Armandina Ferreira

1932
Through the window, it seems that it is raining steadily but slowly. The mass of bodies that fill the room surrounding the reddening baby counts a total of 17; children, possible midwives, or neighbours who came to help or just to watch. Between weeps and a few loud voices, they make a pause. «Call ourselves the best constructive values of the Portuguese society and teach in obedience and discipline our future male leaders»*.
The baby gets slapped several times, flickers the red arms, and has her first cry. Her name is Armandina Ferreira.
*Reference: extract - Discurso de Salazar quando assume chefia do governo

“Armandina Ferreira” is an installation centred on a body that lived between two temporal halves - in a time before and after the revolution, and which, although individual, is not unique in present-day Portugal. How to display torture, manipulation and perpetual generational trauma when no physical/corporeal evidence is left as proof? How do you tell or pass on a testimony of something intangible and intimate? How do you reveal traumatic violence through images that at a first encounter do not reproduce it?

This work revolves around the portrait of Armandina Ferreira (my maternal grandmother), through a collection of family memories, photographic archives, speculative images and historical events that shape the ghost of her identity. Through a tunnel vision of this concrete narrative - Armandina’s and her family’s - this work aims to expand, reflect and draw a parallel with contemporary times. This memorial arises from the need to remember: to look at the past with the critical eye of the present so that another future can be imagined.