In Place: Visual Narratives of Immobility and Isolation

In Place: Visual Narratives of Immobility and Isolation gathers four student projects that revisit private and archival photographs to reflect on memory, identity, and spatial belonging. Developed during the pandemic, Francisco Oliveira’s Casa das Águas traces the Cáster River’s springs, blending personal exploration with local history. Guided by oral testimony, his photographic sequence culminates at the Casa das Águas, a site once central to Santa Maria da Feira’s water distribution. Jessica Teixeira’s Retratos da Memória confronts family history through portraits of her mother, reinterpreted in light of dementia. By symbolically destroying and reworking these photographs, she translates the fragility of memory and the erosion of self-recognition into visual form. Jorge Marques’ Camuflagem begins with a found rural photograph and evolves into digitally manipulated landscapes that resist geographical or temporal fixing, questioning the stability of territory and belonging. Finally, Mariana Vilanova’s project turns her lens toward Porto’s ilhas, modest workers’ housing now threatened by gentrification. Her distant, anonymous images of daily life in these spaces highlight both continuity and loss, exposing the pressures of tourism and real estate on the city’s social fabric. Together, these works explore photography’s role in reactivating memory, transforming place, and narrating conditions of isolation and displacement Faculty of Enginering of the University of Porto