Photography has had an umbilical link to the intention of the trip from its very beginning. Also, in this umbilical sense, the trip would be forcibly linked to the creation of the first collections and people who collect, collectors and curiosities. In Chana de Moura’s practice (Brazil, 1989), the principle of the trip is established in a constant that is similarly inverted. The places of the present and the real become permeable to the potential magnitudes of the places of the past, the future, and of speculation. There is a truth of the lie in each of the images presented in this body-installation - from the photographs, to the documents up to the completed film - we are coerced into a fine premise that moves us in terms of spirit, geography and time to a place without reference. It is in the silence of the place of these images, without geography and timeless, that Chana de Moura constructs the drift of hernarratives, in an intention to reveal an archaeological meaning within a fictional possibility. However, the appropriation of the real for the creation of fictitious places does not disclose the intention of her way of operating in a place with the main focus of questioning the world in the present state and in its real transitions and adaptations.
The project that Chana de Moura presents in the MIRA Space here in the CI.CLO Biennial of Photography, Porto is thus conceived as a concise body - not summarised - of a narrative that the artist has developed, in multiple directions and circumstances, in a continuous manner over her career path.
An analysis arises in the end: the former as survival, the past to salvage the future.
Text by João Terras