Real spaces and their imaginary memories
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Sally Santiago
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Using a series of analog photographs titled "Atlas Reminiscente," this visual essay aims to highlight the process of landscape reinvention and narrow the dialectical gap between the real and the imagined through the construction of a new reality. The images trace the fluidity of personal and collective histories mediated by family immigration zones and emerge as they take off from spoken narratives. By questioning how spaces preserve and transform the times they house, the creative exercise is driven by the tension between memory and its reinterpretation. It invites reflection on the possibility of capturing a past that continually slips away while embracing its elusiveness through the discovery of the new. The photographs, coupled with audio, intertwine to create new virtual territories where memory is reconfigured through a reappropriation that not only evokes what was but also suggests what could be, revealing the friction between testimony, imagination, and creation.
In the context of a contemporary era that echoes the present, interpolating time and projecting itself onto what has already unfolded, the boundaries of reality are challenged. Through imaginative engagement, landscapes are reshaped, offering new possibilities for understanding the past, the present, and their ongoing interrelationship. The essay presents itself as an exercise that acknowledges the fissures of time and the places lived between generations, not seeking to resolve the distances or fill the voids, but rather to amplify them, transforming them into territories of experimentation.
