Families Are Like Rivers: In Person with Goa Familia
The history of photography in Goa spans over two centuries, with sources suggesting that the earliest instance of photography had made its way to Goa within thirty years of the medium’s inception. This is evidenced by people like Manuel Xavier de Noronha, born in 1825 in Aldona, in the northern taluka of Bardez, Goa. He is said to have learnt photography from the Portuguese and travelled to the Princely States of Rajputana to photograph nobilities in as early as 1854.
The Goa Familia project began in 2019 in Panjim, aiming to document histories from the region by archiving family photographs and memorabilia of people in and from Goa. The latest iteration of this project, titled Families Are Like Rivers, is a part of the Serendipity Arts Festival 2022. Curated by Lina Vincent and Akshay Mahajan, the exhibition anchors its archive around the Mandovi river, exploring possibilities of material memories and mapping the region through family pictures, books, found images, films and oral histories.
On view at the Old Goa Medical College in Panjim, the exhibition traces the history of an evolving city through the micro-histories of families who have contributed to the growing archive at Goa Familia. The archive relives threads of history by stitching together distinct narratives and methods of mapping memory, all of which has helped unearth prominent and subtle networks that exist within the many stories gathered by Goa Familia.
In this conversation, Vincent and Mahajan walk us through some of the stories present at the exhibition for the public to engage with. They speak about how the archive is set to be an ever-growing project, because each contribution leads to the discovery of newer connections between people and their histories, thus making community engagement and public research crucial to the process.
Lina Vincent is an art historian and curator who works on projects related to arts education, history of printmaking and practice, documentation of living traditions and folk arts in India and environmental consciousness in the arts. Akshay Mahajan is a photographer, curator and writer, whose work combines his interests in myth, folklore and photography through self-initiated research projects that mirror aspects of culture study and collective memory. Apart from Mahajan and Vincent, the team at Goa Familia includes Manashri Pai Dukle, Christina Dedhia and Nishant Saldanha, whose photographs of Panjim are also a part of the exhibition.
(Featured image: Carmo Fernandes on the promenade in front of the River Mandovi in Panjim, Goa. 1960. Courtesy of Lorraine Fernandes and Goa Famila.)
Conversation recorded on 15 December 2022.
