Incisions: The Ground Made Image

(Text for virtual catalog)

The Starting Point: Before Looking Down

A life almost goes by without our ancestry shimmering within us. Yet, at some point in our existence, a light turns on, as if a long-dormant search suddenly awakens—one we didn’t even know was there. When I see Helena Lopes’ works from the series From the Ground to the Ground, her quest becomes evident: a creative process involving the investigation of the other—the familial atavistic—that ultimately becomes a search for the self and for being in the world.

In Helena’s case, the starting point for unraveling her journey of ancestral search is Budzyn, Poland, an agricultural municipality that, as the word’s etymology suggests, is the smallest part of a village. From this small place of 4,475 inhabitants, a story unfolds and renews itself through the production of artworks that arise from the artist’s reminiscences—not only of her ancestors’ lives but also those of other refugees and prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, which she visited with her sisters in 2019. This search also evolved into an inquiry about humanity’s future and how to cope with a present that carries memory.

Helena’s mother is the starting point of this narrative. Born in Budzyn on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, she migrated to Brazil at the age of four. A story that echoes countless others. It is a global sociopolitical fact, a part of shared global culture. Psychoanalyst Christian Dunker, when recounting his own family history, also cannot avoid connecting it to a broader situation—that of war and its aftermath—when he writes:

"At war’s end, uniforms are shed. Friends and foes become indistinguishable. A time of panic begins, marked by another kind of search for refuge. (...) Wandering arises—a feeling that one must leave where they are without knowing exactly where to go. In that moment, we cling to a kind of fixed idea, a point of return that tells us, even if only imaginatively, where home is."

The feeling of being lost persists, as does the longing for connection—a yearning that transcends generations.

The Experience of Maybe Being (“An intruder out of time”)

Helena's elaboration of history expands into writing, with artistic production overflowing from it. These two languages interconnect, lending the narrative a sense of truth derived from lived experience and a dose of fiction. These explorations culminated in a book and an exhibition, both titled From the Ground to the Ground.

In the book, Helena idealizes and blends timelines: at times, she places herself in the past, with her mother, imagining what it would be like to be there, sharing the anguish of being surrounded by darkness, loss, and the transit into the unknown. At other moments, she shifts to the present, and with the benefit of distance, questions the place of affection amid chaos and, as she puts it, “the void of non-belonging.”[2]

The feeling of "not being part of" deepens when Helena incorporates into her personal memory the experiences of other war victims. During her visit to the extermination camp, the search for affection becomes almost tangible—so dense that it could seemingly be cut with a knife. The birch forest (Birkenau), in the middle of which the camp was constructed in a clearing, could have been the narrative's pleasant façade but instead becomes a shadow of the poetic. Philosopher and historian Georges Didi-Huberman expresses this idea poignantly when he observes that the textures of birch bark, which he gazes at and photographs, resemble those captured by countless other visitors. His image-making practice thus becomes part of a shared culture, as previously mentioned.[3]

Helena shares Didi-Huberman’s connection to "the thing"—the birch bark—as something that may perhaps stand in for the lives that were lost or acknowledge the unspeakable nature of the events. The thing becomes a witness to history. Helena also observes the birch grove, followed by a vast expanse of dry, barren land that could hint at an escape route, were it not unfeasible.

The Ground and the Capture of the Hidden

This is where the image serves as a means to transform the inert quality of "the thing" into materiality within time, even as an image. Nise da Silveira, reflecting on ways of perceiving things, pondered their possible directions: the gaze toward the external world as mere imitation or the acknowledgment of an internal reality, vast and uniquely suited to visual language, which aims "not to reflect the visible, but to make the invisible visible.”[4][5]

Helena’s difficulty connecting with her surroundings during her visit to the camp led her to look downward—toward the ground, its crevices, cracks, and fissures. Suddenly, a unique geography emerged within the macrocosm of panic, revealing textures and the possibility of closeness, with the promise of art on the horizon. Helena Lopes, the printmaker, remains in what arises from the ground she photographed: incisions, grooves, and furrows are present. These marks persist, contemporary with her reflective and meticulous process in her search for the "secrets of the ground.”[6]

It is worth noting that Helena’s engagement with the ground is intertwined with her physical presence, as she moves through spaces, establishing herself through walking and incessant clicking. In the interplay between biography and environment, what forms, according to art historian Hans Belting, is a collective body that combines “personal particularities with collective dimensions.” He adds: “This dual imprint expresses itself in the mutable acceptance and acquiescence with which we confront images of the external world.” Helena accepts these images but subverts them, making them collide with the repression, violence, and nightmares endured by others. She invents a new place for the images—a place in memory rather than a site of memory, as Belting, citing Pierre Nora, describes.[7]

