Solar Cartographies: A Speculative Dialogue through Artistic Practices on Heritage, Transformation and Time

Abstract

This talk proposes an open dialogue around the artistic project Cartografias Solares (2023), developed during an art-science residency at i3S – Institute for Research and Innovation in Health – in Porto, Portugal, as part of the Ancestry Traveller initiative. The work emerges from the intersection of ancestral data, embodied memory, and the transformation of what dissolves into new imaginaries. It opens a space to rethink how we might relate to personal and collective heritage through slow disintegration, reimagining, and touching what remains with care — embracing decay as a space for transformation.
Cartografias Solares begins with the artist undergoing a DNA test and receiving a detailed genetic ancestry profile — framing ancestry through numerical patterns, geographic distributions and coordinates. But rather than interpreting these results as rigid truths or roots to be claimed, the artist decided that the project should approach them as fragments in motion, traces of a time that resists clear categorization. The question then becomes: how can one relate to heritage not as something to be preserved in its original form, but as something to be reactivated, softened, and reimagined across time?
Using cyanotype—a photographic process dependent on sunlight—as a central technique, the work employs light-sensitive chemistry, handmade cotton paper, botanical materials, and tea-based dyes. The process relies on exposure, staining, and slow transformation. The sun, ever-present and unchanging across generations, becomes a temporal bridge that burns memory into matter. This ephemeral cartography is not interested in geographical accuracy or historical fixity, but in gesturing toward imagined landscapes shaped by emotion, displacement, and tactile remembrance.
Banana leaves, dried and stitched with golden thread, recall a childhood memory of embroidery with matriarchal figures, evoking practices passed through hands rather than documents. These fragile surfaces—wrinkled, irregular, and slowly degrading—refuse the permanence expected of archival material. Instead, they become a canvas for questioning which forms of heritage deserve preservation, and which might be allowed to shift, fray, or dissolve altogether.
In this presentation, the artist reflects on the making of Cartografias Solares as both process and proposition: a refusal to mourn the loss of linear narratives, and an embrace of heritage as porous, participatory, and shaped by decay. The project suggests that what we inherit may not be facts or traditions, but ways of sensing, making, and being-with materials that hold time in their fibers.
This talk invites the audience into an intimate exploration of how decay can be a method rather than a failure—how the decomposing edges of identity and history might enable new forms of care, speculative thinking, and soft resistance to rigid cultural continuity. Through projected visuals, storytelling, and conceptual unfolding, Cartografias Solares becomes not only an artwork, but a gesture toward futures where heritage is not fixed, but continuously remade in the warmth of what remains.