Stolen Books
Catalogue of Spectrum exhibition, a project by the cultural association Hélice, on view at the Avenida da India gallery from May 7th to June 26th, 2022. The publication brings together records of the collective’s activity, focusing on the collective production of a photographic archive.
¬¬“Dante found Virgil, shadow or man, finding his guide to hell. As for us, shadows will guide us through the history of images, with and without movement, with or without a will of art – whatever that may be. Nameless, the young daughter of a Corinthian potter, outlines the shadow of her departing lover, grasping, with this gesture, a presence, in the imminence of his absence – replacing the traveller with an image”.
– José António Leitão
“Throughout the archive, the collective intends the image to impose itself as a founding entity, with text appearing at its periphery. This permanent inconsistency of the archive also disconnects from the establishment of the exercise of power, making intelligible what is being archived: a useless archive when placed in an institutional perspective.”
– Hélice Team
“The images that came together in Spectrum are stripped of any context, authorship, intention, or origin – all these strings are cut off, lost. And so, unlike the content of a classical archive, these images can be “reincarnated”. The balance that seems to be inherent to anything in life: every time something disappears, a space for something new emerges. What is that, when it comes to photographs?”
– Katarína Poliačiková
Stolen Books