Imagens de futuro : álbuns de família e contranarrativas de cidade em livros de artista

Abstract

This thesis highlights the family album as a fundamental archive for the study of everyday images, highlighting the role of artist’s books in mobilizing this collection to complexify the hegemonic narratives of urban historiography, often appeased by the logic of capitalism and the State. The artist’s book is proposed as a critical tool for the construction of counter-narratives that challenge official representations, allowing the emergence of voices and stories that are traditionally marginalized or stereotyped. The objective of the research is to understand how cities manifest themselves in artist’s books produced from images captured and preserved by their own inhabitants in family albums. To this end, we raise here the concepts developed in the course “Family Albums: city, photography and memory”, focusing on the analysis of three artist’s books that are part of the scope of the course: Travessia, Poço 115: Um álbum imaginário and Procurem Luísa no Mercado de Arte Popular. These works reveal unique ways of life, constructed over time and through the occupation of certain spaces, which resist the impositions of urban commodification and highlight the autonomy of subjects in the construction of their own images, opposing official representations that reduce them to stereotypical objects. From this analysis, we realize that artist books not only document forms of resistance to the use of the city as a commodity, but also point to future possibilities in which the city is perceived as a space of experiences, marked by asymmetries, conflicts, but also by the creation of affective bonds and plural subjectivities.