Marta Albuquerque, graduated in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Greenwich, is a lecturer of the discipline cine-video at the Escola Artística Soares dos Reis. Her contact with students allowed her to keep abreast of both technological and conceptual innovations, which she eventually adopted in her first solo photographic exhibition Wallpaper, held in Cape Town, South Africa. Marta produced the zine We Are All Made of Dust, where she mixes her poetry with photography and edited the book Letras de Amor, with Lisa Penedo, with whom she founded Goonas Edições, a publishing house that aims to explore alternative printing techniques that allow the book to recover as a unique object.

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In the last few years I have been focusing on the relationship between the I-essence, the I-social and the I-memory and on how these concepts relate to trauma. To this end, I set out to create a multi-sensory space, which highlights emotive and sensory channels to the detriment of verbal language. Photography, as an object, also allowed me to explore, in a more organic and visceral way, the permeability of the self, transposing not only metaphysical borders that relate to its construction, but also at a plastic level, having explored new ways of presenting the I-essence. Working the body from the inside out, I used sculpture in addition to photography, which allowed me to attribute haptic qualities to immaterial concepts. More than any surrealist current, photography is celebrated exactly for being capable of taking us to the past, to the imaginary and being able to bring it to the present. In this temporal limbo, memory occupies a privileged place when, for the first time, the photograph serves as a reference of the real, even when it is interpreted years later. The references of the past are just pieces of life that depending on how we align them acquire new meanings. It is here that the new "I" emerges, an I that is no longer ruled by linearity, but by the connections and interpretations we make as we gain access to these proofs of a time that is no longer.

• Marta Albuquerque

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Marta presents the conference Rescuing the Immaterial Self, on the 15th February, at 16:30, in the auditorium of ESAD, in the scope of the BA Degree in Communication Design.

Créditos