My current incursion into archives expands from a childhood curiosity about my father's war memorabilia (Fig. 1). He fought in the last two years of the colonial war in former Portuguese Guinea (1963–1974), and during that period he collected photographs of the war. I began examining those images in my childhood and have continued to work with them as a professional artist interested in the photographic medium and as an anthropologist attempting to assess human behavior. My research, as both visual artist and anthropologist, is intimately related to that album of photographs, the individual prints, and the album as an object—even when I create works that might appear to have no relation to them.
For a considerable time, I created artworks by erasing, covering, or even destroying photographs and objects from my father's album (Fig. 2). Some of these works were merely inspired by the images...