Read text/interviews by Littal Melnik*

Our mental tapestries, our sense of self that is woven into our relationships, environments, and lifetimes of chance, they’re something more intricate than can be fully glimpsed at any one moment. Yet we instinctively know that family rituals upheld and forsaken, the loved ones near and formerly familiar, spaces we’ve inhabited, they are all vital threads to who we have become.

Early in development, as very young children we take on object permanence, we know the dropped stuffed animal is only out of sight, not gone. We grow into object constancy, our caregivers are internalized so that we can still feel mom even when she is not close.

There is an almost magical sense of safety that comes from feeling we have a home base. With that, we fall into the groove of growing, taking in, giving back, holding close, and discarding.

We cannot recall life’s infinite moments and impacts, but we surely can reflect on the most compelling. Photographs are a stream for this process, memories and history are reaffirmed but with the passage of time their significance revised. The objects, the relationships, they are still there but somehow different. Images of our own past, others’ images that connect to our inner world, they allow us to vividly experience what once was but within the present moment.

A photobook that draws on the artist’s real family, with real bonds, conflicts, and journeys puts the photographer in position to see into their origins and put forth a narrative. The three artists featured in Penumbra’s September lecture series combine the spirit of truth-telling, cooperation, and rebellion of personal history resulting in their own specific book.

Cati Bestard touches the inevitability of time in Ca s’abuela. A project which began in her family’s Mallorca home seeks to counteract and submit to the loss of what is loved, and ultimately to understand.

Ca s’abuela’s earliest images were taken years ago by her father, Andreu Bestard Ferrari, in the 60s and 70s. Growing up during Francisco Franco’s Spanish rule, he made images using natural light. Cati Bestard knows there was an impact of political circumstance, she intuits “growing up at that time he would make pictures near the window, what did it mean to grow up in a dictatorship, looking at the window as a limit in your life and still a space to interact with the world?”

In 2019 Bestard Ferrarí passed, soon after a home that had been in the family for generations was sold to an Argentinian. Something she describes as a common occurrence, how the economy once industrial (her family made liquor for over 100 years) is now based on tourism and in turn homes are no longer staying within families. Before losing her father, before the home sold, in the years the house stood empty, Bestard photographed. She connected to the feelings she had as a small child exploring the home. The space that to a youngster felt vast in possibilities and new adventures was now vast in memories. “When I entered in 2016 it was a time capsule but with dust.

There was no electricity, the only light came through the windows giving the space a painting like quality.” Bestard explains “the book is about this house that hosted all these memories and has accumulated all these experiences, accumulated all this life. But now it is at a point when its empty of this life. There is the dust that functions as an archive of existence, because if dust is analyzed you can determine a lot of the things that have happened, history of the materiality, the illnesses, it is left from the people and the things… so I became interested in the house as this architecture that held all these bodies but is now empty.” There are indeed images of dust, including an abstract cover with no title, a trace that something or someone was there, but the details are bound in the fragments.

There are the house’s old and recent photos as well as “ghosts.” Bestard projected the Mallorca house images in her US apartment and created new works. “It’s about the impossibility of bringing the worlds together as the image becomes so diluted, it’s almost against the image.” She explains it’s about the wish to still have the feeling and experience of her family, but of finding the limits of memory. The people and the place having a permanent space within her, but it is not the same as the earlier experiences. “I was reading about how every time we access a memory, we erase part of the original content to add some contextual information of our present moment. I thought the projections were a way to address something lost in memory when we add something from the present.”

Portuguese artist Joao Pina, in harmony with Cati Bestard, accepts that the person recalling the past, like the viewer observing a photograph, is adding a piece of themselves.

Pina shares a native saying, “Who tells a tale adds a tale.” He is reflecting on the process by which his mother and great-grandfather passed on the legend of his grandfather. Pina, a seasoned documentary artist, explains that “In the telling of the story, myths were created. I approached this work to demystify the ideas, to lay down an accurate recoded history. The book is structured so that the images are speaking to each other. That the letters are speaking to each other.

There is a narrative that is visual and there is a narrative that is textual, and in the textual, I give a lot of my own experience.” Pina strives to give us objective history through what is deeply personal in Tarrafal. For Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, Joao’s maternal grandfather, the dictatorial regime he grew up under was a merciless force. A fascist ideology he understood as something entirely destructive, something to be rebelled against. Yet so powerful that it cut him from his home, his family. In 1949 Carvalho, a Communist party member, was sent to Tarrafal, a concentration camp for political prisoners on the Portuguese colony of Cape Verde.

