A Pain That Will Not Fade is an on-going project which I started after my grand-mother passed away in front of me. Both a testament to the love I have for her and to the multiple and incoherent stages of grief, my work aims to document the process of having to let someone you love go.
From pure shock to despair, from sadness to assimilation, from unable to fathom her disappearance to trying to accept it… grieving demands a lot from you, and death takes you by surprise. In order to make sense of what happened, I put my mind - quite naturally - to exposing moments that spoke to the feelings I had to face, despite wanting to block everything out.
After she passed away, we had to bring back her body to Portugal, where she lived and was born and raised before emigrating to France to escape poverty and Salazar’s dictatorship. She was buried in her hometown, and as we spent a few days at her house, I looked after the pile of photographs from her life, testimony to the joyous person that she’s always been despite poverty, estrangement from home and her abusive husband.
I used some of these photographs, hiding her face with dried out petals, as a way to respect her memory, her privacy, but also to link myself to these pictures of her from the sixties, seventies and eighties. And if I’m honest, A Pain That Will Not Fade is mostly about the fact that I will miss her until the day that I pass away as well.
