My work revolves around two central issues, identity, and memory. I am interested in how these two concepts are created and how we relate to them. My starting point is always the archive, which helps me researching these topics. When I talk about archive I am not referring only to the images I found in various flea markets, but also to all the pictures I have personally taken during my trips to Luanda and around the world. I would say that the archive is not just an encyclopedia of images I can work with, but it is the sketch from which I build a new narrative for the original images. Thanks to it, I can look at the images – even the ones taken by me - with an archaeological gaze, unveiling the pictures and looking for elements to add to them.
In this sort of archaeological process, I use what you might consider as alternative techniques. I work with analog photography and techniques such as cyanotype, platinum and palladium printing. Thanks to these photographic processes, which are the core of photography itself, I can add various elements to the original picture – which is never destroyed – making it lose its original perspective. I would say the images turn tridimensional, showing the complexity of a specific context or process. That's why my work is full of stamps, words, numbers and also superimposed images. The choice of the new elements might seem arbitrary, as it happens with the stamps and codes we all have in our documents, which are often the first things that define us. So I considered this newly created image a document, which shows all the different layers which are present in life or in a place, thus contributing to the complex process of creating our identity and our memories.
Delio Jasse (Angola)
Délio Jasse (born in 1980, Luanda, Angola) currently lives and works in Milan. In his photographic work, Délio Jasse often interweaves found images with clues from past lives (found passport photos, family albums) to draw links between photography - in particular the concept of the ‘latent image' - and memory. Jesse is also known for experimenting with analog photographic printing processes, including cyanotype, platinum and early printing processes such as ‘Van Dyke Brown', as well as developing his own printing techniques. The analog processes that Jasse uses confer to his works a monotypic character, subverting the reproducibility of the photographic medium, through the direct intervention on unconventional supports, and also the application of emulsion with gestural strokes or with chromatic notes. Recent exhibitions include the group show African Metropolis at the MAXXI in Rome (2018), Recent Histories: New Photography from Africa at the Walther Collection Project Space in New York, the official selection of the 12th Dakar Biennale (2016), the 56th Venice Biennale (Angolan Pavilion, 2015), Milan Expo (Angolan Pavilion, 2015), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal (2013) and the 9th Bamako Photography Encounters (2011). He was one of three finalists in the BES Photo Prize (2014) and won the Iwalewa Art Award in 2015.