Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Old Process »
Silver Medal
Thereza begins from an absence: the erased history of the artist’s great-grandmother. With no family records or documents, Balestrin seeks to restart an existence from what remains — fragments, silences, traces. Through photography, writing, and experimental and organic cyanotype processes, the artist transforms oblivion into matter and imagination.
The project unfolds as an act of re-enchantment of matter. Photography ceases to be mere record and becomes a process of recomposition: dissolved in water, reconstituted by light, reinvented through manual gestures. Each image is an exercise in both technical and poetic reinvention — a way of giving presence back to what had been silenced.
Against the linearity of historical time, Thereza proposes a circular temporality, where past and present intertwine like waters flowing between generations. The work is at once memory and rebirth — a way of restoring to life what seemed lost, and of recognizing that nothing ceases, it only transforms into another form of existence.
