Carla Cabanas

When Sunday comes,

I wish to do all the finest things a

man can do in his life.

Some people go to the seaside

lie down on the sand and think of nothing…  Others go

to the country filled with bucolic sentiment  because

they read yesterday’s newspaper weather cast:

“Tomorrow will be a fine day”…

But many will be out on the streets begging,

because on that day those who stroll around with

their wives and children  are more generous.

One young man who was a painter

said not a word to anyone and picked

a Sunday to kill himself. (…)

Domingo [Sunday] – Manuel da Fonseca ^[1]

Sundays are paradoxical: days of conviviality and loneliness. Days that are common to all countries, times and families, but sometimes, too, in our heart of hearts, days of a certain interior emptiness. What we remember of the history of each individual and of the collectivity to which they belong takes the form of a construction assembled from deeds, actions and occurrences scattered throughout the days, as well as the small hiatuses we tend to associate with Sundays. 

Moving between two types of memory: personal and collective, accurate and imaginary, Carla Cabanas’ work melancholically constructs itself around time, its passage, and the way it develops concepts of belonging and identity. These factors are not solely linked to the functioning of each work, but relate to the very organics of the discipline, leading the artist to attentively inquire into the origin, workings and perception of photography.  

Cabanas considers the image as both a recording and a tool in a working process, manipulating the concepts of veracity and limit. Thus, operating through various layers and across different fields of action, her works deal with the original events, with the years that pass by them and with the reinvention that the artist carries out,   resulting in a complex entity that acts on the construction and deconstruction of a linear time. Her works interrogate a condition of uncertain memory, where actions and characters reside in a place that dubious and familiar at once and conceive a new, specific and transversal network of relationships. By reinventing the moment and place of things, the artist examines indifference and recognition, establishing a gaze that largely focuses on family issues, domesticity and the idea of everyday life.  

Curiously, even though the works desire the specificity of a moment, they explore a sphere of instability. It would seem that Carla Cabanas wishes to staunch an echo, but her gaze is based on a cinematic quality that both refreshes memory and muddies reality. What she lets us see, or guess, inexplicitly invokes a set of instants that precede a certain occasion. In this manner, by the foundations of an existence that, though specific, may not even configure an action, the moments Cabanas uses in her work develop the feel of a hiatus, excerpt or isolated instant in some Sunday in the world.  

Let us also consider that, while the works deal with an imaginative realm of impermanence and fabulation, the way they structure themselves seeks for a new understanding of the limit, indicating a desire to transcend traditional formats. While, on the one hand, we find at the start the artist in the role of a gleaner (voyeur?) of other people’s lives and stories, picking up old objects and pictures in street markets, something close to an archaeology of memory; on the other, there is a final result that expands the elements beyond the surface, exploring the itinerary and physicality of the still image, bringing it close to sculpture, installation or the moving image. Just look at such series as “What remains of what it was” (2010-2016), “Celtis Australis L.” (2015), “Clouds Game” (2016), “The Mechanics of Absence I and II” (2016-2017), “Eclipse” (2017) or “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping I and II” (2018-2020).

In “What remains of what it was” (2010-2016) the gaze focuses on expressing the physical presence and its disappearance. Training her attention on memory, the individual and the environment, the artist ponders the way these elements interact in the social sphere, or in the process of contacting with the other. The series is divided into several groups, called “Albuns” (Album Cabanas; Album desconhecido, Album arquivado; Album Martim Moniz, Album Francisco Manuel Fialho, Album São Tomé e Príncipe), and a set called Archived Word. In the first three albums, attention is drawn to a group of figures that pose for the camera: there, changing the usual concept of what a portrait is, family memories (personal ones, in “Album Cabanas”) are examined and fabulated upon.  

The making of her works, in which the cuts that line, score and change the surface are highlighted, comprises an action that searches and modifies, recognises and distorts, displays and conceals. In fact, it is not a simple matter of inscribing, since the grooves the artist leaves mark a desire to discover what lies beyond the face, or to encompass what is concealed behind appearances, transforming the image and the very idea of its recording.  

The debris this process leaves behind are seen as part and parcel of the work, questioning it as an object. While that approach can be observed in previous albums (“Album Cabanas”), it is in “Archived Word”, where writing is cut out of old postcards, leaving behind a void, or in “Album Martin Moniz”, in which the images are accompanied by drawn maps and audio recordings, that a process that is more in the nature of an installation, rather than simply sculptural, begins to take form. Actually, this exploration began in 2009, when the artist began developing similar devices for her series “Memory Box”.

