Offerings, 2017. Digital from 4x5 Tintypes Offerings connect the tintype as a historical photographic method to African ancestry and their residues in the contemporary Transamerican African Diaspora. As an intervention in archival paradigms, I use the tintype to reclaim and re-appropriate 19th-century photographic medium to produce objects where the Western African liturgy is at the center. In each tintype, a specific food is been offered to a specific Orisha or cause. The series is also an index of Western African offerings to the Americas, a gift not yet fully availed.
Paula Damasceno is a Brazilian visual artist and scholar, born in Rio de Janeiro City in 1975, and based in Greensboro, North Carolina since 2012. Her artistic strategy uses historical and alternative photographic methods as departing points for the articulation of individual and collective subjectivities within histories and cultures. Collapsing techniques and materials, she also collapses ideas and visual perceptions to create art that invites wonder and critical thinking. She holds a BFA with a concentration in Photography from the UNC Greensboro.
