mayara ferrão

“Album of deforgetfulness”,  2024

Mixed media on photo paper

“Album of deforgetfulness” unfolds as a visual–poetic act of reparation, addressing the archival erasure of Black and Indigenous women in Brazil’s colonial record. Through a speculative and intimate image repertoire, the project fabulates submerged histories of affection between women of the past, tracing forms of kinship and desire that exceed the limits of official narration.

Working across analogue photography, artificial intelligence, and image manipulation, artist Mayara Ferrão unsettles the boundaries between fiction, memory, and history. The archive is not retrieved but reimagined, opened, queered, and made porous. “Unarchiving” thus emerges as a dissident practice: a refusal of linear historiography and a gesture toward affective, non-normative modes of relation.

In this space, absence becomes generative. What was never fully recorded persists as trace and as possibility, inviting the imagining of futures sustained by fugitive, intimate, and enduring bonds.