IT WAS A LIE (ERA MENTIRA)

Era mentira (it was a lie) raises a reflection on the moldability of memory and how we interpret the memories lived or recounted to generate new stories from a personal fiction.

PROJECT MEMORY The project starts when I found an old 8mm tape at my parents’ house and digitized it. I then rediscover a film in which my mother collaborated when I was twenty years old. I capture some frames of the making-of and freeze it on them. The project speaks of losses: the loss of image quality, the loss of my mother. Losses and fragments of his memory and mine.

After finding the old tape, I began to investigate my father’s photographic archive, discovering negatives that were never developed. I come across images of my mother from before I was born and I come across a stranger. Thus I begin to build his character from an alien, foreign look. In this way, I design my own scenario, fictionalizing a spatio-temporal rupture based on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which stated that apparently incompatible spaces in time could be juxtaposed in the same real space.

From the discrepancies between the veracity of the images found and my memories, a re-elaboration of meanings begins where the fantasies of my memory and their representations in the family album begin to unravel.

In the project I combine the photographs from my father’s archive with my own images, taken today of the few objects I have left of my mother: a jewelry box and an old box of photos. Thus, a dialogue between the past and the present is produced; photography makes my mother and I together again in the same time and space. I try to reflect how the construction of memories and memories involves a changing itinerary full of intricacies.

The numbers that appear recurringly on some pages of the photobook are the days that she has been gone. These days are written down by my father in some notebooks that he has been writing to my mother since the day she died.

I would like to be able to promote my project with an exhibition complemented by a photobook of which I have designed the model and can be seen in the following link:

VÍDEO OF THE BOOK LINK