“Looking Back” was taken during a bicycle ride in the countryside around Malmö, in Sweden, were the artist lived and studied in 2007 / 2008.

“Looking Back” is about memory. Personal memory (of what the artist had left back in Portugal) and collective memory (the historical meaning that these ancient man-made mounds have for the scandinavian people, a significance that the artist was unaware of at the time – he reacted only to the visual impact he experienced).

The burial mound and the public lighting device, appearing artificially in the open country, seem equally strange to the observer. In a way, the two strange elements establish a relation between them. A relation over time and space. They observe each other – a relation of the me and the you, beyond the implicit relation of Nature and artifact.

The same image is shown in two different scales – small and big (8.70 x 13cm versus 53.5 x 80cm) in order to draw attention to the variation of dimension that looking back into the past might imply. Depending on the moment, the memory of a fact will vary in importance. Following the importance of the memory, the perception of the importance of the fact itself will be different. This difference in scale and space is the metaphor of memory as a dynamic thing, always changing, always under construction and subjected to the need of tuning.

The two pictures are exhibited one in front of the other across a room – so as to allow the public to ”look back” and back again – seeing the same image bigger or smaller.