Navigators of the Landscape

Navegantes da Paisagem investigates memory, belonging, and identity through family photographs.

I revisit inherited images through manual interventions—such as embroidery, stitching, and collage—transforming them into surfaces for inscribing the present.

Photography acts as a mediator between document and imagination, stretching time and reopening histories. By manipulating these images, I reconstruct bonds, work through absences, and create new narrative possibilities. Stitching, beyond a technical procedure, operates as a metaphor for repair.

Understanding the family implies a double movement: recognizing oneself as part of a collective while simultaneously shaping one’s own individuality. In this process, memory is constructed as a form of autofiction—a rewriting of the self in the present.

Faced with the gaps in the archive, imagination assumes the gesture of stitching what is missing. The photographs cease to be mere records of the past and become living matter, capable of generating new meanings and experiences. Each work brings past and present closer together, displacing the image from its documentary function and turning it into a sensorial experience.

The work is organized as a non-linear visual narrative, in which memories, absences, and fabulations intertwine. The project materializes as a series of works that form an expanded affective archive, in a permanent process of reconstructing memory.