Inês Marinho

These photos record impulsive performances within a specific deliberate composition allowing for both the carefully planned and the accidental, some exposing an affinity to ghost stories and haunted house tales.

The house in which I took these photographs is a place that tells stories, my mother’s, grandmother’s, even my grandfather’s and my great grandmother’s, who I have only met through stories. This house is built after memories. In this house I am confronted with my family’s memory, and with my own history.

These stories have been shared in the family. How mom’s grandma had lived with Sonia and Robert Delaunay when they were in our hometown, socialised with their painter friends and how she was even considered part of the family. The Delaunays wanted her to move to Spain with them, but the first war was on and there was an atmosphere of mistrust and fear in Portugal. When my great grandmother Beatriz was crossing the northern border with Delaunay’s luggage, she was accused of working for spies and arrested.

This event from a distant past, that happened to my great grandmother — someone I never met, feels very present to me. I even feel a kind of regret for my great grandma, wishing she could have had an eventful life abroad, even knowing, at the same time, that if it wasn’t for that unfortunate occurrence at the border I wouldn’t have been born.

This series is a family narrative, taking place in my grandparents’ house, commissioned by my grandfather and created in the same street where his mother, my great grandmother Beatriz, once modelled and cooked for the Delaunays. 

Throughout the process of staging photos of me and my mother in her childhood home, I seek to reveal their symbolic and conventional qualities. I work with the materiality of photography, the limitations and fragility of the medium to tell and perceive a family trauma. I am re-interpreting something that has not been photographed.

Inês Marinho (1990) is a visual artist from Portugal.  She studied Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and holds a master’s degree in Professional Photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design, in Madrid. She has been published in magazines such as Fotoroom, GUP, i-D, Rûm,  Ain’t Bad. In 2018 she was artist in residence in the Nordic Lights Festival of Photography, Kristiansund (Norway), was awarded the Honourable mention in the FNAC Portugal New Talent Award,  selected for the Debut exhibition by the Lithuanian Photographers Association and shortlisted for the IWPA (International Women Photographers Association) Award. Her work revolves around personal stories, memory, family, landscape, and the relationship between the human being and his environment.