A Memória como Ruína, a Ruína da Memória: (Re)Configurações dos Resquícios de uma Ditadura nos Livros de Artista de Ana Vidigal

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the work of the Portuguese artist Ana Vidigal, focusing particularly on her artist's books, which serve as a vehicle for working on the articulation of individual and collective memories of the dictatorship in Portugal. In this sense, we will discuss how Vidigal uses techniques of collecting and overlaying various fragments, mixing personal, family, political, and cultural memory to create critical aesthetic compositions about the dictatorship, the colonial war, and the condition of women. Interpreting her creative process from the perspective of studies on cultural memory and archive we explore the idea of productive memory and the role of archives as ruins that are reconfigured through artistic practice. The reflections of authors such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Andreas Huyssen, Marianne Hirsch, and Aleida Assmann, among others, are called upon here to highlight the potential of the artist's book as a space for dialogue between past and present.