In the lobby of the Hotel do Buçaco, almost hidden by a stairway, there is a panel of azulejos showing the mouth of the Tagus, some caravels facing the ocean and a sea-gull as those that might be around the place since there are mullets in the sea. The image I may wrongly remember eludes a tower that is not missing in other memories. During the last five centuries symbols like this have spread through the earth the fame of glorious adventures and feats of civilization as those which justify the journeys that humans dedicate to the places of cult.

This may be the way that one arrives in Belém, stepping down from a bus, and gets into a dream which combines the instances of time: the sleep of the stone, the shadow of the hour (or its tumult) and that nebulous matrix encompassing the memory, the historical text, the tale, the program, the souvenir, the picturesque, the postcard.

Photography has another support and may, at most, evoke this dream. I have tried to do this by insinuating a certain similarity: these images have been assembled, often in a laborious way, from a variable number of digital versions of 35 mm slides. There are technical motivations to this option such as the building of panoramics and the production of large prints from small format frames. But it also shows some metaphorical potentialities: the assembled image hides and reveals, in a selective or occasional way, its process of construction, which has to deal with the incoherence of perspectives, the lack of synchrony, the choice of themes, the mise en scéne. The final result combines the deceiving realism of photography with the pictorial character of a panel of azulejos.

Actually, this assembling process does not always end up to be necessary. Certain assemblages are found to be ready and one frame is enough to reproduce them. The evidence of this fact may be a question of emphasis: this may well be a consequence of the nature of all images.