He writes: “Places do not disappear or dissolve without a trace; they leave remnants in a palimpsest of multiple layers, where old and new representations have nested and sedimented.”[8]

The Process, Photography, and Mutation

Digital photography, as something neither absolute nor singular, reproduces itself and, like places, leaves traces layer upon layer of the interventions it undergoes. However, it also becomes material for reflecting on the extent to which the aura of the visited place and the artist's gaze render original what might otherwise be a copy, since photography establishes itself as the foundational language for capturing the lived environment in Helena's project.

In Character, one of the emblematic images of this series, we see an example of how layers operate across the various stages of digital procedures. This positions us before questions about the unique and the multiple, as well as the correlations between figuration and abstraction, and between the animate and the inanimate. After all, the Character—a textured and colored mark on the ground—is elevated by the artist not merely as a visual representation but as a living presence. It becomes her travel companion and guide: “The Character calls me, directs me, signals the path among the visitors' feet. I think of nothing. With my body bent, looking at the ground, I follow.”[9]

The life Helena imbues into the Character is part of her process of thinking about the digital as a way to reframe lived experience. The first image, captured at the moment of her visit, remains a work in itself, but she revisits it, creating a second version, adding new tones and incorporating new elements to balance and protect it. In one of its "legs," she adds a sock, similar to one she often wears, transformed into a graphic mark.

Helena’s images evolve along her journey, acquiring life and names: the mask, the food, the grid, Virgil, the tightrope walker, the father, the ship, the bulb. Given the artist's disorientation, as she recounts in the book, we could invoke Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny[10], as Helena's movement in many photographs animates the inanimate, prompted by the discomfort of unfamiliarity. This acts as a counterpoint to the familiar knowledge of the history she carries. Confronting the unease of the situation, the artist finds figures in the cracks of the ground, rendering the environment more palatable and less frightening. From this, her narrative emerges and unfolds.

In developing the series, experimentation with digital media was not merely a technical act to resolve visual demands but a conceptual effort to fulfill the artist’s desire to reach her intended outcome. Helena frequently employs resources such as mirroring figures, extracting, displacing, and resizing forms. These practices reconfigure that determined reality, creating new landscapes. They are, as Cândida Almeida wrote, poetics of recomposition, which occur when the artist seeks to “recompose a given semiotic arrangement of the work.”[11] This broadens the poetic dimension, allowing room for the unexpected and creating space for new meanings.

From that initial search for her ancestry—which shimmered into awareness for Helena and spurred the movement that led to this place of artistic production—something has transformed. The image’s mutations point to this transformation. In mirroring, for example, the memory of what was seen finds new paths to becoming. For some, such as the narrator in a Guimarães Rosa story[12], the mirror, in its metaphysical sense, carries enigmas whose precise meanings escape us; for others, mirroring makes something manifest, an identification.

Thus, the originating ground—emerging from a collective experience tied to a nefarious political action—undergoes mutations facilitated by artistic practice. It becomes a rewriting of the image that leads to another story: present and alive.

Renata Azambuja

[1] DUNKER, C. Reinvenção da intimidade: políticas do sofrimento cotidiano. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2017. pp. 7-8.

[2] LOPES, H. Do chão para o chão. São Paulo: Giostri, 2023. p. 28.

[3] DIDI-HUBERMAN, G. Cascas. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2017.

[4] SILVEIRA, N. O mundo das imagens. São Paulo: Ed. Ática, 1992.

[5] Ibid, p. 82. Silveira refere-se a Paul Klee.

[6] LOPES, H. Op. cit. p. 39.

[7] BELTING, H. Antropologia da imagem: para uma ciência da imagem. Lisboa: KKYM + EAUM, 2014. p. 81.

[8] Ibid, p.85.

[9] LOPES, H. Op. cit. p.47.

[10] FREUD, S. O infamiliar. São Paulo: Autêntica, 2019. “O estranho é aquela categoria do assustador que remete ao que é conhecido, de velho, e há muito familiar.” p. 64.

[11] ALMEIDA, C. Poéticas da recomposição: arte, rede e cognição. In: Estéticas tecnológicas: novos modos de sentir. Orgs. Lucia Santaella, Priscila Arantes. São Paulo: Educ, 2008. p. 202.

[12] ROSA, G.  Primeiras histórias. São Paulo: Global, 2019. Recurso digital