Raquel Belli (b, 1982, Lisbon, Portugal) has lived and worked between Portugal and East Timor for the last ten years. After working for the travel magazine "Volta ao Mundo", documentary and travel photography gained importance in her career. In Timor she collaborated in the creation of WAP (WomenArtPower), a structure for female empowerment through the support to creation and promotion of art made by women. Inspired by crafts and manual work of Timorese women - such as basketry and weaving - in 2017, she developed a body of work that combined photography with these techniques, exhibiting for the first time at the Asian Foundation in Dili that same year.

Intimate and personal but easily relatable, this body of work takes the viewer on a journey through what could be anyone's family memories. It delves into the lives, experiences and memories of the multicultural ancestry of the artist, presenting a lively and captivating juxtaposition of the festive summer theme lived in the summer holidays spent every year in Italy and the compositions of those who had already done it so 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, where she combines 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.