ALMA

 

ALMA

BY EDU SILVA


This visual narrative isn’t another epic tale about the portuguese coastline and its heroic seamen. Those days are long gone as well as those seamen, whom are either dead or dying. Globalization and the European Union came, saw, and conquered it all. Fishing boats were dismantled and strict fishing quotas were imposed, while at the same time a massive multiplatform campaign promoting tourism in Portugal began to be implemented and disseminated, both on a nacional and international scale. And while tourism is now a booming sector in this country, labors such as fishing or sargassum harvesting are becoming dying arts. These new dynamics altered the fabric of the social landscape of the portuguese coastline, changing the morphology of this territory not only in the physical sense, but also gradually turned a once great nation of seamen into a fleet of waiters and nondescript caretakers willing to tend to the needs of the tourists (foreign and domestic alike). 


The truth of the matter is that in this admirable and innocuous new world, there is no place for heroes and danger anymore. All that’s left are the old tales about the portuguese coastline, stories that still make us daydream about a place that once was the starting point to adventure. 
Indeed, this is a difficult conjuncture to make a living off the sea. But there are still a few people who are bold enough to resist the tides of change and dare to fight for their right to live yet another day in this fabled place. 


This visual essay is dedicated to the last inhabitants of the late and once great portuguese coastline.

 

Isolation With Dementia by Amber Franks

 
 
 

Isolation With Dementia

BY AMBER FRANKS

I am an artist based in Sussex, UK - during Lockdown in the UK, I cared for my 89 year old Grandmother who has Vascular Dementia. For the first 40 days, I documented her daily life throughout being isolated in my home.

Bio

In her practice the artist Amber Franks investigates personal trauma and loss in relation to “casual” sexism and its causes and contexts.Her work poses challenging questions that push and question conventional boundaries between artist and viewer. Franks considers the spectators’ space and progression within her exhibits, devising a narrative that invokes the viewer to reflect upon the self. This consideration exemplifies how various experiences of trauma can be dissected into separate narratives, but inherently still coincide with one another.

https://www.amberfranks.co.uk
Instagram @amberrfranks

 

Fade Away

 

FADE AWAY

BY MICHELE PALAZZI

During the past decade, China is experiencing the largest internal migration in its history, involving especially the minorities living in the remote areas of the country. In Guizhou, the poorest province of the China, two million people, mostly from the Miao minority, are being pushed, through economic incentives, to leave their villages situated in isolated mountain and to be relocated into neighborhoods in urban cities, specifically built for them. This ongoing relocation, started in 2012 is expected to end by 2020, according to the local government it will allow the villagers to alleviate their poverty conditions.
The photographic project analyze the loss of identity of the people who chose to abandon their household surrounding themselves of a new extraneous environment, portraying also the daily rural life of those who decided to resist in a traditional world, where everything around them is rapidly fading away.


Biography

The italian photographer Michele Palazzi (b.1984) works with current social issues through a subjective approach, confronting the contemporary man with his origins, through a look that investigates the past in order to interpret the present. He has won several recognitions, among which the First Prize of the World Press Photo Award in the category Daily Life - Stories.
He is currently working on FINISTERRAE, a long term project concerning the southern European crisis and he works as a photography teacher at the Rome University of Fine Arts.

michelepalazziphotographer.com
instagram.com/michele_palazzi/


 

CATALOG I - FOUR HANDED

 

CATALOG I - FOUR HANDED

BY ANA PAISANO

Ana Paisano is an architect that uses the photography as a tool in the Architecture process. She studied Architecture in FAUL (Lisbon, Portugal) and she did the last year of Mater’s degree in Tokyo University (Japan) with AUSMIP scholarship. Currently employed at Studio Mumbai Architects and living in Mumbai (India), she engages in parallel research on the architecture/craft interface.


Synopsis

This catalog is an informal study exploring the use of human feet in craft, manual labor and daily life in India. The people photographed have learned to employ their whole body in their labor.
The four-handed people of India have developed unique processes linking thought to production and performance, that most urban  societies seem to have forgotten.
Learning a skill does not happen through verbal teaching but rather by the transference of the skill from the muscles of the teacher directly to the muscles of the apprentice. It is an act of simultaneous perception through the senses and bodily mimesis, or imitation. People learn by doing. The use of feet as hands is an unconscious process. For the people documented in this catalog, feet act as “extra hands” in a natural, instinctive way.
This document is an attempt to re-discover through the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indian people, what it means for a human to be “four-handed”.