KN

The artist collected temporary donations of old homemade films from families in the region where she was born (countryside São Paulo), and transferred the material to video. She then returned the digital copies to the participants along with the original films, in exchange for the right to use all the newly generated archive to create artworks. The project offers a reflection about time – condensing and uniting elements such as memory, the time of the recording, the documentation of time passage in the lives of the families and the impression of time over the media itself (with the physical deterioration of the film). In addition, the artist intends to investigate the tensions between fiction and reality, History and personal stories. 

"The pride in the eyes and attitudes of characters parading past the camera becomes the restless look of the spectator who, plunged in the excess of those special moments, quickly realizes the trap that the artwork puts us in: does immersing yourself in your personal memories completely reveal how much they are composed of a substance that is common to all, and therefore unimportant in itself?  

(...) The risk of the image / recovered memory is the revelation of this commonplace. But it is also the greatest opportunity, since that frees us from the burden of the extraordinary and it allows us to rediscover, on what is more banal, something that moves us when facing one another. And that contemplates its fragility in ourselves, presenting us with a rough, blurry and inaccurate mirror to our own fictions."

Alessandra Monachesi Ribeiro, 'Traces: Following the Steps of Kika Nicolela', excerpt

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