In October 2013, Carla Cabanas was an artist in residence for almost a month in São Tomé e Príncipe, in a residency organized by Xerem and supported by Direcção Geral das Artes. The exhibition “Saudades e lagrimas são o unico lenitivo para a grande auzencia” (“Longing and tears are the only remedy for the great absence”), the artist’s second solo at Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art, presents the body of work developed in this context.
In this exhibition, Carla Cabanas pursues certain concerns of central importance to her work, such as photography as a corner stone in the current building of memory, as a trace of a provisory existence and has a ground for a drawing that, through the image’s erasure, stresses our inescapable transitoriness.
The Project “O que ficou do que foi – O Álbum São Tomé e Príncipe” (“What remains of what it was- Album São Tomé e Príncipe”) consists of a series of scratched postcard reproductions from the early XX century and two videos.
The postcard images work, on the one hand, as a historical portrait of a country (one that is built, manipulated, hand-coloured), and, on the other hand, as a record of these linking documents between people away from each other. The cuts made by Cabanas in the photographic emulsion compose a drawing that either brings the epistles’s calligraphy up, as if seen-through the insular image, or invades the built territory with organic shapes, claiming the man-altered landscape back to nature. The postcard reproductions are disappearing by erasure and, through this absence drawing, becoming something else.
The videos show static shots that operate as portraits of a place unfolding in time. The villas portrayed breathe in time, and its dilated image brings the signs of its turning evident.
