Ephemera is a portuguese library and archive. One the biggest private archives of such nature in the iberian peninsula, it belongs to José Pacheco Pereira, an historian and political commentator.
Ephemera collects all sorts of printed ephemera and manuscripts, mostly related to Portugal’s political and labour history but comprising several others categories. For it’s tenth anniversary, we were asked to design a poster with a given motto, “10 anos aos papéis”, which roughly translates into “10 years catching papers”.

What Ephemera does with all the material it collects is select, organize, store and make it available for researchers and our future collective memory. With that in mind, we printed the motto in a very large scale in several A3 sheets of white paper. We then assembled the printed sections in a photographer’s studio floor and walked across it as pictures were being taken with long exposures.

The result is a series of images were ghostly, ephemeral silhouettes, represent the archivist’s mission, his involvement with the overwhelming compromise of preserving the material testimonies of our stories, and our history.