During the Walk & Talk Festival artistic residency, in 2016, Carla Cabanas had the opportunity to access part of the photography archive from the Instituto Cultural de Ponta Delgada. This archive contains a peculiar collection from the first half of the 20th century, consisting of photographs of photographs, depicting portraits and landscapes, scenes from the daily life, domestic interiors and aspects of labour. These images result from the act of photographing a photography, a common practice in those days that served several purposes, namely to do photo montages, duplications and enlargements, or simply to preserve the matrix.
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This urge to preserve the image prompted the project
The Matrix and the Interval, a look towards the history of the photographic practice and the medium specificities.
We see in these images what we suspect to be photographs and postcards, mounted with pushpins and nails on improvised structures, all set to be photographed again.
We see in these images the act of taking a picture, freed from the constraints of the referent but obsessed with itself and with the possibility of its repetition.
Cabanas reclaims and continues the act of reproducing the photography, using as a starting point the digitized glass plates from the archive. Remaining in the new images, the improvised backgrounds in real size – pieces of wood, furniture, newspaper sheets or cloth – that the original photographer would, perhaps, discard from his compositions.