Berlin<>Rio: trajetos e memórias

Abstract

Berlin<>Rio: Routes and Memories is a research and artistic project which addresses the lifeline of the author’s family, its cohesiveness, and its survival across five generations throughout different political and cultural systems, namely: Prussia at the beginning of the 19th century; the period after the unification of Germany at the end of that century; the Weimar Republic; the years of Nazism before WW2; Brazil, from the end of the 1930s; and finally the return to Germany in the 1960s. It deals also with migration, arrivals and returns.
Visual materials are employed as historical sources to make the autobiographical traces of the past visible in the present. A narrative is created through the dialogue between pictures and documents, which primarily stem from the family’s archive, as well as films and re-enactments in the form of contemporary photographs. Alongside their aesthetic qualities, the images can also be interpreted as witnesses of social practices and thematize the manner in which photography itself is used.