“(…) se elas houverem,
a gente vai
tirá-las”
2024
Texts by others
On the banks of the river Ave and the river Vizela, there have always been murmurs of an activity that was slowly undermining the pillars of some of the municipalities and parishes that depended on its waters. The industrial flood that settled in the Ave Valley threatened the natural ecosystem – and the mental health – of what used to be one of the region's most striking landscapes.
The pollution spread by the discharge of toxic products into the waterways has led to a total imbalance in the local fauna and flora. These attitudes have consequently led to many aquatic species moving to other areas, or simply being driven to decay. Just as the murmurs of the textile industry were heard among the local population, the possible existence of an exotic species in the rivers was also heard – among timid conversations – which, if confirmed, would easily unravel the abrupt disappearance of the others.
Galeria da Estação - Encontros da Imagem
_ Exhibition
Braga, PT 2025
Troubled waters: Rivers, banks, stories and legends
This exhibition draws on the idiosyncratic perspectives of these two photographers, opening up a wide-ranging debate on biodiversity, climate and environmental issues, media literacy, the importance of personal history and the role of photography as an anthropological tool.
(...) Emanuel Constantino has woven a visual web that skillfully combines myth and history. In “(...) if there are any, we'll take them away” Constantino mixes his own images taken around the Rio Ave and Rio Vizela with archive photographs, newspaper clippings and images from Germany. In Portugal, the industrial growth of the 1990s led to questions about environmental well-being, which absorbed influences from the suspicious view left by the Cold War. Constantino's work is a stupendous challenge to the viewer's media literacy and independent thinking.
Combining the two projects in a single exhibition allows the viewer to reflect on their own position in relation to history and the present. It is increasingly important to examine visual communication with a critical eye and understand its motives, authors and objectives.
Center for Photography Studies
_ Exhibition
Casa dos Cubos
Tomar, PT 2025
On the banks of the River Ave and the River Vizela, there were always whispers of an activity that was slowly undermining, from within, the pillars of some of the municipalities and parishes that depended on its waters. (...) Just as the whispers of the textile industry were heard among the local population, there were also shy conversations about the possible existence of an exotic species in the rivers, which, if confirmed, would easily unveil the abrupt disappearance of the others.”
As can be seen from this extract from the synopsis of this series, in the absence, or lack of credibility, of science, it is belief and deception that fill the cognitive bias. This situation is gradually aggravated by the continued lack of information about the consequences of the impact of industrial activities, which is the hallmark and modus operandi of a certain industry, whose conveniences are different, and which makes one wonder about the true identity of the “piranhas” that have populated the rivers of the Ave Valley.
(...) the common element of constructing visual reading proposals that integrate their own images and elements from the archive, both visual and written, thus calling on other sources and narratives, while at the same time being part of an investigative proposal in which the present relates to and interpenetrates with the past. It is an exhibition model that allows for expansive and multidimensional readings whose ramifications between the territory and ecology, economic activity, tradition, belief, memory and identity, are traces of a becoming that is present, and as such must be questioned at every moment.
De Volta ao Futuro _ Exhibition
Santo Thyrso Factory
Santo Tirso, PT 2024
Just as technologies become obsolete as soon as we master them, and photographs are evidence of the past the instant they are taken, the artist residency in Santo Tirso ended when we were still imagining it. The depth of the work we present is therefore the depth of the experience in loco and the study that precedes it. Our meeting place was Colégio das Caldinhas, next to Caldas da Saúde, in the parish of Areias. It was here that we lived hot days and nights in April and where we woke up to the importance of listening, from the lowest to the highest frequencies and sound amplitudes, which for operators of an inherently visual medium can be of the utmost importance. We added our own noise and silences to the space, listened to the history of the Jesuit diaspora and visited the museum that bears witness to their commitment to science and education. But that was in the moments when we could stop, between km of travel and km of WhatsApp feeds to organize meetings, productions, meals, conversations, presentations. Everything it took for a group of prospectors to be able to dig their lode, each in their own direction, in different places in the municipality of Santo Tirso.
The time has come to weigh up the results of the excavations and do the math. In the pages of the catalogue, each body of work appears as its author conceived it and ordered it sequentially, in relation to text and other elements. The exhibition experiments with a performance and curatorial process that involves the artists and challenges the public. We worked on the idea of a constellation of relationships between photographs rather than a separation of each author's work. On the one hand, this dilutes their individual voices, but on the other hand, it democratizes gazes and opens interpretations, involving the viewer in their decoding. We invoke Aby Warburg's thinking, which emerges in Atlas Mnemosyne, to establish (find, provoke, experiment) correlations of affinity or contradiction, continuity or discontinuity, between images, times, places and thoughts.
These ways of showing assume another condition of the process of learning the photographic technique and life experience: the act of creation always implies mimesis (imitation) and poiesis (invention), so by understanding the publication of the work as an approach to the archive, because it will remain, and the exhibition as an in situ performance, in addition to the individual gaze that can be recognized in the styles that cross multiple photographs, we also highlight our cultural references. Photographs, as a record of granular instants in a continuous time, even when they repeat or show what we already know, add new knowledge, which expands in the confrontation with the gaze of the other, even though everything remains eternally under construction and unfinishedness is one of its existential conditions.
Photobook - Booktrailer
//
It was in a search fueled by the attempt to better understand the history of this territory, Santo Tirso, that a news item from RTP's (Radio and Television of Portugal) online archive,
broadcast on the news in 1995 with the title “Rumor about Piranhas in the River Ave”, served as the impetus for the project.
“The false news has spread and convinced many people”. That's how the article opens. The
Parish Newspaper of São João de Ponte, in Guimarães, published an article signed by two
secondary school students warning about the pollution of the River Ave; the issue was the
destruction of the river's ecosystem and the danger to which the population was exposed,
due to the release of piranhas into the river's flow. The case wouldn't have been so
publicized and would probably have gone unnoticed if the newspapers “O Primeiro de
Janeiro” and “Diário do Minho” (and some local radio stations) hadn't run headlines and
front pages without first confirming its veracity. This fiction, which was denied at the time
of its circulation in the media, ended up becoming reality for some residents.
In my - short - journey through documentary photography, from a
perspective of deepening and investigating the issues that construct it - in technical,
ethical, aesthetic and theoretical terms - doubts have arisen about the contours of this
type of approach. I'm increasingly interested in the (sometimes imperceptible) boundary
from which documentary ceases to be documentary and begins to assert itself as fiction.
Its blending. It's important to understand whether this border even exists, and if so,
whether documentaries are always associated with a fictional construction. If the answer
is yes, in what way does the documentary record lose its primary value of transmitting and
telling the story of an event or social process?
Focusing on the figure of the exotic animal or animals of the River Ave (and putting the
piranha in the background, throwing the interpretation into a broader spectrum), a
narrative is born that is based on a “distorted true event” that has become linked to the
region, making it and seeing it as truth in the region's collective memory. In between,
possible biological interference and german-american conspiracies are explored,
supported by a range of strategic conveniences (water facilities, geographical location, the
possibility of covering up constructions by passing them off as a textile industry, weak
legislation and control of activities). It's a current revisit to a territory that seems to hold
some secrets.