Posthumous Landscape - Part 1

Territory and memory have been central themes in my practice. In a somewhat accidental, abstract, and even experimental way, I always end up photographing in places where I can establish connections derived from memories.

My parents grew up on the same street in a small village about 8 km from the center of Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal. This coincidence shaped my existence and became a constant reference in the development of my photographic practice.

The death of my father almost coincided with the beginning of the pandemic. During the entire confinement period, in addition to a deep feeling of uncertainty about the future, it was undoubtedly a time of discovery through revisiting family archives. I remember finding a set of square photographs taken by my mother with her Kodak Instamatic. They were images of my father in a forest very close to the house where they grew up. This forest, connected to the Ermo, was a place of discovery in both my parents' childhood and my own. I carry with me all their stories: the trails, shortcuts, the tallest trees, and even stories of witches who would leave dead chickens and candles by certain trees.

On the back of one of the photographs, I found the inscription "October, 1980." On the front was an autumnal palette of colors. My father crouched and posed next to a pool in a forest which, although privately owned, was more or less managed by the locals, from whom I heard many stories. It was an iconic pool where many people learned to swim. I have a vague memory of that pool. I recall a summer when my uncle took me there. I remember the cold water and the tall pines around, just like in the photograph. This was likely in the late 1980s, shortly before the pool began to be vandalized and quickly turned into a garbage dump, and sometime in the 1990s, it was buried to solve the problem.

I felt deeply connected to this set of photographs, perhaps because my father always appears in them and because I can still recognise the places in the images. In one of the photographs, I recognized the small pedestrian path that crossed the forest, which was also the source of many stories. There is a moment of my father showing off, hanging from an electrical tower. Perhaps it was my mother's unbalanced composition that gave me the space to discover the location of this photograph through the background. The slope of the terrain and the proximity of the electrical tower marked the place - this will be one of the photographs in the next blog post, "March, 2020."

This search through the family archive and the confrontation with my father's image in a territory that I recognize but which predates me was the spark to revisit this space with the idea of Posthumous Landscape. Between 2020 and 2023, I produced a series of photographs driven by the need to return to the location and document it, creating several blocks of images that resulted in a kind of mapping of the terrain between traces and suggestions, exploring themes such as loneliness and my vulnerability in that place.

However, a few months ago, everything disappeared with a land clearing.

Bruno Silva is part of »Guest Room: Tina Campt & Keisha Scarville«.