'As nossas imagens' Turns the Family Album Into a Disputed Archive
Origins
The curatorial project As nossas imagens, conceived by Rodrigo Lopes at Paço das Artes, begins with a deceptively familiar object: the family album. In ordinary language, the album is often treated as a private container of affection, descent, and domestic continuity. Lopes shifts that frame by proposing the album as an "arquivo branco," or white archive, a structure of memory that in Brazil is inseparable from colonial trauma, racial hierarchy, and the unequal right to appear, be preserved, and be narrated. Rather than treating family photographs as neutral documents, the exhibition asks what kinds of lives were historically admitted into the archive, which presences were erased or staged by violence, and how contemporary artists can reopen those images without surrendering them to nostalgia. See also Cordel Does Not Fit in Drawers: Marina Nabuco on the Living Archive of Instituto Brincante.
The exhibition brings together Anderson Feliciano, Eliana Amorim, Pedra Silva, and Val Souza across installation, collage, videoperformance, and photography. That range matters because the project does not present the album as a fixed format. It treats the album as a method, a field where intimate images become evidence of broader social and historical structures. In this movement from the domestic to the public, personal memory becomes inseparable from the formation of Brazil itself. The family photograph may promise recognition, but it also carries exclusions: who had access to portraiture, whose kinship was recorded, whose image was archived as affection, and whose body was captured by colonial and racial systems as object, labor, or absence. See also Alice Dote and the Intimate Politics of Looking.
Public collections
Eliana Amorim's Reintegracao de leite (serie Reintegracao de afeto), from 2019, makes that tension especially visible. The image works through the language of old portraiture while interrupting it with a contemporary act of repair. Figures associated with family memory appear against a composed field of patterned forms, turning the photograph into a site of reconstruction rather than passive remembrance. Pedra Silva's image, staged around bathing, care, and bodily presence, approaches the archive through another register: the everyday body as a bearer of histories that are intimate, racialized, and political at once. A third family-album image, with its crowded birthday scene, insists on the collective dimension of memory. Celebration, childhood, domestic abundance, and photographic wear become part of a larger visual argument about how Black and Brazilian family images preserve forms of relation that official archives often failed to honor.
The conversation held at Paço das Artes on August 9 at 4 p.m., with Rodrigo Lopes and artists Anderson Feliciano, Eliana Amorim, and Pedra Silva, extended the exhibition's central question into spoken reflection on visual poetics. For CASCA Archive, As nossas imagens is important precisely because it refuses to separate aesthetics from the politics of memory. Its works do not simply illustrate the past; they test the album as a contested technology of visibility. By moving through collage, installation, videoperformance, and photography, the project expands the family image into a critical language for Brazil's colonial afterlives. The album becomes less a sealed private object than a place where affection, absence, race, and historical repair meet.
