“With her various researches, Lívia Melzi approaches, by means of photography and without making any judgment, the questions of identity, of appropriation of objects, of the cultural heritage preserved in Western museums and of their restitution; while transporting us in historical, geographical, ethnographic odysseys between reality and imagination.
What is the role and power of images? Based on an archaeological analysis, to which this study is similar with the constitution of a corpus of photographs and archival texts from various sources and periods, how does our imagination come about? How to reconstruct the history of a people, from this mantle – symbol of a vanished culture?
And similar to the artist Paulo Nazareth, whose approach she appreciates, Melzi points out: “we must try to bring forgotten stories back to contemporary realities.”
Sylvie Fontaine
