Chão de Histórias

Chão de Histórias explores memory, ancestry, and belonging in Brazil's sertão, weaving family archives, landscape, and material interventions into a visual narrative where human histories and the land become inseparable.

CHÃO DE HISTÓRIAS

Chão de Histórias (Ground of Stories) is an ongoing exploration of memory, ancestry, and belonging, rooted in my reconnection with my paternal family's history in the Brazilian sertão, a semi-arid region in the country's Northeast. What began as a personal search for traces of my family's past has evolved into a broader investigation of how histories inhabit places, bodies, and materials—and how photography can give form to what time has obscured.

The project unfolds through three interconnected visual approaches, each exploring a different dimension of the same question: how do we reconstruct a sense of belonging from fragments of what remains?

In Dobra do Tempo (Fold of Time), family archives are brought into dialogue with contemporary photographs of the sertão through physical collage and Renaissance lace, a traditional craft deeply connected to the region. Images from different generations and temporalities coexist, suggesting that memory is neither linear nor fixed, but continually woven and reconfigured.

In Encontro (Encounter), old family portraits are partially obscured by images of cracked clay surfaces that I created in my studio. The fissures evoke both the arid landscape and the vulnerability of the human body. Rather than erasing the identities of those portrayed, these interventions question what remains visible, what disappears, and what can still be transmitted across generations.

In Álbum de Família (Family Album), native species of the Caatinga are photographed and presented as ancestral portraits. By placing plants within the visual conventions of a family album, I extend the notion of kinship beyond human lineage, acknowledging the landscape itself as a bearer of memory and identity.

These approaches are not separate narratives, but different expressions of a shared inquiry. Archival photographs, living vegetation, lace, clay, and fractured earth become interconnected forms of testimony. The human body and the landscape mirror one another: both bear marks of time, both preserve traces of absence, and both resist disappearance.

Moving between inherited images and newly created ones, Chão de Histórias challenges photography's conventional relationship with preservation. Rather than attempting to recover an intact past, the work embraces memory as an act of transformation—one that is shaped as much by what is missing as by what survives.

Ultimately, the project proposes that belonging is not simply inherited. It is continually reconstructed through our encounters with the places, materials, and histories that precede us. The ground, too, has skin. And within its fractures, stories remain.