Theories and practices that mutually stimulate one another

This essay highlights photographic projects developed within the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Photography and Cinema, reflecting the tension between theory and the experiential “eroticism” of practice, as noted by Susan Sontag and Henk Borgdorff. Ari Mouroa and Teresa Ribeiro’s Impressions documents elderly participants from the Senior University of Vila das Aves, exploring shared learning and memory. Emanuel Constantino’s De Zhejiang investigates the industrial community of Varziela, evoking a sense of estrangement between people, buildings, and landscape. Felícia Oliveira’s Sem Passado engages with archival traces of abandoned children in Porto’s Casa da Roda, transforming memory objects into visual testimony. Natalia Perulero’s Quemadura experiments with photography’s elemental materials—light and time—balancing figuration and abstraction. Together, these works reveal photography’s critical, poetic, and transformative possibilities. School of Media, Arts and Design, Póvoa de Varzim and Vila do Conde