Ana Vidigal + José Malhoa

Ana Vidigal
‘the brain is deeper than the sea’
(project ana/malhoa)
2011
on the work
Praia das Maçãs
by José Malhoa (c. 1913–18)

I did not choose an image, I chose words.
I chose a title: Praia das Maçãs.
Anyone who works or wishes to work with time knows the importance of a name.
This is a name that draws us back. I went back, back to Praia das Maçãs, several times after receiving the invitation to Outros Olhares – Novos Projectos.

I went back to the beach that I know, which is also Malhoa’s beach, and the one that is there today.
Looking at the cover of my childhood photo album, I can see my mother inscribing my weight, and the colour of my eyes and hair.
I recognise her handwriting, and see her placing the corners for the photographs, putting together my ‘memento’.

Years later, when this memento came into my hands, I took it to pieces.
I meticulously removed all of the photographs, cutting many of them up and giving others away. I replaced my memento, which was scrupulously faithful to reality, with the memories of others, which I gradually lost in time, by keeping them in boxes, labelling books. Even today I still come across pictures of summers on beaches that I have never visited and Christmas trees that I have never decorated, surrounded by sisters that I never had in Enid Blyton books.

I preserve other people’s memories, substituted for mine in adolescence.
The album remained.
I consigned it to a shelf for years, like a damaged object, as if to remind myself of my teenage vandalism. It was empty of images, but full of words. Of my life, it contained only phrases: Ana Beatriz at four days old; Ana Beatriz at her first Carnival; Ana Beatriz at Praia das Maçãs.

Time has taught me to look into the words.  I have always known that if one day I were to work with my mother’s recollection of that time, I would go to this album, empty of pictures. I would show its blankness, show other people that the brain, the memory and what each of us invents as our own ‘history’ are deeper than the sea. We envisage things far beyond what we actually see.

Malhoa was aware of this when he painted the back of that woman. Time, the story and the characters in one image, constituting one single content, keeping alive forever in the memory the name of a place where one was once happy.

Ana Vidigal
June 2011