We could say, then, that “What remains of what it was” is a series that covers several years and is composed of several parts; it explores the void’s dichotomy, between the manifestation of its presence and the contour of its absence. It is something that emerges out of the scoring of the surface, but also out of the suppression of its matter.  

In “Celtis Australis L” (2015), Carla Cabanas prints a set of old black-and-white portraits, cut in the shape of tree leaves. This work appeared in the context of an action in a space that includes a large specimen of the tree whose scientific name is the work’s title. 

Inside an old abandoned palace, Cabanas’ intervention covers the floor of a small room, where two windows draw our gaze to the outside, where a yard where the aforementioned tree stands can be seen. Our eyes wander between the garden and the empty room, into which leaves are brought, seemingly by the wind, covering the floor and mirroring the decrepitude of the whole. The passing of time is conveyed by the leaves’ caducity, by the condition of the uninhabited building and by the images in the old photographs used in the work. Here, the nostalgic melancholy of fading things is the poetic expression of a detachment that characterises both the work and its surroundings.  

Thus, by exploring a notion of continuity and immersion, whereby the intervention is associated with the exhibition space, the work is characterised by an intimate dialogue with the context that surrounds it (a temporary intervention in a ruined space) and with its qualities as an installation. Conceived as a whole, the relationship between the image, its support and the room gives form to a creation that defines connections, suggests atmospheres and, once again, leads the viewer to a new understanding of the body and of the performance of photography. 

In “Clouds Game” (2016) Cabanas continues her three-dimensional exploration of the image by creating a set of triangular light-boxes, in which several photographs of clouds printed on glass are displayed. The displacement suggested by the pictures occurs when we move around them: the collodion-fixed images arrange themselves obliquely, making it impossible to have a frontal view of them. Therefore, while on the one hand these elements carry in themselves the implications of an ancient form of recording images, on the other what is depicted here shows a desire for motion that is corroborated by the viewer’s diagonal gaze. The whole alludes to a fleeting time, somewhere between the photograph in the past, the present gaze and the imaginary possibility of a dissipation in the future. Once again, in terms both physical and imagistic, the pieces allude to the desire to preserve a moment, to the fugacity of things and to the viewer’s role. 

Two series, “The Mechanics of Absence I and II” (2016 – 2017) and “Eclipse” (2017), can be read together as processes that explore the ability to reveal, construct and conceal images, invoking in the twilight the empathetic outlines of memory.  

The first intervention (“The Mechanics of Absence I”) combines the projection of a number of slides with a helicoidal itinerary, where every stop and start of the viewer is carefully synchronised with the nature of the images, marking the place, the length and the cadence of each projection. To this dialogue is added the viewer’s shadow, which, considered as another element in the composition, is projected across the cut-out voids, the figures and places on display. Cabanas cuts and overlaps slides, creating complex entities that combine a variety of absences and references. The noise of the slide projectors, or perhaps the noise’s ability to carry us to the atmosphere of family evenings in the past, and the palimpsest of memories generated by the images and shadows favour the construction of a dense and layered gaze, associated with an emotional time or with a duration that does not follow the precepts of reason.

While the density of “The Mechanics of Absence I” is associated with a feeling of compression, making Cabanas aggregate several films and cut-outs as a single surface (in the frames and on the walls), the density of “The Mechanics of Absence II”, still psychological in nature, comes out of the way the images are spread across a variety of supports. In other words: enveloped in twilight and deprived of the cut-out’s light, the figures multiply, intersect and dissolve themselves into various distances that now disengage them from the wall’s plane.  

Actually, each image occupies a set of semi-transparent veils that both fix and free its contours, thus unfolding its presence across the space. Here, repetition acts as an echo that measures a number of different sizes and foci, bringing this series close to the organics of the moving image. Not because it is possible to discern in it the cadence of a possible narration, but rather because the sequence of events, or the way everything appears, disappears and overlaps, is closer to the synapses that shape memory than to the narrative structure of a film. This means that the whole series is read kinetically, not cinematically, since the apprehension of the work is dependent in whether the viewer can find their path in a labyrinth of unexpected encounters, without the guidance of a script or a pre-defined itinerary. In actual fact, if there was place for a film camera here, it would be inside the viewer, connecting images in accordance with the impulses of the will, rather than the logic of reason. 

Originally shown together with “The Mechanics of Absence II”, “Eclipse” is a group of works that once again brings into question, in a different manner, the nature of what is seen and our way of looking at it. In this series, a set of objects akin to light-boxes introvert the images, turning them inwards.   

