Using photography, as visual and critical tools, the project is a self-exploration of family’s experiences in relation to belonging, displacement and memory and the context that triggered them. I’m using found photographs and my family’s photographic archives as mnemonic reminders that activate, imagine and reinvent, individual and collective memory, strengthening the link between present and past. Self-narratives that pose questions anchored in problematics around migration and diaspora. Thus proposing what Abraham (2014) calls an alternative or third space of becoming. […] the unhealable rift forces between the self and its true home (Said 2001)
I
40 years… returning to a space and time! Memories of a physical and psychic rupture. A space familiar…, yet unknown. Nurtured within, it grew to mythical proportions. Qualities that, similar to sailors tales in onboard diaries, augmented as days, weeks, months and years floated by…
II
Echoes of the epic poem, a reference to ‘Os Lusiadas ‘ by Luís Vaz de Camões, XV century Portuguese poet. Recounts of a long sea voyage, when the exhausted lusitanos encounter the pleasant, Ilha dos Amores where they are finally rewarded for their valour and, prophesises are laid by the nymphs on their achievements to come.
III […]
César Santos da Luz 