A puzzling calculation was made by the regime, allowing Guilherme Carvalho’s parents, Herculaina da Costa Carvalho and Luis Alves de Carvalho, to visit the camp with camera and film. Whatever the original intention, to project ideas of humanly treated prisoners, to assuage worried loved ones, 75 years later we are left with the black and white images. Tarrafal puts forth those pictures, seemingly well-nourished prisoners standing tall in uniform, a pet monkey steals the spotlight in some frames. There is an incongruence between what we know to be a camp and these pictures. The pictures suggest, and Pina’s research supports, that in this moment the men felt the joy of being able to send messages to loved ones at home. They hoped that through the photographs their families could feel them.

In addition to the original photos we are given pieces of correspondence between the Carvalhos as well as Pina’s photos of Cape Verde revisited. The project puts forth a parent’s drive to protect their child, the sometimes competing needs of protecting one’s family and some larger political calling, a grandson’s wish to solidify the marks that were made, as well as a look at what is left when history moves on. September 14, 1949 Guilherme writes his parents “I shall always find my courage to face whatever comes my way and I’m sure that you are more than capable of turning this sorrow into a weapon of aggression against those responsible for the misery that — in all walks of life — has taken hold of our country, caused by individuals whom the entire nation despises and who will therefor be expelled.” He asks that the oceanic tide which pulls him be embraced, that the loss his parents experience translate into momentum for some bigger fight he has taken on.

April 25, 1950. Luiz writes his son Guilherme, following a visit: “Only those who know how much we love each other could comprehend our joy at seeing you and the bitterness we feel when we leave. But such is life, and often what we love is that which suffers most. Which is to say, if I had been blessed with more sons, I would have wished with all my heart for them to be as sound and honest as you. Political ideas are something I tend not to discuss, nor am I one to condemn them. I only know that I raised you to travel a path of honor, justice, and duty, and you were always happy to keep to that, without me having censured any action you ever took in life, not even those for which you were sent there.”

Luis and Guilherme, father and son, define memories and myths in these letters. In this forced separation admiration of a cause or of a person provides reason for what otherwise is unfathomable.

November 27, 2020 Pina writes his deceased grandfather, “It seems that contrary to what you and your comrades believed, the New Man never thrived, societies still have those who exploit and those who are exploited, just as they did in the days before capitalism. And those who are exploited are still there in every attempt at socialism our world has seen. The problem, as I see it, my Dear Grandad, remains the same: There are always some who try to take advantage of other people’s misfortune.” His grandfather’s mission is retold as an illusion. Man and society cannot separate the desire to give and be loved from the fear of exploitation and the accompanying aggression.

While Pina’s letter declares the greater conflict is still alive, the book’s contemporary color photographs are proof that this specific battle is no longer. Cape Verde, as its name suggests, is lush and alive. There are images of smiling locals, trees impervious to the memories of man, seascapes and landscapes carrying on as forces of nature.

And of course, images of a camp now oxidized, being taken back by the elements so that only a shadow of the prisoners’ existence now remains.

Pina’s great grandparents who accepted a cause to keep connection with their son, his mother’s childhood with loving grandparents in place of parents, and Guilherme himself who chose to live for an ideal, they exist in the edited and revised world of permanence. The book’s archival elements serve as a record of historical facts, Pina’s sought-after demystification. Still, peering into this book, feeling the drives and wishes, it’s easy for any viewer to create new legends.

In Tarrafal, we see how perspectives taken are intertwined over four generations. With Victor Sira’s Home Coming, we feel the ebb and flow of the currents of change.

Sira likens his country of origin, Venezuela, to an “electrocardiogram, an EKG, with the peaks and valleys of change.” While one’s heart predictably contacts and relaxes to currents, Venezuela faced a surge as oil charged through. This new energy created ideals, polarizations, and struggles no one intended.

