Real Fictions: Conceptual documentaries.

Photography has always been attached to the concept of document. New digital photographic techniques and access to endless archives in the internet have widened the uses and opportunities for artists working with photographs. Many artists are now working with these archives and personal photographs to create projects that only photojournalists and people working ‘in situ’ could carry out before. Photography has changed not only in techniques but also in distribution. Now we all recycle, clip, cut, copy, paste, mix, upload and download. We don’t even need a camera now to produce new photographs.

This lab aims to help artists, photographers and users to take advantage of this new situation in order to produce art projects with personal and shared images from the internet, to create stories and comment on or customize existing ones.

The starting point is last year’s futureplaces event-photo session “It’s Raining Families”, where formal and informal families, as well as groups of people of all kinds, had their portraits made at Praça dos Poveiros. An exhibition of these portraits will be opened at this year’s edition of the festival, and this exhibition will be interactive in very literal ways: visitors and workshop participants will be invited to add themselves to the exhibited portraits, therefore proposing to belong to the families of their choice. We thus encourage building bridges between “tribes”, merging borders between traditional geographical, narrative and emotional territories.

Participants should bring their own cameras and laptops, and examples of their work if they have personal projects. No experience necessary.

Content generated in this lab will be permanently exhibited in the Families project website, to be opened to the public at the futureplaces closing session, October 22.