The need to say the impossibility of naming

The work begins with an investigation into memory, belonging, and identity.

The work begins with an investigation into memory, belonging, and identity. Through photography, I seek to understand my relationship with my father’s family, a lineage shaped by Italian migration to the coffee plantations of the countryside of São Paulo and Minas Gerais.

Among the fragments that remain of this history, two central figures emerge: my grandmother Maria and my aunt Lurdes—women I never knew, yet whose presence constitutes me. For years, their images were denied to me; after my grandmother’s death, the family archive was kept by the eldest daughters. Only in adulthood, when visiting these aunts, was I finally able to see a photograph of the woman people had always said I resembled.

The project is structured around this gesture of reunion. I use alternative photographic techniques—cyanotype, anthotype, and lumen print—alongside manual processes such as sewing, embroidery, and collage, reprinting, erasing, and recomposing the inherited images. Each intervention is an attempt at closeness: repetition becomes a form of contact with what was absent from me.

The resulting images move between birth and mourning, between memory and absence. They form an expanded archive in which photographic matter is also body, matter, and time. These interventions do not seek to restore the past, but to tension its gaps—to recognize, within the image, the place where memory and forgetting meet. In this movement, I realize: I am not only searching for them; I am searching for myself.