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“Through a poetic and experimental proposal to rethink time and image in the post-photography era, Filipa Frois Almeida (b. 1981, Germany) works with memory and its reconstruction, establishing relationships between the past and the future. As the artist herself mentions (2024): ‘It is through photography that we record moments to fix in time, but it also has its own lifespan - it ages, it transforms.’

Through a chemical process that alters the composition of photosensitive paper, the project Mergulho em Apneia (Freediving) explores issues of degradation, both of memory and of the photographic image itself. The process of decomposition of the photograph took two years, opening up space for chance, or rather, for the tension between the human desire for control and the unpredictability of life and the artistic process.

The process of blurring and fading of the image resembles the experience of dreaming: when, asleep in deep slumber, we are visited by familiar faces – we know who they are, but we are unable to define them completely. They are mirages, alluding to people we know. However, due to a lack of ability or a protective instinct, our memory fails to reconstruct their features accurately, and they thus become ghosts.

At first glance, those faded patches of colour, the paint that runs across the paper and distorts the shapes, do not allow us to say with certainty that this anthropomorphic image was once someone's portrait. It takes time to carefully observe what the gesture implies. Deformed faces gradually take shape and, after a few seconds of adaptation, the gaze collects the eyes, mouth and nose, mentally reconstructing a face.

Apnea Dive proposes, precisely, a visual reflection on the impermanence of the image in the post-photography era. Through the slow degradation of the printed photograph, the artist invokes diving and shipwrecking as metaphors for accessing the unconscious of memory and representation. As the artist herself says, ‘If, as Hans Blumenberg argues in Shipwreck with Spectator, shipwreck is the original condition of existence, then perhaps the artistic gesture consists of learning to be submerged, not as someone who is lost, but as someone who learns to see with different eyes.’

Filipa Frois de Almeida's work is a tribute to the slowing down of the world, to mourning and to the acceptance of the transience of things. ‘The image, in dissolution, becomes a space for rescue – not of what was, but of what persists,’ functioning as a tool to ‘reflect critically on the unease generated by the constant acceleration of contemporary society.’”

Leonor Guerreiro Queiroz about Mergulho em Apneia, Bienal de Arte Contemporânea da Maia, Fulgor, 2025

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In the first chapter of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, we learn that adults lack imagination: they cannot see the elephant inside the boa in the drawing by the Pilot. The further along we read, it becomes obvious that this loss of imagination is not irreversible if one has curiosity.

Human history has a very complex understanding of curiosity. In myth and religion, it is often appointed as the root of all evil. Was it not curiosity that led Eve to bite that apple, or what made Pandora open the box? “Curiosity killed the cat” is a common English saying that clearly gives out a warning: mind your own business, or else.

Yet when it comes to art, isn’t curiosity the true starting point for all creative endeavours? Were we not curious, would we bother picking up the pencil, the guitar or the camera?

The artist Filipa Frois Almeida journeyed through her memories, trying to catch up with the ones she cannot quite reach any longer. If you have ever tried to remember something from a long time ago, you might have noticed that the older the memory, the less beneath the surface of it can you dive. This begs us all a question: Are we still curious enough to keep trying to find the answers, even if it means failing?

As my conversations with Filipa Frois Almeida carried on throughout the past year, it was obvious early on that in developing “Homogeneizador de memórias” she has let loose her curiosity, allowed her sense of wonder to guide her into experimenting in a way that resembles the pure joy of a child’s play. Her accounts of the different methods she tested were not reports about work, they were stories of fascination, of a game she had been playing recently. The results serve to remind us that like our individual memories that entangle together, we too are part of a shared experience from play to loss to rediscovery.

It is somehow reassuring that the artist’s wildness was allowed to flourish when creating work — or should we say play? — about something personal she had gone through at a very young age. Especially when someone is faced with tragedy, it is not a small victory that they do not lose touch with their inner child. The humble beginnings of this project, the small mistake that lead to an extraordinary world of personal and artistic discoveries, reminded me of what Samuel Becket wrote in 1983 in “Worstward Ho”:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Noora Manty about homogeneizador de memórias, Galeria da Estação, Braga, 2025

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estado límbico is a site-speculative fairytale, which proposes a method of joyous meddling with spaces and things of the past — stubbornly stuck in the past — and of affirming the possibility of telling their story in other, playful, almost child-like ways in which only futures exist. A novel story can be told by a simple gesture of re-ordering and re-configuring the established order of things. It is also a highly political method, which fits with the overarching program of the Robida Collective, the host of the residency which resulted in estado límbico.

Modelling Future Ruralism, Aljaž Škrlep, estado límbico, 2024