The spinners of Memory: the city of Fortaleza archived in photographs and oral texts

Abstract

By following women from Poço da Draga – a neighbourhood located in the city of Fortaleza, Ceará State – Brazil, we have noticed that the threads of their trajectories and of the very territory are spun together and woven into the fabric of the telling of stories about the city. We approach this territory through photographs that these women keep in their homes and the narratives they tell about them. Starting from the ideas of Gagnebin, Assmann, Certeau and Didi-Huberman we aim to reflect about photographs can reveal not only individual biographies but also the biography of a city. These women are the guardians and artisans of life, as if they wore carefully handling a loom. Their photo albums also safekeep and evoke their invisible territories: the life created inside their homes, their kitchen tables, their backyards, and the passage of time on their sidewalks, these pieces of paper, woven by light, reveal each image as an extension of their bodies, in which they archive their biographies and the biographies of the city.