The Idea in Ideology
by Ana de Almeida
My most recent and ongoing project focuses in the personal photo archive of José Alberto Vidal de Almeida, my father, a Portuguese stipendium student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987.
The analysis of this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the first years after the left wing revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime and the end of the Colonial War in April 1974.
The analysis of the individual understanding, situation and context mirrors the hegemonic intentionality of the culture in question and manifests in the way how propagandistic images are reproduced after being filtered and processed by the individual. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance.
This practical artistic essay consists in the reorganization of the photo archive, through the addition and omission of images, through the pairing up of situations that took place simultaneously in both countries, defining new codes for the connection between pairs of images (pairing up according timing or identity, but also searching for new meanings of coexistence), building new narratives and new exchanges of significance between images while trying to understand through an aesthetical approach the visual codes as ways through which meaning is generated.
The analysis of this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the first years after the left wing revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime and the end of the Colonial War in April 1974.
The analysis of the individual understanding, situation and context mirrors the hegemonic intentionality of the culture in question and manifests in the way how propagandistic images are reproduced after being filtered and processed by the individual. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance.
This practical artistic essay consists in the reorganization of the photo archive, through the addition and omission of images, through the pairing up of situations that took place simultaneously in both countries, defining new codes for the connection between pairs of images (pairing up according timing or identity, but also searching for new meanings of coexistence), building new narratives and new exchanges of significance between images while trying to understand through an aesthetical approach the visual codes as ways through which meaning is generated.
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| Technique | Photography |
