2022 | 1st Edition

Nos txon - Fascículo 22

Marta Pinto Machado

Cabo VerdeFamilyMemoryArchivePost-colonialismSelf-portrait

"My mother, Lúcia, left Cape Verde after independence in 1975 to work as a maid in the home of a French couple in Paris, where she stayed between 1976 and 1983 as a way to finance her studies. From 1976 onwards, she took numerous self-portraits with a polaroid camera, which she sent to her friends and family. Of these, only seven remain, kept in my mother's album among many other photographs. This work results from academic research in which different narratives and discourses are compared over time, juxtaposing individual memory, collective memory, and collective history, reversing power mechanisms and giving the 'minority' control of the discourse." Marta Pinto Machado, 2023