SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes

Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa

05 . 09 . 2025 → 04 . 10 . 2025

monday - friday → 12:00 pm – 07:00 pm

saturday → 02:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Artist

Patrik Rastenberger

Latitude of Sorrow -project focuses on the use of photography in the creation of racism as an inherent part of European culture. Ethnographic photography has been imposed to create the concept of human race with unjust ideologies and narratives which has no basis in the natural sciences. (...) The issue of racism is a product of European culture; therefore, it is unfair to leave people of colour to remind us of its resolution. The employment of images is essential, when studying how photography has produced the biased worldview we live with. In Latitude of Sorrow -series my artistic method is to combine archival material of my own family, old ethnographic photographs and my own images. To dismantle the visual performance that was applied to create the colonial narrative, I return to the visual sources that were deployed in the process. The deconstruction relies on the knowledge I possess from my own culture and its racist history.

Latitude of Sorrow -series bridge present and past, creating new narratives and perspectives to review the world around us. The idea of monocultural nation-state has been characteristic of Europe since 19th century, and our relation to nature reflects parallel longing for a monoculture in ecosystems. Postcolonial and posthuman themes do interlace in the conceptual approach as well as in the expression of the series.

The nature of photography is violent, and awareness of the ethical problems related to images is present at my work. The selection of images has been sensitive, and the identities of the characters have been deleted categorically, abstracting the personalities rendering the theme and subject universal. Can art be a tool to locate the historical roots of structural racism, dismantle the idea of monolingual and - cultural nation-state, and, and point the way towards a more pluralistic and inclusive society?