In my mind I hold the memory of the countless times I
have visited La  Ciotat (…). I assure you I have lost count
of all the visits I have made to La Ciotat.

And, yet, I have never been there.

Abílio Hernandez, 2013
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According to Jacques Derrida («Mal d' Archive»), there are several steps to saving a document in the archive. One of those steps is consignment, from which there is the image of lists, acronyms, or ciphers, producing a certain order. 3/1/2025 Consignment implies not only providing storage space but also placing the documents concerning each other, in an articulated system

Arquivo e Consignação aims to prove the hypothesis that images activate new meanings in (physical) proximity to other images, losing their uniqueness in order to then gain a relational and expansive meaning. This is the concept of «dialectical image» (Walter Benjamin), which does not embody the continuity between past and present, but rather focuses the movement of what was to the now in itself, becoming the center of a remembrance gesture. It is also about the duality of the image (Carlos Vidal), about its ability to refer to a field of meaning far removed from itself.

Indexing by number and letters (purely conventional relationship) is the oldest and most effective way of archiving, however, it is necessary to create another system clarifying this inscription. This apparent clarification is often too cryptic and diffuse to be cleared up by the archon or the bureaucrat. 

This new indexing in Arquivo e Consignação obliterates the context, time, and place that usually accompany photographs in archives, albums, and even computer files. This omission excludes them from a narrative reading in advance and increases receptive tension because one always asks where and when before the photographs.

According to David Santos (2001)¹, regarding traveling as a mechanism of gathering images, the artistic practice of the artist José Maçãs de Carvalho involved a broader understanding of that very universe, later establishing a new order of the referents gathered in the travels, altering the correspondence of meaning between image and referent.

This has, in fact, been a recurring practice in the works by José Maçãs de Carvalho, this questioning of what is visible with what is unspeakable through affirming the word in a tense relationship with the image.

Consequently, it seems as though these two questions are recurring and substantial: images stripped of context, time, and place, in meaning yet to come; and, the presence of the word, which also brings linguistic friction to the image, also disturbs the relationship with what is visible, after all, José Maçãs de Carvalho speaks of the word as an «impressiva» [impressive] (Derrida) mark in this new series of conjugations, engraved on the skin of the image.

It is worth noting the intentional formal imbalance between iconic image and verbal image (the words engraved on the photograph are small) so that in the first (visual) instance, the viewer can look at the photograph without the disturbance of text, and thus have a very visual perceptive relationship with the photographs on the wall, and then later realize that the little black spot turns into text.

The word engraved on the image refers to physical places established in the collective memory and takes one to geographical places whose individual affection (the subjective perception) is decisive in their expressiveness.

These photographs interrupt the usual correspondence between image and word (especially if one thinks of how in the titles of most photographs, the place where it was taken is always included), thus causing a new association of meaning, after all, in each one of these images there are no elements that force the connection between photograph and place. Therefore, the dissimilarity space emerges from this opacity in the analog relationship of the photograph with reality, where the credibility of the image is suspended by the intrusion of the word.

José Maçãs de Carvalho, April 2016
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¹ In this 2001 text titled Linguagem, verdade e percepção, David Santos takes up Carlos Vidal’s analysis of José Maçãs de Carvalho’s catalog for the 1998 exhibition Hotline, held in Macao, Hong Kong, Lisbon and later in Madrid, which was, at heart, a project for the public space.