EXHIBITION // TALKS // BOOK PRESENTATION
Made It
Universidade Lusofona Lisboa
There's a recurring idea in road movies: what truly matters is never the destination, but everything that happens before getting there.
The detours, the encounters, the unexpected events and the changes of direction end up
transforming the journey itself.
The same happens with an authorial project.
Rarely does a work originate from a completely defined idea; it is during the process that questions arise, that themes consolidate, and that the photographic language finds its own form.
The projects gathered in this exhibition are the result of a year of research and experimentation.
In this process, each student defined their own field of work, approaching issues that, despite their diversity, converge around memory, identity, territory, and the capacity of photography to construct narratives.
STUDENTS
Guilherme Caldeira Campos
Rage Luz
Martina Stoltenborg
João Tavares
Bernardo Rosa
Sofia Valventos
Beatriz Vicente
PROFESSORS
Orlando Franco
João Paulo Serafim
In Lúcia Pereira's work, loss and family inheritance become the starting point for a reflection on identity and belonging from the experience of grief.
The experience of displacement is also a common axis in several projects.
In Guilherme Caldeira Campos's work, photography follows the daily life of a young man who, for family reasons, divides his life between two houses.
In Rage Luz, migration and the consequent distance give rise to images where theplace is continuously traversed by uprooting and displacement.
Martina Stoltenborg establishes a new relationship with the memory of her grandparents from the
discovery of an intimate photographic album.
In the attention they dedicated to aesthetics and photographic language, she recognizes an unexpected affinity, transforming this archive into an inheritance and a new form of connection.
In another work, João Tavares explores photography as a fictional construction of identity and self-portraiture. The images suggest events without explaining them, inviting the viewer to complete and prolong the narrative. Bernardo Rosa's project explores the relationship between image and sound in an approach to abstraction. From a laboratory he built himself, where optical devices intersect with the manipulation of guitar sounds, he seeks to establish relationships of rhythm and correspondences between different media. Territory also assumes a central place in two of the presented projects.
Sofia Valventos approaches the community of a senior university, seeking to understand the gestures of resistance, coexistence, and continuity that persist in the face of change.
Beatriz Vicente, on the contrary, directs her gaze towards spaces marked by absence.
The traces of human action remain in the landscapes, objects, and architecture, revealing a slow transformation where time and entropy become visible.
If in one case we find the permanence of people, in the other we find what remains of them.
The exhibition title,THEN GLAD WE ALMOST MADE IT, can be understood as a reference to the very moment in which these works are found.
More than completed projects, they point to paths under construction. In them there is an awareness that artistic practice is not made of definitive answers, but of the ability to remain in motion, accepting that, sometimes, it is precisely in the almost that it becomes possible to discover a path.
Orlando Franco
João Paulo Serafim