Clara Simas, Meu pai morreu três vezes, 2025

The photobook Meu pai morreu três vezes (My father died three times) is the result of a posthumous collaboration between a deceased person and a living person. In a terrain fraught with ambiguity, Clara Simas recounts her grieving process and the evocative presence of Caveirinha — journalist, iconoclastic figure and amateur actor in the 1960s and 1970s in Cinema Marginal in Bahia and Ciclo de Super-8 in Pernambuco —, her absent father.

Oscillating between documentary and fiction, this autobiographical narrative reveals and recomposes the faces of this multifaceted character through a combination of different image sources, addressing issues related to the work of mourning and analytical processing in the face of the systematic physical absence of father figures and the symbolic disappearance of these men in the adult journey.

In this research, mourning is embraced as a body present in the author’s life, inviting the traces of the desires of this man who was once many to play along. Together, and starting from the overlapping of different materialities and layers of time, father and daughter bring to life the surviving memories and stories, whether they are contained in a photograph, a historical document or scenes from films in which this man acted and in which he died several times.