Portrait nominee

Strongly rooted in the collective memory of the Alentejo people ( south of Portugal) as a work song, some musicologists attribute its origin to the Gregorian chant of Arab culture, while others give it more ancestral aspects, placing their roots in the pre-Roman period. Polyphonic choral song, the "Cante Alentejano" accompanied men and women who worked the fields manually, as well as in party environments. This informal form of "Cante" manifestation has gradually been lost in time with the arrival of agricultural industrialization in the late 19th century in Portugal. In this way, the informal "Cante" started to take place almost exclusively in taverns - a place closed to women, and where men meet to socialize while drinking wine. (Inevitably, the informal "Cante" for women has lost strength over time.) In 1926 the first choral group of "Cante" is officially created, and with that the proliferation of choral groups begins, which confers to this manifestation of Intangible Cultural Heritage a formal character. With the rural exodus of the younger generations and their consequent disinterest in this tradition, and with the closure of many places where this informal form of "Cante" manifested, will we soon be facing an archaeological collective memory?

Always having as a background the portrait and representation of the body through photography, my interest, and consequent research, is based on concepts of Identity, collective memory and Cultural Heritage, whether material or immaterial. How these three concepts can be interrelated, and how they are subject and susceptible to the increasingly dizzying changes and tensions that globalization and technological advances impose and continue to impose on them. In 2019 I started the materialization of portrait work bodies that can help a reflection on these themes. Born in 1977, I graduated in Photography from IADE (Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication) in 1999, and since then I have been collaborating with the Portuguese press as a free-lancer photographer, making almost exclusively portrait. Over these years I have also collaborated with Angolan, Brazilian and German publications. In 2003 I enrolled in the Anthropology course at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in an attempt to more consistently support the crossing of the two disciplines. In 2019 I studied “Aesthetics” and “History of contemporary art” at the National Society of Fine Arts, in Lisbon, where I am currently studying “Visual Culture and Image Theory”.