Álbum de família: fotografia como recurso poético para o reencantamento da memória familiar

Abstract

Family Album is a research project developed within the Graduate Program in Arts at UFMG, in the Visual Arts field, which investigates photography in the family context, memory, and ancestral narratives. Carried out at Marajó Island, the research delves into the author’s ancestry, whose maternal family comes from the tiny district of Ganhoão, in the far north of the island, in the state of Pará — a place where much of her family memory was lost in the riverbeds during migrations to bigger cities. The return to the ancestral island takes place through the research itself, in which the author confronts unresolved personal matters by photographing the residents of Ganhoão with instant photography, re-enchanting her own family memory while helping other local families enchant theirs. Told in literary form, the dissertation takes on the tone of a family novel, intertwining reality and critical fabulation, as proposed by Saidiya Hartman, with the concept of enchantment in the Amazonian area by João de Jesus Paes Loureiro, as well as literary references such as the novels by Dalcídio Jurandir. The result is a narrative that is both poetic and academic, built through artistic gesture, affection and memory.