Photobook | Uma Azeitona Bordada em Azul

Self-published
1st Edition | 2024
300 copies
Hardcover; 80 Pages; 16,5x22cm

Photographs and Text | RUI COSTA
Production | NARRATIVA
Editing and Sequencing | MÁRIO CRUZ and RUI COSTA
Design | FERNANDA FAJARDO and JOÃO LINNEU
Printing | MAIADOURO

*Winner of Fnac New Talents Award 2023

Uma Azeitona Bordada em Azul (means: An Olive Embroidered in Blue)

Vulnerable, this need for impermanence that was manifested, inexplicable, in a second of apnea close to the definitive, endless. The opportunity that arose and that I document, between uncertainties of an imagined truth and the familiar fragility that takes away my discernment.

I tried to return to that place, emotionally, to try to understand you, irrationally, even
knowing that in the skin you inhabit, there are more lines and fewer words, than those
contained on this page.
And without questioning your choice, I try to understand what I don't feel.

This essay comes after my grandmother's suicide attempt, in early 2022.
An abrupt event, synonymous with rupture and restlessness. A limit that was reached,
saturated and dense. A path that was drawn, starting again and learning from what we are.

I then return to her safe place, to find her again available as always, to listen to her with the time I never had, to dedicate to her every day that does not repeat itself.
I sit down and listen to the stories she has to tell, some I know by heart from hearing them so often, others are as new as the pomegranates on the table, but all of them are old as the colour she is wearing.

The days go by and the minutes are hers, I observe her presence in the garden that now grows, we walk in the late afternoon without fear that the sun will hide.
I learn with the resilience that every day surprises, motivates and makes me believe that all this makes sense. I grow with the presence that always supported me even before I met myself and I repay it with my being, in that slow living.

I now realize how the purpose in which we use photography can originate an extremely positive impact on someone's life. That a photographic essay is an exchange of experiences, a manifestation of respect and trust, a need to understand and an attempt to see the world through another person's eyes.
This is my representation of gratitude and if photography is memory perhaps time is the tribute.

In the presence of the dimness, I contemplate the space that the land occupies;

Rui Costa