Embodying the Family Album: Acts of Performance

This article describes a process for interpreting photographic archives through performance photography. It considers family albums not only as documentary records but also as sources of insight into identity, cultural heritage, and memory. Through embodiment and performance, the work explores how archival photographs can be reinterpreted and reanimated. This work operates within the framework of analysis and visual re-appropriation of a family archive, with the purpose of recollecting and re-inscribing a potential future (her)story. Its central objective is to examine identity construction in the generations succeeding the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship and colonial empire, while also examining women’s identities and how these were shaped by preceding generations who lived respectively on the mainland and in the colonial setting. The photographs analyzed belong to the author’s grandparents and reflect Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974). Focusing on the grandmothers, who lived under this regime—one in mainland Portugal, the other in the former colonial territories of India and Mozambique—the study reads their images as representations of women’s lives during that period. The article presents a methodology of iconographic analysis followed by performance-based reenactments, arguing for private photographic collections as vital tools in rethinking history and memory.