“ A brasileira ”
Everything begins with an absence. Juliette Malveau, a French photographer of Portuguese roots, crosses the Atlantic to Brazil in search of her origins. In her luggage, almost nothing: fragments of memory about a missing Brazilian grandfather named Amado, and a DNA map that leads her to the sertão of the Northeast. It is from lack, chance, and uncertainty that Juliette embarks on a “hero’s journey,” giving rise to the series Amada família.
Along the way, the artist meets people who share her surname, Amado, and with them travels across Brazil from north to south. Like her ancestor, the Bahian writer Jorge Amado, Juliette explores territories, gestures, and details of Brazilian culture, drawing closer to multiple regional identities. Her work moves between the intimate and the imaginary, reaching a universal dimension by addressing contemporary questions such as migration, belonging, and lineage.
Without adhering to ideologies, beliefs, or fixed narratives, Juliette places herself in relation to others. Her gaze creates sensitive spaces of encounter, where different cultures, histories, and subjectivities recognize and transform one another. Photography thus becomes a gesture of listening and connection.
In this process, the artist reinvents the family album. Far from being an archive of the past meant to preserve faces and events for future generations, her album constructs, from the present, a new family. The series weaves together an imagined ancestry, full of possibilities, with the reality of the emotional bonds Juliette builds with the Amados who welcome her along her journey.
Amada família weaves an emotional thread connecting the grandfather who disappeared in Portugal more than sixty years ago, the French artist and her present-day family relationships, and a Brazilian ancestry in constant expansion, spread across the vastness of the territory. As Clarice Lispector, another great voice of Brazilian literature, once wrote, “to lose oneself is also a path.” In Amada Família, losing oneself is, above all, a way of belonging.
Everything begins with an absence. Juliette Malveau, a French photographer of Portuguese roots, crosses the Atlantic to Brazil in search of her origins. In her luggage, almost nothing: fragments of memory about a missing Brazilian grandfather named Amado, and a DNA map that leads her to the sertão of the Northeast. It is from lack, chance, and uncertainty that Juliette embarks on a “hero’s journey,” giving rise to the series Amada família.
Along the way, the artist meets people who share her surname, Amado, and with them travels across Brazil from north to south. Like her ancestor, the Bahian writer Jorge Amado, Juliette explores territories, gestures, and details of Brazilian culture, drawing closer to multiple regional identities. Her work moves between the intimate and the imaginary, reaching a universal dimension by addressing contemporary questions such as migration, belonging, and lineage.
Without adhering to ideologies, beliefs, or fixed narratives, Juliette places herself in relation to others. Her gaze creates sensitive spaces of encounter, where different cultures, histories, and subjectivities recognize and transform one another. Photography thus becomes a gesture of listening and connection.
In this process, the artist reinvents the family album. Far from being an archive of the past meant to preserve faces and events for future generations, her album constructs, from the present, a new family. The series weaves together an imagined ancestry, full of possibilities, with the reality of the emotional bonds Juliette builds with the Amados who welcome her along her journey.
Amada família weaves an emotional thread connecting the grandfather who disappeared in Portugal more than sixty years ago, the French artist and her present-day family relationships, and a Brazilian ancestry in constant expansion, spread across the vastness of the territory. As Clarice Lispector, another great voice of Brazilian literature, once wrote, “to lose oneself is also a path.” In Amada Família, losing oneself is, above all, a way of belonging.
Ioana Mello
