My father went to the missions in Mato Grosso during the 60s and began to photograph and organize an archive. My mother started to photograph and elaborate the family album just when I was born. For us, photography has been a necessary ritual to integrate fundamental life experiences. But my sister and I have actually learnt all about rituals from the stories from Bororos, Karajás and Xavantes that my father used to tell us. is project is a new montage on my family’s memory pondering the possibility that a systematically silenced culture is a fundamental part of my own, exploring patterns and moments which are feared and repressed.

Ever since my father’s death, when I was still a child, that world has frozen into an unreachable place, existing only as a lost paradise. In this essay, past makes sense only retrospectively by splicing together the two worlds that were all I knew during a crucial period in my life. Reorganized here, they reveal the Oedipal challenges of a hidden narrative and allow me to accept the foundations of my own personality.

The discarded material in the construction of this first history reveals social and collective aspects which are absent and incompatible with the imaginary unfolded in the first album intervention: the systematic acculturation carried out by the Church from which my father was a participant and which remains are still hanging in our family home: bows and arrows, feathers and ornaments that, after having been fundamental tools for social integration (just as photography is) have finally become decorative objects.

Searching for the origin is always unsuccessful. It often revolves around the myth of paradise, a place of immortality and communication between sky and earth where we live in a state of freedom, spontaneity and friendship. This state of grace is also identified with childhood during which the separation between the self and the world has not yet been completed. That kind of nostalgia implies a confrontation between a regressive fantasies of totality and the analytical will to recognize difference and incoherence as foundations of experience and the encounter with otherness.

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LINK

Raquel Bravo Iglesias (website)