Let us say that photography photographic work has its mysterious ways. The topic of collecting images of Portugal led me into thinking of image as both diversity and a journey, encompassing the hinterland of the rural country and the coastline of the Atlantic, blending in that borderline system other hinterlands of extreme significant potential.

Running through my own archive – memory within memory – I have searched then that path, finding it in holiday seasons during which, I realize now (and indeed the journey into one’s own archive proves to be a (re)discovery journey, but also, and mainly, a self-realization journey), I almost always use film and only a 50mm lens.

The mindset of the geographical dislocation through the country seemed to materialize in the colour and density of 35mm films. As if flânerie, or rather, as if the emotional perception of what to flâner implies, cutting through the film’s matter, left its imprint. One doubts whether the unconscious is optical (in a Benjaminian sense) or whether the flâneur’s unconscious gradually becomes conscious. If Benjamin, referring to Paris and Baudelaire, spoke of the city as a phantasmagoria for the flâneur, can it not also be a country for its inhabitant-traveler?

By looking at the images one notices how some of the used films are worn out or imperfect, outdate or out-of-time (perhaps too in the sense that Agamben attributes to contemporaneity, as a concept implying distance from his own time). The time used in each photogram and the different times I have used in the making of those images give shape to the project of creating a portrait – one among many – of Portugal. Nevertheless, a Portugal-portrait – and in fact, the selection from the pre-existing image archive that takes place surprises me: upon meeting that Portugal-portrait I identify it as real and truthful; in better words: representative.

From a countryside house in Minho to the “landscape” that invades an Algarve window, including the back of a Mirandês donkey or a cat and dolphins from the Azores, the journey begins with a toy-boat reflecting in a mirror – a musing upon that very own Portuguese postcard, ominously reminiscent of the dictatorial appropriation of a putative historical fate – to cross sunny landscapes which dilute in a representation of the sea in a more and more colourless film. The end of the series reveals itself thus as the beginning of the 35mm film, yet another beginning of the film.