The work was born in the rural environment of northern Portugal, where the strong depopulation that the country suffers is palpable, in addition to the feeling of abandonment that permeates the area.
The face is traditionally considered one of the most effective visual links to an individual’s memory. The face has a notion of extraordinary complexity that, over time, has had different plastic expressions.
The portraits, hung around the city in a propagandistic manner, announcing the death of some of the inhabitants, making them recognizable, show an identity that coincides with the physiognomy of the person portrayed. However, their use and social dissemination make them an artifact that, in addition to representation, seems to show the new “forgetting” of a story and identity: and with that, a new house in the process of abandonment.
Through a methodology that oscillates between site-specific and a performative gesture, the project shown here originates. During a process of documenting those portraits, hanging them around the city, until their relocation in the houses that, during my stay, I could see how empty they were, a work that frames itself in all of my previous works was articulated, where the memory, oblivion, identity and death hang by a thread in their purest and most human conception.