Valley (2014)

Work produced along the extension of Côa’s Valley (Municipality of Vila Nova de Foz Côa), during a scientific campaign that took place between 2007 and 2008, with the goal of documenting all known engravings present along vast areas of this open-air prehistoric rock art sanctuary (UNESCO site).

You can read Jorge Calado’s words on this exhibition here (in Expresso, for portuguese readers).

At its essence, there’s not much separating photography from the first prehistoric rock engravings made 40.000 years ago by our fellow palaeolithic ancestors. The quest for the permanence of an image has also been one of photography’s main concerns over the last decades. Both disciplines rely on the subtraction of matter in order to allow representation. Photography relies on selective subtraction of a chemical substance, such as silver halides, from a the surface it is deposited on, through a combination of optics, light and a few different chemical processes, while an engraving, in its turn, is made by physically removing tiny bits of rock, through abrasion or the clattering percussion of a hard stone striking on a softer stone’s surface, in order to represent the outline of a scene. And a river’s valley is, in itself, nothing but a line, if observed from a far enough distance, as from the sky. Or in a map.