For this exhibition, we selected an object (glasses), a set of eight photographs with dimensions of 50 × 70 cm, and a group of 63 slides (taken between 1977 and 2019) composing a lightbox with dimensions of 50 × 50 cm.
At the heart of this project, there is a reflection on the “memory of the body”, which we understand to be sedimented in the memory of places, objects, movements, sounds, and smells. The metaphor carries the possibilities of crossings between theoretical and artistic horizons, experienced events, and personal memories. In a sense, the objects on display are also one of the “sides” of that metaphor and, thus, of these lived memories.

Our participation in the collective exhibition “Motel Coimbra #6”, 2023, promoted by the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra, should also be understood, therefore, as a research process. It reflects on the conceptual structure that we have developed around the themes of memory and corporeality using artistic languages such as photography, video, or installation. In our work, objects exiling atmospheres from the past activate memory. In those moments, we remember another atmosphere, that of the present, which can alter past events and vice versa. Without us realizing it, the body manages these two moments, and, as a result, another memory appears when we observe an image, an object, an aroma, or a sound.

The Interstices of Memory are part of this experience's invisibility (intervals included in the lightbox, represented in squares apparently without images); they are part of the path we follow to carry out this project and respective rehearsals. Visual rehearsals are carried out to experiment and test this path, questioning the coherence, perhaps the scepticism, of some reflections. The “Atmospheres”, the “Unoccupied Body”, and the use of objects, sounds, or aromas are perhaps the tests where bodily habits can incorporate access routes to discover the visible, the spatial side of memory.

Motivated by remembrance, the memory of objects (accompanied by their atmospheres) allows the intertwining between space and time in relation to the duration (always finite) of the theoretical and practical reflection of a memory that is not only of the past but also of the present. In other words, every moment we are in front of an object, an aroma, or a sound, the experience of time is realized in us. The images presented in “Atmospheres” end up being repetitions of memories, always with variations. They represent the effort to reconstruct a memory because memory is not extinguished in a representation of the past but rather in the reconstruction or constant recovery of an effort from the past. It is through this effort; this path is taken (from past to present) in the recovery of the “I” that we end up rescuing the “unconscious” memory, the one that seemed lost in the invisibility of oblivion. Suddenly, without realizing how it appears, before an object, a sound, an aroma, a shadow, an atmosphere, it becomes present, visible, tangible.