In Álbum de família, Carla Cabanas deviates from her previous works, not elaborating on the performance of the person posing, the gaze of the person capturing it, the plot of a tale of intermittences, its recollection through different eyes, which make the family photograph album a deposit of obscure glimpses and vague murmurs, of fictions on fictions, a fragmented and improbable resonance.

Adopting part of the title from Jorge Luis Borges’ The book of imaginary beings, Seres imaginários, by Carla Cabanas (1979, Lisbon), is an exhibition-installation that opens the doors, on the one hand, to the private world of the artist’s memories and, on the other hand, to a speculative space of what (the constructions of) those memories might be.

With a scrutinizing gaze and a diffuse memory, Cabanas dwells upon the construction of an image, attentive to what belongs to it and to what one fantasizes. Pursuing ideas of fabulation and reminiscence, the artist creates an apparatus that exhibits and invokes vaguely recognizable moments.

Carla Cabanas explores themes related with the archive, memory, absence and effacement, using as source material photos from her own family albuns, others rescued from flea markets or found in archives.

It is hard to think that after we die someone might find our image, printed on photographic paper, in the flee market. That it might find its way here, to this gallery, in the hands of an artist. It is the inescapable logic of reproduction.

Cosmological reflexivity, which begins with pre-Socratic philosophers, places man, for the first time, in an investigative relationship with the world, giving a fundamental role to natural elements (water, air, indefinable matter).

Carla Cabanas’ work focuses on reinterpreting time and memory, through an idea of loss and saturation. Changing a set of slides, the artist modifies the story that each image retains, transforming, with that action, what was the registration of the suspended instant, or the crystallization of a special moment, in a living, indefined and fabled time.

Archived Word developed from a set of early 20th century postcards belonging to Carla Cabanas’ own private collection, and some others belonging to Eduardo Portugal’s – collection of Lisbon City Archive – Photography.

This album would resume the questioning the artist had been developing in previous work, namely identity loss and the role of time in failing memory. This new work, nevertheless, would reflect an aspect that had not been yet explored: memory of place.

Lúcia Marques (LM): This project came about with the chance of doing a residency in S. Tomé. What ideas did you take there with you? Carla Cabanas (CC): I wanted to keep dealing with the issues of Time and Memory and working on representations of a given space.

In a cold sunny Saturday I went to the studio where Carla Cabanas was finishing her pieces that are now being presented at Sala do Veado and collected in this catalogue. Before I describe to you the reason why I was fifteen minutes late that day, let us stop for a while to consider this object that holds this text and the images I am trying to respond.

What remains of who Isu was? Almost nothing. For those who care about this kind of things, he was king of the eight dynasty – of the Egytian empire’s 31 dynasties – in a time of crisis, over four thousand one hundred years ago.

Photography has never abandoned its historical relationship with the portrait. The scientific condition in dealing with reality – optically, chemically, mechanically apart – has eliminated error, so says convention, from human interpretation.

Roland Barthes wrote La Chambre Claire out of his need to explain and discuss on the emotional effect some photographs have on their “spectator”. At the time, his mother had passed away and he carried with him a photo of his childhood. He distinguished between objective or external reading and, on the other hand, an internal reading: more emotive, from the detail and inexplicable.

On the sum and its parts #1. When the memory of a space is summoned to become description, all senses overlap: smells, feelings, distances, objects, people…the memory of a place is the memory of a stage and of the play we have acted there.