Each box comprises an elaborate light-reflection system that conceals and discloses the photographic prints. The images are displayed symmetrically, as though reflected in a mirror, marking the passage into an inverted world, or into the fabulation of another reality. Opaque and silent on the outside, but brilliant and alive inside, these structures are close to the imaginative realm of the magic mirror, or of Lewis Carroll’s deep well, here in a horizontal setting. Performing as thick, intriguing black mirrors, where reflections eschew conventional behaviour, developing instead within a mysterious dark surface, the works host figures that conceal themselves and interpellate us. Arranged at eye level, all of them invite a skimming, sideways view that excites the viewers’ curiosity, putting them in the position of voyeurs before something that appears to belong to the past. It would seem that if the black mirror is something used to examine clear visions of the future (scrying), the pieces in this series are devices that search for lost memories of the past.

In “Eclipse”, going against the approach in “The Mechanics of Absence I” and “The Mechanics of Absence II”, the artist does not employ the usual slides, arranged in serial supports, but their digitalised enlargements, which become singular objects. Similarly, the images no longer remake and contract themselves inside a frame, nor do they expand across the available space; instead, they are illusorily projected into the wall. 

The slides Cabanas uses depict the same families over several years. This characteristic induces recognition and recurrence by allowing us to, again and again, come across people, places and situations that become partially familiar to us. On the other hand, the type of images she employs, taken from the aforementioned family, domestic and everyday worlds, lead us to, as was also the case with previous works, envisage them as parallel to events in our own lives (Sundays are the same all over the world).

Finally, in “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping I and II” (2018-2020)” Cabanas works on original colour photographs, small and personal in nature, taken from albums and the walls of family homes. Her approach consists in carving a drawing into them, thus revealing the white paper underneath the glossy surface in the form of patterns, patches and loose lines. While, on the one hand, we see that the cuts reduce the image, thus extending a previously explored approach, on the other we observe that the artist reinvents these procedures by adding new layers and types of information to them. 

Through these series, characterised by a logic of juxtaposition and by the interaction of figures and background, run a number of possible narrative lines that do not actually narrate an event. This is a proximity exercise in which the artist lets herself experience other times, places and individuals, while now and then shrewdly and sarcastically attaching references of a personal order to them. By changing the moment in which the original photograph was taken and thus moving it from the past to the present and from the present to the past, Cabanas turns her pieces into devices that kaleidoscopically interweave a number of different experiences.   

“I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping I” is a project that began in 2018, during an artistic residency in Berlin. Its starting-point was a long spell of insomnia that affected the artist. Here, all the vocabulary Cabanas has used over time to redefine the image, in such series as “What remains of what it was”, is given a new sheen. The action is no longer solely defined by pre-existent references, like when it created a camouflage design from a plant’s leaves or from the pattern in a fabric depicted in the image (for instance); nor it is limited to the literal elimination of the figure, whose contour is still recognisable here. In fact, the lines and patches the artist inscribes (and eliminates) are indicative of entities that interact in a different way. 

In “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping II” Carla Cabanas revises the cutting of the surface and the type of support by gluing the photograph onto a rigid, painted base, thus reducing instability and turning the image into an object. The drawings now have a new stratum, composed of thin, malleable gold leaves that, in ways similar to an ancient Japanese technique for repairing porcelain (Kintsugi), connect the various parts, in a celebration of scars, as well as of the imperfection and transformation of things. Thus, in the artist’s work the connection between different times, places, stories and affections is also operated by the gold leaf, which asserts a desire to accept, operate and praise difference, imperfection and vulnerability.  

We can, then, say that the place of these works is the creation of connections, where the fragment is used to turn the image into a map of emotions. A place where histories and stories stratify, in an incantatory joint existence.  

The fabulative quality of Carla Cabanas’ work supports her reinvention of photography. Acting directly upon the images by means of collage or drawing, in an approach that has much in common with sculpture, installation and the moving image,  her imagination develops through the dynamics between memory and the recognition  of different times and places; the place of the images, the place of the intervention and the place of perception. It could be said, first and foremost, that the gaze of the artist romanticises the nostalgia of a past moment that might actually never have occurred. Like, perhaps, the vague notion of a distant Sunday that manifests as fantasy. 

Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues

[1] Fonseca, Manuel da, “Domingo”, Rosa dos Ventos, author’s edition, 1953, Lisbon.