N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
caption: detail from Dioso Simões’ booklet in Propeller Propaganda. Deisgn by Paulo Arraiano. When we asked Diogo to collaborate with Propeller Propaganda, there was a lot of possibilities in the air and no pre-established idea of what he could publish. After some options were dropped, the series of photographs we then published was suggested, but…
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More about São Trindade’s work Dead Inside can be seen here. More about São Trindade’s book Bad Liver and a Broken Heart can be seen here.
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image caption (above): © Margarida Gouveia, Beautiful People #1, poster for Propeller #3 – Propaganda, 2019. More of Margarida’s recent work can be seen here. These black-and-white photographs constitute an imaginary that calls to mind scientific and forensic photography. They are imbued with a sense of strangeness and of a hygienic and strictly functional world in…
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image caption (above): © Soraya Vasconcelos, untitled, digital c-print, 122×163 cm, 2007. More of Soraya’s recent work can be seen here. Models of “territories” are constructed with organic matter and inorganic material: paint, pigments, varnishes, wax, plaster… There is a process of constructionIs it possible to formulate a general theory of artistic collaboration? And…
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photo caption (above): Chine, Shenzhen, 2017, Scene #1350 © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos Les employés d’un institut de beauté participent à une réunion de motivation avant de commencer leur travail. When is enough, enough? Vice is obviously no reference when it comes to dignifying the use of photographs in the media, but still I…
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image caption (above): © Paulo Arraiano, Swiping Reality, 2016, Acrylic On Canvas, 180 x 150 cm. More of Paulo’s work can be seen here. Excerpt from Miguel Moore‘s FOLD/FAULT. More here. In the fast-paced frenzy that drives our contemporary societies, where thoughts and impulses are beamed by way of artificial satellites and express the paramount need to…
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I’ve been following Nihilsentimentalgia for the past six years or so. I visit the blog every two or three months and read an entry or two. It’s an open but stable relationship. It seemed that every time I read the blog there are texts exactly matching the issues I currently grapple with, like a creepy…
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While updating some info on Nihil’s early posts I came across a post featuring an image by Alex Kisilevich. It seemed weird to have a post with a single image and as I went looking for more, I found not only that I made a second post a year after that but, and that’s the…
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First posts were made exactly ten years ago (and what a strange day I chose to start this – it’s Portugal’s national day…). As I go through those first years, I realize I never once addressed Cindy Sherman’s photographs, which is surprising, for at the time she was an inspiration. The other day, while in…
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Ever since I left Glasgow, I”ve tried to keep up, at a distance, with what artists are doing there and by this time of the year, with the Degree Show happening at GSA, there’s always something worth seeing. The last degree show I saw in Glasgow I remember being very impressed with a particular work…
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Everything is workshopable these days. It’s an amazing thing. We can either learn to do things watching youtube videos or we can learn pretty much every technique attending workshops about this and that. As I see it, there’s clearly something weird about this. I’m not sure what it is, but somehow it affects the way…
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photo: Palestinian mourners carry the body of eight-month-old Palestinian baby Leila Anwar Ghandoour, who died from tear gas inhalation in Gaza City on 15 May 2018 [Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency] As of Sunday, a succession of events has once again reanimated a question that often comes to mind, namely: what would make me go into exile? Throughout…
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I met Duarte and Valter when doing my undergrad in photography. Both were my teachers and tutors and for quite some time that was the role assigned to them. In September 2008 brief notes were made about both of them. At the time, Valter was working with José Nuno Lamas, exploring landscape, performance and play. Duarte was finding his…
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Before advancing, I feel I must apologize for this confessional note. Really, if you haven’t been a reader of Nihil, do yourself a favor and stop reading; this exposure of the private life of Nihil will make little sense in any case. I’ve been suffering from a strange set of headaches that bring along an…
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Throughout this year, I’ll be publishing reader’s posts. To start, here is an article by one of Nihilsentimentalgia’s dearest readers: Robin Cracknell. When I first discovered Nihilsentimentalgia, I was a very different person. I had just had my first solo show in London, two more in the works, every day in my diary pencilled-in…
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Throughout this year, I’ll be publishing reader’s posts. Here is an article by one of Nihilsentimentalgia’s special readers: Jonathan Morse. Seen below, one of history’s little ruins: evidence that in or after 1915, something pressed itself upon a glass photographic negative and broke it. When the cracks radiated through the negative’s matrix and tore…
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What happens inside our homes, in the domestic environment, is something that truly fascinates me, particularly when considering how that intimate environment can be brought into the public sphere, with integrity and respect. In the first months of Nihilsentimentalgia that was pretty obvious. I shared artwork by Esko Manniko, Holly Lynton, Tina Barney, Melissa Ann…
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Dating from mid 90’s, Richard Billingham‘s project Ray’s a Laugh is still a reference to me and I always show it to students whenever we address the art of documenting intimate stories and domestic environments. Ray’s a Laugh is a project about Richard’s father Ray and his mother Liz and their life indoors. If what Billingham…
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As Nihilsentimentalgia’s early readers know well, at the core of this platform is an interest for the idea of phototherapy and, consequently, different approaches to the idea of self. Throughout the years, I’ve done my experiments using photography as a personal therapeutic tool and I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really work for…
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One of my earliest posts featured a couple of photographs by Malerie Marder and ten years later I am very surprised to go through her work and see that she has been seriously addressing intimacy, not only thematically, as core object of her compositions, but also in what the photographic camera, as a technological medium, does, within…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 