“I wanted to to tell the story at eye level, not something monumental, simply a family trying to understand what is happening,” explains Victor as we page through his book of images taken 20 years ago during a financial boom. “I hated it (the climate of wealth with out foresight,)I had no respect, it’s as though a party was going on, and I knew the hangover was coming. They were drinking, dancing, thinking we are going to be a superpower, but it made no sense. The infrastructure wasn’t there, the money wasn’t being used to bring in goods; forget superpower, just be a regular country with happy people”

The images are explicitly without people and without opulence. In telling the story, he shares the state of withdrawal which was his refuge. “As an adult living in the US, I would return to visit my father. I saw people with no middle ground. Everyone was fighting from the position “your either for me or against.” I took these pictures to connect to the city, not to the people and the political situation. The people are like a river, they will flow through and be gone, but what about the space?” Images of Modernest architecture once envisioned as a new way of life show the space taking its own path, bringing its own lines and cracks impervious to shouted promises. They are plainly laid out with one image per page, we see building details and landscapes, empty playgrounds and cars. It is the feel of a place forgotten while still inhabited.

Like many families, Victor’s did indeed flow through. For generations, they faced a near constant pressure to adapt, to reroute and reestablish, only to have the current change once more. While the images ground us, the narratives move us. Victor shows how circumstances changed identities, how decisions were made, and family, continued.

In an excerpt, he writes, “For my grandmother and her children, living on the outskirts of Caracas, the project was at first only a distant reality, the new housing superblocks rising on the horizon like a concrete apparition. But it was only a matter of time before she and her family would also be uprooted by the new ideal. Torn from her first shanty home -- she was told she was squatting on someone else’s land -- she moved her family to Ciudad Tablita, where the shanty homes were built on top of sewage, behind a slaughter- house. In the face of such conditions, she would soon search for yet another place to make her home. But the catalyst this time was an unexpected convulsion, this one occurring on a single day, January 23, 1958, when the military reign of Pérez Jiménez came crashing down. Across the capital, people took to the streets, claiming land and apartments in the new housing district.

On that day, my ten-year-old mother, wise beyond her years, joined my grandmother and the masses hunting for a piece of land. My mom, bold as brass even then, led my grandmother into one of the towering new superblocks, selecting an apartment on the third floor. For a moment, it must have seemed like a dream to walk through the clean, bright, brand-new rooms. But my grandmother, her heart pounding with fear of what the new government might bring, decided to flee. As they left the building, my mother glanced back, witnessing other families entering inside. Only later, after the chaos and tumult had subsided, would they learn that the apartment, had they stayed inside and held onto it, would one day have been theirs to keep.”

Victor introduces us to the matriarchs of the family, his grandmother and mother, a mother whose early experience sharpened her identity and wove in a determination for progress. She had felt the sting of missing an opportunity. This woman who seized their future brought Victor and his brother to NYC in the 1990s.

Victor explains that his book has only one audience, his daughter, Sana. It was made for her with the help of his wife, Shiori Kawasaki. Nevertheless, he divulges the discussions he had with his mother in this writing, the drawing back to fundamental experiences which also shaped his brother and father. This process of considerable reflection, recalling all of the attachments and influences involved, the book has only one audience but many authors.

The permanence we develop in early childhood, it initially comes with a great deal of idealization. As infants and toddlers we are faced with all sorts of frightening experiences, hunger, illness, hostility. We turn to and eventually internalize our caregivers as some all powerful being. One only needs to imagine a crying 2-year-old turning to mommy or daddy as their balloon floats a way, surely parents can overcome the chemical properties of helium and return it. Our super-parents provide a sense of safety with which we can begin exploring the world.

As the separation process continues it becomes clear that no one is perfect, can cure all our wants and needs. We are able to depend on people emotionally even with all their foibles. Our well intentioned parents, teachers, partners, leaders cannot make us perfect, but knowing they are there, either literally or through what they have given us, it is a maturation of idealization and love.

Ca s’abuela, Tarrafal, and Homecoming use images and words to navigate, to create, beauty and resilience out of what has passed. In each of these works we can feel the pulse of some long-ago experienced emotions. How once all encompassing states have been woven into our greater selves.

*Littal Melnik’s BFA photography studies developed her desire to see and connect with others, eventually leading her to pursue medicine and psychiatry. She is now interested in the drives and hopes that lead artists to create their work, as well as in the experiences of viewers. Littal Melnik received her BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She completed Medical School at Rutgers and continued to Mt Sinai and New York Presbyterian for her General and Child Psychiatry training. Currently she balances public sector work with teaching Child Psychiatry fellows at Columbia University Medical Center.

Penumbra Foundation’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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