Jumping into existence is the first solo exhibition by Cristóvão Maçarico, winner of the Young Creators W&T 2022, where he presents a series of analog photographs and a sound piece, which constitute a diary and visual journey where the past is not just a memory, but the solid foundation of the future.

Can the way we look at the place reflect who we are?
Maçarico has been working with analog photography to relate to the various dimensions of the places he relates on a human and emotional level.

In the series presented here, Jumping into existence marks an entry point in a new cycle. After a period outside the island where he was born, he returns to it and proposes a renewed look at it. The island remains; he does not. This gaze is registered in photography as a visual diary where places, people, landscapes, animals, and objects are a starting point to connect his past memories to the present, grouping images that now allow him to look at the past differently. Barthe describes photography as “the living image of a dead thing”. The people portrayed in the photographs belong to places that marked Christopher's mind, from Enschede, Netherlands, to São Miguel, among other places, and activate that "punctum" that philosopher Roland Barthes used to define as one of the fundamental strengths of photography.

The use of analog photography as a technique requires the management of material and temporal resources but also enables materiality in the final result - as well as in the process. The double exposure of real images with images of fabricated places (mockups) emphasizes the premonitory character of the photographs as images of desire. Registered places are spaces of possibility. Registered between Lisbon and São Miguel, they enable the artist's existence in the molds he decided.

This seemingly anthropological record is rather an essay on the self, human relationships, being and caring, and also the idea of death as the end of cycles and, consequently, the beginning of others.