HOW I STARTED MY ARCHIVE

My first art film project is dated 2019, when I was still working as a fashion industry consultant. I had no technical experience and my very first images came out from an unexpectedly fortunate circumstance during a work trip. I was in Bari, South Italy, in the enchanting historical center, “Bari Vecchia”. It was a rainy, cold and windy night of November. Nobody was on the street. The beauty of the narrow antique street had hypnotized me. The numerous terraces of the buildings were covered with large homemade rain cloths, moved by the gusts of the wind. I’ve never seen that kind of coverings in North Italy. In each court, I could find a small wayside catholic shrine. They were all dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and decorated with laces, plastic flowers and love. I soon realized that the rain cloths were not moved by the wind, but they were dancing. They were performing a choreography, naturally in time with laces and plastic flowers. I was the only spectator. Grateful and moved, I filmed them with my phone. I couldn’t say if the protagonists of my video were the dancers or the air moving them. I feel I met somebody very generous, friendly and magnificent. I went on travelling and working, but I didn’t have such lucky encounters until a forced permanence in Portugal, with the beginning of the new weird pandemic world.

“As I made my discoveries alone, I have been anxious to write my book by myself,

though in so doing, the reader will consider me, and with great propriety, guilty of temerity;

but the public will perhaps gain in the fidelity of my narrative, what it loses in elegance.” (G.B.Belzoni, 1820, V)

During the first lockdown, I was alone in Portugal. I explored any corner of Quinta da Braamcamp, the extraordinary natural area between my home and the river Tejo. Abandoned since 2008, it is one of the many public lands at risk of being sold and cementified. The inaccessible and polluted land of a factory can slowly become a natural park thanks to its abandonment. If humans do not disturb it, nature is very good at cleaning and regaining its space. Birds nest in Braamcamp and the variety of wild flora is astonishing. The river water is becoming cleaner and some marine creatures that have disappeared are slowly coming back. During my solitary walks, I was looking for the same friendly and divine presence of Bari Vecchia. I was feeling alone, and I had all the time to seek carefully.

In response to isolation and alienation, my relationship with the landscape and its inhabitants became more and more intense. I noticed that my eyesight became sharper, and my sense of time more fluid. Someone may say I have projected my human qualities onto my imaginary friends. During our meetings, these presences are always dancing, kissing, touching, and moving very erotically to me. They may also say that I have colonized with my creative vision the Portuguese landscape, putting myself and my human needs at the centre of everything. I think I was moved more by the desire to disappear in that marvellous landscape, to be part of it, to be accepted and integrated as the ruins of factories covered with vegetation. That can be also viewed as an erotic encounter. I was looking with a certain envy at the objects of man abandoned on the ground or on the river for a long time. Nature had welcomed them, enveloped and integrated as I would have liked. Troubled by apocalyptic thoughts, I recognized everywhere metaphors of humanity’s decline, death, redemption, love, and rebirth.