Name: Miriam Jayne Martins Sampaio
Country Of Origin: Dual citizenship: Portuguese-Canadian (born in Montreal, Canada, daughter of political refugees who fled from Portugal in 1964, under the dictatorship of Antonio Oliveira Salazar.
Country Now Residing: Portugal
Title: The Wounds of Returning
This image is part of a series based on the re-construction of memory and informed by the relationship between fiction, reality and memory.
I feel compelled to document, preserve and thwart disappearance. It is a means of charting the experience into something visible and retraceable – of marking expired moments. I situate myself within a constructed myth, where I blur and distort elements of truth. This exploration permits me to reinvent fragments of written and architectural history, consolidate the act of remembering – involuntary or deliberate – and incorporate the past and present. This work – an inquiry into the deepest reaches of hereditary memory – has resulted in the creation of a disjointed visual narrative, allowing the silences of history to come to word.
Travelling to places where traumas may have occurred, open wounds, to tell a story before it scars over from being swallowed by life. The vistas are made possible only through the imagination, or through a hypothetical ancestral memory.
In the foreign language, words have no childhood. I act as a ventriloquist, speaking for the dead, imagining their desires and terrors, even poeticizing them. I create nostalgia for a home that was never mine.
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