Unresolved Youth:

Between Reverie and the Screen

Abstract

This series of digital collages constructs a topology of suspended time, where the present hesitates, the past insists, and youth folds back onto its own phantoms. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image, the work explores visual fragments in which gesture and memory intermingle, and the visible already carries what has not yet occurred. The figures—human, sacred, fictional or unfinished— emerge as traces of desire, ruins of identity, or rehearsals of presences that never fully materialised. In this context, collage is not mere juxtaposition: it operates as an archaeological gesture and an oneiric method, reconfiguring the unconscious that infiltrates the image. The project also establishes a tacit dialogue with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), evoking youth as a state of performative enclosure, suspended between intimacy and enactment. Portuguese visual references— tiles, domestic iconographies and religious interiors—intertwine with elements of fashion and pop culture, generating a hybrid and fractured visual lexicon. These collages do not depict youth; they interrogate it as a field of variation, where what pulses is not the force of an exalted moment, but the subtle rhythm of gestures, suspensions, and possibilities still in latency.