.

Fabiana Bruno