Poetic and political gestures in the performativity of archives and in the encounter with the photographic images of the project “Retratistas do Morro”

Abstract

This text is the result of encounters between the photographic images of the project “Retratistas do Morro” (created by visual artist Guilherme Cunha) with one of its planner photographers, João Mendes, and a current resident of Aglomerado da Serra, Cristiane Gomes. Authored by photographers João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta, the images of the project were recorded between the 1960s and 1990s in Aglomerado itself, showing scenes of the daily lives of its residents. We argue that the performativity of these images has its agency intensified by the accounts produced by the interviewees, configuring a critical operation that rearticulates ways of narrating, interfering in relations of power and imaginaries, destabilizing consensual ways of thinking about experience. We show how the hospitable encounter with images can create unforeseen events, zones of indecision in which the appearance promoted by the work of the project's images does not aim to explain the lives of vulnerable people, but to free up other imaginary operations, challenging certain norms of ordering and evaluating the lives that flourish and resist on the margins.