In his project, Da Pedra ao Osso, student João Ramilo works on the question of territory and its relation- ship with place, more specifically, his home village of Louriceira. According to the student: ‘This desire was born out of the restlessness of seeing the place where I grew up disappear and the inability to fight the circumstances without necessarily wanting to change its nature, becoming a village on the verge of extinction’. Thus, this body of work shows an ontological understanding of place, in which the relationship between the self and places is established, which raises an essential reflection on the existence and death of spaces, places and territories. The manifestation of this problem realises the essential processes of permanent changes in the rural world. This project emerges from the notions of space, place, territory, personal or shared memories, remembrance, and nostalgia without necessarily wanting to touch on a political sphere. According to João Ramilo: ‘I approach Louriceira from a perspective of farewell and absence’.
The visual exploration of the territory is also one of the central themes in the work of José Miguel Ribeiro and his series Na Cratera do Vulcão. Based on the texts and ethnographic notes written by anthropologist Paulo Valverde during his fieldwork in São Tomé and Príncipe between 1995 and 1999 and posthumously compiled by João de Pina Cabral in the book Máscara, Mato e Morte: Textos para uma etno- grafia de São Tomé, Celta Editora (2000), this photographic project seeks to capture and understand how, on these islands, the world of the dead coexists side by side with the world of the living.
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School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University