Júlia Barata - Família

After a nomadic life - with stops in Lisbon, Porto, Maputo, Barcelona and Rotterdam, Júlia Barata, architect and graphic artist, settled in Buenos Aires 11 years ago, after a hectic move that she illustrates in the book Gravidez (Pregnancy) (Tigre de Papel; 2017).

Família, which could be read as a sequel to Gravidez, reflects on the construction and deconstruction of a family nucleus, between autobiographical and autofictional records. Even so, there is a narrative coherence in this work that describes the emotional zigzags of a woman in a period of change, of a mother and wife who needs to escape from the family she has formed. Barata's artistic strength is at full gallop here. She recounts cute little slice-of-life stories in a Moleskine diary, much in the same vein as many of the childish contemporary productions out there. However, contrary to what you might expect, these innocuous moments serve to be trounced by a distressing depiction of depression. Nothing is simple here. The minimalist tone of the drawings is really an interpretation without filters, without morals and without pedagogy. If a family is generally seen as a uniform space, in this Familia the struggle is for individual freedom to be as respected as institutional commitment. Is that (still) possible?