Like déjà vu

Abstract

Like Déjà Vu was born from the experience of researching the contemporary scene in Maceió, Alagoas. Moved by the recognition of gender asymmetries in the field of photography — a category in which I am inserted as a photographer —, I investigated how women's self-representations produce fractures in dominant masculinist photography. Characterized by operating to the detriment of women photographers and women photographed, dominant photography, in addition to promoting female invisibilization in the field of artistic and professional activity, historically portrays gender through the lens of sexual objectification, a stereotype intersected with racist and classist relations. Contrary to this thought, the essay emerged from the artistic gesture of learning in practice with photographers, research partners, how to recreate imaginaries and visualities, that is, how to self-represent myself based on an awareness of photographic practice. More especially, through an experience with affection and education in the field, the essay is a portrait of the nostalgic feeling of seeing, from the perspective of adult life, the childhood of my cousin Alicia, so similar to me. An attempt to portray myself in my own terms, to portray my affective memory: the fishing, the foot on the ground, the trail in the sky, the farm, the love letter... As in a dream, intertwining our lives and the image collections of our childhoods — hers being the result of my records — I evoke the experience of seeing the child growing in her, while the child dies in me. In this sense, as an embodied anthropologist-photographer, I designed a production in which the boundaries between scientific rationality and emotion, subject and object, art and science are called into question.