Regarding INVENTING THE VOID by the author:
 While revisiting my photographic archive during lockdown, I wandered through Mozambican lands and found myself reflecting on a phrase I often heard – We have time, they have the clock. There are two very distant worlds: one that depends on the clock and one that lives in time; one that discusses sophisticated topics such as artificial intelligence, robotics, machines that learn and replace humans in routine activities; and one that fills the day with simple tasks like carrying water, gathering firewood, washing clothes or fishing in the river, selling on the street, playing and socializing. Some are considered rich and with a high quality of life, others poor and vulnerable; some are important, others are forgotten.
 This work evokes those who are part of a world without clocks. I started with a set of photographs that depict everyday scenes of small lives where time slows down and days merge, rhythms far removed from the frenetic patterns of so-called first-world societies. I intervened on the images, emptying the appearance of identity from the characters, thus highlighting presence, life, dissimilarity.
 Between fiction and reality, appearance and disappearance, in a creative game that bypasses the formal language of photography, I seek to incite the viewer's participation in reflecting on what we see, how we see it, and how this can shape our understanding and actions in the world. Does turning off the clock bring time back?

 About the Author:
 Cláudia Freitas (Setúbal, 1967) currently resides in Setúbal where she develops her artistic practice. Her artistic interest focuses on reflecting on what we see, how we see it, and how this can shape our understanding of the world. Photography is the medium she uses as a starting point for creating her personal projects, where she seeks to discover and understand places, people, and their relationship with contemporary life. Although photography is her most frequently used medium, she has recently been exploring more experimental processes that fuse photography with other artistic techniques or practices such as drawing, collage, cut-outs, or image superimposition. She studied photography at the Portuguese Institute of Photography in Lisbon (2010-2012) and completed a postgraduate degree in art curatorship at the FCSH of the Nova University of Lisbon (2019). Her work has been shown and disseminated in exhibitions, online, and through self-published editions.