In recent years I have often observed research and projects that regenerate photographic archives or family albums. Since its beginnings, photography has shown its full potential in faithfully reproducing reality, and therefore in placing itself better than painting as a suitable tool for memory conservation. The technological development accompanied by economic accessibility has allowed a wide diffusion of this medium and huge decentralized production of photographs. It has been said: there is no place in the world that has not been photographed. I don't think it's true, and in any case, the way we photograph will always make a difference, at least for ourselves. Whatever people may say, reviewing old images often lead to emotional impacts, if not even cathartic. This also happens when we find ourselves in pictures taken by others. There is a latent need to see us again, in some way to shorten or to oppose the linear dimension of time. This last argument is essential to understand that the environment forms us, and shapes our consciousness. So it is enough for us to recognize the environment to find parts of who we have been. What matters at times is to find ourselves in the past, to recover thoughts, appearances, beliefs, feelings. Without disturbing the definition of Plato's remembrance, and therefore the fact that images can contain something that precedes our life, we cannot deny that photography catalyzes inner processes of great importance when it touches and activates our memory.
The series 'Berocoan' by Raquel Bravo Iglesias, which is built from a family archive, has pushed me to write this article, maybe in the attempt to bring order to my thoughts. The series mostly depicts scenes from a past father and son' relationship. These memories are set in Mato Grosso, a once intact region, synonymous with nature, pristine forest, tribes and ancient languages. The terms "Mato Grosso" mean precisely dense jungle. As we know, all this is gone, it has been mostly removed, people have been converted to progress, to a sedentary life, to agroindustrial dominance, to private property, to the globalist regime, to consumerist wishes. The American dream or nightmare has replaced and perpetuated the European colonial inheritance by other means. It has violated and invaded new lands like cancer devouring the world voraciously. And nothing seems to quench its insatiable and greedy reproduction anxiety.
© Raquel Bravo Iglesias from the series 'Berocoan'
The geography here is not only a choreographic background of memory but is intertwined with the tacit intention of questioning not so much what time is, but who is time. History and time intertwine in the memory, as the being (we are now) and not being (we have been) almost identify. It is of little importance then that memory is a stratification of more or less partial perceptions, it is in the possibility of remembering that self-consciousness is rooted. By removing the history or trivializing it, or by eliminating its importance it is possible to construct an atomized society of stateless individuals that fluctuates in an eternal and nihilistic present. So the exercise of memory and its functional deconstruction helps us both in a learning process and in awareness-raising. Memory is actually useful for the protection of man. The absence of memory makes the world invisible or rather unknown. At the time of the technological catechism that makes us slaves of instantaneous and transient pleasures, memory is increasingly left to the machines, messily shared between profiles, personal pages, forgotten clouds. We are witnessing the transition from the faculty to the capacity of memorizing. As trapezists suspended in the void, we are confident of holding on to the future yet unaware of the consequences of a fatal change.
A sense of impossibility, of renunciation, lifts in the human spirit. I remember a conversation by Dieter Debruyne with artist Elsa Leydier who was confronted with the immense territorial destruction promoted by the 2014 Rio Olympics. Yet another opportunity to violate the land and human rights, to destabilize the precarious conditions and extreme contradictions recorded in the city. The usual colossal film that fills the box office of the elite, and leaves behind a trail of misery. So wrote us Leydier: «there was a building called Antigo Museu do Índio. It was one of the country's very few places dedicated to indigenous culture and had been occupied for years by different Indian communities. However, the Indians were violently removed from the museum by the military police in March 2013. It was done to make way for a complex of restaurants, parking lots and stores filled with products related to the 2014 World Cup.» This story was the point of departure for her work, for which she combined through collage two different types of images. Postcards featuring Brazilian Indians from different ethnicities that were hugely edited in the '70s and '80s, overlapped by World Cup stamps released by the Brazilian Post Office and quickly sold out.
© Elsa Leydier from the series 'Esgotados'
Photography has the advantage of making memory visible. Photography allows people to freeze time. Today we tend to forget it, taken by a thousand options and the possibility of modifying reality at will. Today's horizon is traced by a finger. Yet the great gift of photography is to help us remember. And the memory has a value for the individual, for the community, for history, for society. With it, we can then interact. We can interpret, integrate, add, modify, discover, and much more. It is up to us to create interpretations or further levels of meaning. Images acquire significance over time. Think of urban photography that attests the development and changes of the cities, the ethnographic one which documents and historicizes social behavior, habits, customs, rituals. Photography can also serve the environment. Thanks to satellite photography geographers, scholars, and experts monitor environmental changes and impacts.
Steve Bisson, satellite view, repertoire Amazon
Raquel's work raises the inconvenient environmental and humanitarian issue of the Amazon rainforest. I say uncomfortable because humans are proving unable to defend and protect the most important planetary ecosystem. To most people the immeasurable damage is evident and yet we have not been able to prevent the mineralization of the forest with the construction of roads, the deportation and the genocide of the native tribes, not to mention the leveling of biodiversity. The story of Chico Mendes, one of the most important trade union leaders and environmentalists of Brazil, murdered in his home in Xapuri, Acre, often leads me to reflect with a mixture of feelings about the fate of humanity. For this reason, together with the author Henriique Oliveira, we began research aimed at enhancing the memory of this man, who represented and can still represent a bastion of resistance to resignation. I want to convince myself that the generations to come will be able to find the right path, thanks to these references, and to lead coexistence towards values different from the masochistic and selfish ones on which our times rest.
Chico Mendes at his house in Xapuri, Acre, Brazil.
Today photography can translate into a pretext to restore an ethical dimension in human relations. Photography should not be thought of as an end, as a result at all costs, as a shelf product. Photography is before anything else a means that if used wisely helps us to remember. The production of images now often reduced to a fetishistic act can become an ethical gesture. Therefore, it's important to produce images with greater awareness of the future, and not only for the purpose of immediate satisfaction in everyday life. This way we have a chance to overcome the rampant nihilism, and our disappearance. The technique and the machines must remain at our service, otherwise, we will be increasingly less indispensable to nature, which will certainly take its place again sooner or later. Sometimes I try to think about how a native of the forest feels when forced to completely alien life. In total disharmony with nature. I believe he feels like a stranger to his own homeland. What is happening in the Amazon rainforest should make us think of this. Man is denying his memory and by doing so he will feel more and more extraneous to this world.
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LINKS
Raquel Bravo Iglesias
Elsa Leydier
Documentary Chico Mendes: eu quero viver (1989) by Adrian Cowell
IEA - Instituto de Estudos Amazonicos
Henriique
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