In my practice, I use photography as a starting point to investigate the concept of identity in and between cultures. Born in the Netherlands with a Cape Verdean background, I start from an intersectional context, understanding these two worlds as grounds to root my artistic research. Through photography, performance, textile, drawing, and installation, I produce work that deals with intersecting layers of personal and political histories. 

 

My work reconstructs historical and speculative narratives, and creates characters and personalities engendered in this reconstructive process. In this way, photography has become a useful medium in this practice because of its use in processes of historicisation, its operation as a tool for memory, and its archival and evidential value. I think in images, and with them I create new histories rooted in inherited memories and embodied intuitions informed by my own subject position.

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“What is the capacity for a single image to mirror unknown histories? How can intergenerational modes of sharing and storytelling enable space-time crossings? In which ways can inherited memories and embodiments catalyse artistic production? For over a decade, visual artist Sandim Mendes has been conducting photographic, and what she calls “imagetic” investigations to inquire into embodied inheritances in relation to geocultural ancestries. Sandim uses her own experience to expose confrontations derived from being born in a country where notions of belonging are construed on behalf of the other; and where one’s own agency regarding identity is constantly confronted with social, political, cultural and educational expectations that perpetuate Western colonial canons.”

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