Memories from a Travel Album
Amanda Coimbra

In the last ´aceNITE of 2016, we had the pleasure of presenting the book by the Brazilian artist Amanda Coimbra, Memory of a Travel Album, artist selected through the Semillero 2016 open call.

The book is composed of photographs of the artist’s family album that was modified by a flood in her father’s apartment. Through the book, Coimbra creates a reinterpretation of the album, working with images that are no longer a record but a representation of the fragile and complex relationship between photography and memory. This trilingual publication (Portuguese-Spanish-English) of 300 copies has a presentation written by the Argentinean art critique Ana María Battistozzi.

WHEN INSTANTS ARE ERASED (by Ana María Battistozzi)

“(…) It was not the tears of a Buenos Aires autumn but the water of a Rio de Janeiro storm, Amanda reflected as she went through those images of elusive clarity one afternoon in Buenos Aires. Perhaps, it was that particular state of melancholy that led her to stop in the delicate poetry that emerged in these ruined images, in the pictorial effects of the spots that deformed the faces and subverted the valued photographic precision.
Suddenly, that happened to be the greatest charm they offered before her artist’s gaze. Or what best revealed the paths of her imagination in a state of melancholy. Amanda worked with these images using various instruments of contemporary technique, she copied them and explored several instances of presentation until she found the book format that they now display as a travel album. A romantic connection emerges from the option chosen already from the cover itself. A Swiss landscape (perhaps?) invaded by a pictorial barrage announces the subtly elegiac climate that nests inside. The documentary clarity of the ça a eté (“this has been”) by Roland Barthes ended up succumbing to the fascination of pictorial action, contributing an aesthetic of another order oriented more towards subjective experience than objective reality. Thus, it is not by chance that Amanda Coimbra finds company in the affinity system that groups the preferences of those who make use of photography in contemporary art. This is where painting’s own modes of production have become more prevalent in photographic practices than is thought. A regime of composition and valuation of the artist’s intervention before and after the action of the camera has surpassed the formulas that modern photography fetishized.

The narrative model that Amanda Coimbra chooses is also a symptom of these times that ignore the sin of hybridity. From it, the artist manages to introduce us to the dreams that take hold of the man who meditates, as Bachelard wrote. When the moments are erased, the picturesque fades, the hour no longer rings and the space extends without limits.”