An Entire People Emerges from the Threads of Memory: Archive, Ancestry, and Existence in Parede da Memória

Abstract

This article examines Rosana Paulino’s (1967) Parede da Memória (Wall of Memory; 1994–2015) as an aesthetic-political dispositif that challenges regimes of visibility and memory in contemporary Brazilian art. Rather than viewing the artist’s practice as limited to reconstructing silenced narratives, the article proposes engaging with the work as a field of forces in which memory, materiality and ancestry converge, establishing a co-presence between the living and the dead. Through poetic dispositifs that bring together family photographs, stitching, repetition and montage, Paulino shifts the archive away from its traditional function as a static repository and towards a regime of contestation. In other words, Paulino’s poetic practice allows the work to be understood as an archive in action, capable of reactivating traces and forging connections between individual and collective experiences, particularly in the context of the diaspora in Brazil. Incorporating elements associated with diasporic displacement, such as patuás (protective amulets), further extends this dimension by transforming them into dispositifs of memory and protection, in which ancestral images act as agents of continuity and belonging. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Deleuze and Guattari (1980/2011) and Vinciane Despret (2015/2023), the article approaches the work as a territory and an assemblage, showing how it generates modes of existence by bringing material and sensory elements into relation and sustaining the presence of the dead in the present. Finally, the article argues that the installation’s power lies in its capacity to bring a living memory into being — a memory that does not remain fixed in the past but is continually actualised through relationships, taking shape as a space of cohabitation in which memory, art and existence remain in process.