Expériences
Creative experiments
Artistic experiments and creative explorations.
Since earning my university degree in Film Studies, and during my studies, I have been experimenting with photography, video, and writing. Over the years, I have accumulated these experiences, which I wish to share here.
From the beginning, it’s important to highlight my deep interest in old personal archival photographs of my family. However, I don’t remain confined to this (almost) obsession. My creative explorations reach beyond, striving to answer a quiet, persistent need that stirs within me every day.
Quand les navires ni partent ni arrivent
Video, 2020, 9 minutes.
Based on an excerpt from a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a Brazilian poet, I journey through my family’s personal archives.
In an attempt to fill the gap left by the absence of family stories, I seek to uncover narratives that have been forgotten. My grandparents’ traveling amusement park serves as the starting point for this exploration. Here, I pursue these archives to create a video in which I bring together recovered fragments.
The journeys I undertake form a quest to find stories for what has no known history. I gather fragments—video, audio, photography, and text—within my reach and dive into oblivion. Like waves drifting almost aimlessly, I follow this personal path while trying to escape this endless search.
Summer 83
Video, 2019, 1'09''
Untitled
Video, 2020, 2'08''
Inspired by old family photographs, I explored the world of gouache.
Between here and there
Photographic series
My deep curiosity for old family photographs is partly linked to the unknown faces mingling with the familiar ones — a meeting that happens inside the old biscuit tin where these photos are kept. While selecting the images, I realize that my family, the one I know, is the most present. When I look at an old family photograph, like one of my grandparents for example, it doesn’t necessarily mean I feel close to them. It is the overlay of these old family photos with my recent photographs that brings me closer to these people, known and unknown: I imagine my grandparents strolling through Paris beside me; I see my uncles and cousins playing on a beach that suddenly appears in the heart of the French capital; I see my mother in a bikini, even though it’s winter, because she longs for warmth; I observe my grandmother, elegant and serious; and strangers from Brazil, nameless, gaze back at me, just like the passersby I meet in Montmartre.
I believe the creative process for this work began long before I even realized it. My curiosity for old family photographs and my interest in the people appearing in them go far back, and somehow it pushed me to find ways to express myself artistically. After some experimentation, layering was the technique that caught my attention the most, and it’s the method I use in my project 'Between Here and There.' The works of 'Between Here and There' are my dreams—that’s the definition that fits best. They are my dreams, mixed, chaotic, and confused. In a way, they are a reflection of my own confusion.
Untitled
Photographic collage
Reflecting on narratives and journeys, I experimented with a new creation inspired by the idea of making a film that doesn’t exist. I tried to create a kind of layering that looks more like a collage. Using a photograph I took, I inserted two old family photos to create a new context. I decided to add subtitles to try to produce the frame of a film. The images of my present meeting the old archives create a possible crossfade. It is in this search for narrative that these images seem to compose a script not yet written, yet existing through the relationships between the images. I therefore attempted to visually and materially create something that could resemble this.
What Lies Behind: The Play of Narratives
Photographic montage
I think of a family photograph. I recognize my mother; I see her in the image I hold in my hands. She is at the beach in a town I don’t know, but about which I have heard so many stories. My mother is depicted, right before my eyes, yet the photograph also evokes the image of this town that I build in my imagination. Does the photographic image play a double game?
From this rather simple reflection, I move into action. I gather a few photographs. In this double play of 'showing and evoking,' I selected fragments from several photographs and combined them. Each fragment shows a piece of photographs that have no connection to each other. Their new association evokes a narrative that was never given before. The combination of scattered and reinterpreted photographs makes this double play possible. I try to evoke a story with these images which, originally, have nothing to do with one another.
I also think of cinema—an art that presents the relationships between different sequences of images and evokes a narrative in the viewer. One could also say that the double play here lies in the tangible representation of the photograph and the mental one that takes place in each person's imagination.
The connections between these diverse fragments form unconsciously in the viewer’s mind, and the double play is constructed through these previously nonexistent links. By changing the order of the sequences, or the arrangement of fragments within the same sequence, we can evoke new narratives in the viewer, thus recreating the double play once again.
Fragments of Movement
An album of imaginary Polaroids through Google Street View, 2021
I decided to take an emotional journey and create a series of photographs from found (or refound) fragments.
But which fragments?
It’s been over four years since I last lived in Brazil. Before changing continents, I moved several times within the same country. With an imaginary Polaroid in hand, I set off on a journey through Street View, intending to rediscover what is — or once was — familiar to me.
For each city, two clicks at most, two photos, two memories preserved.
In the bumpy streets of my hometown, I pass through places I vaguely remember. I recall details: the potholes, the red earth, a city neglected but where I found much care in a small house with a mango tree in the backyard.
At my grandparents’ house in Ourinhos, in São Paulo state, with filled cookies hidden at the back of the kitchen cupboard, I decided to take the train because Ourinhos only reminds me of the house with the tree out front. Halfway there, a group of children ready to fly a kite — just like I used to do with my cousin — stared at me. I asked if I could photograph them. After the click, I asked questions about the train: where could I catch it?
Was the old train still there, full of goods or of people wanting to escape from there?
Ourinhos-SP, October 2021
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543 R. João Jorge Neder
Ourinhos, São Paulo
Street View - juillet de 2015
