Raquel Belli

Raquel Belli is a photographer, and visual artist. She has lived and worked between Portugal and East Timor for the last ten years.

With a degree in Visual Arts from ESAD – Escola Superior de Artes e Design (Caldas da Rainha, 2006), she also completed the Technical Course in Photography at ETIC – Escola de Tecnologias, Inovação e Criação (Lisbon, 2008), where she developed and deepened still photography.

In Timor, she collaborated in creating WAP (WomenArtPower), a structure for female empowerment that supports the creation of art by women. Inspired by crafts and manual work of Timorese women, such as basketry and weaving, in 2017, she developed the first body of work that combined photography with these techniques. In the same year, she exhibited at the Asian Foundation in Dili.

Intimate and personal but easily relatable, the body of work revealed in this exhibition took the viewer on a journey through what could be anyone's family memories. In fact, it delves into the experiences and memories of the artist's family, namely images of the summer holidays spent in Italy, which she juxtaposes with the compositions of those who have done the same many years before.

Driven by curiosity and a creative stimulus guided by the understanding of this reality, Raquel Belli explores the aesthetics of this photographic treasure and the unique era it portrays, intertwining identifiable features of past times with the exotic sensory experience. European fashion, hairstyles, poses and backdrops are carefully intertwined with tropical trees, creating a striking and unexpectedly symbiotic visual contrast that mirrors the artist's signature methodology of combining contemporary photography practice with traditional artisanal techniques.

Deeply aware that verbal generational transmission is inherently subject to loss and open to interpretation, and that memory is not a reliable ally, the artist lets each piece speak for itself.

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Raquel Belli Portuguese, b. 1982

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