Espera
Bruna Chichavel
“Espera” is an illustrated book developed in the Contexts and Practices of Illustration curricular unit, under the supervision of Professor Rui Vitorino.
The publication grows out of the imagination and the choice of three objects of great personal importance — a camera, a necklace and a toiletry bag — which serve as the narrative’s guiding thread. Their meanings are, respectively, memory, inheritance and care for others, which weave the story found in my father’s diary.
“Espera” is, at heart, an enigmatic story about the life of a couple, about a house that keeps signs of absence and about a heart that never stopped waiting. It is a portrait of an existence between emptiness and hope, between everyday disorder and the memory of what once was.
The book brings together a series of collage illustrations that explore textures, fragments and overlaps to represent the rooms of the couple’s house. At certain moments the characters appear, but never in full, leaving an air of mystery and suggesting the unfinished, the absent and what remains unsaid.
To create the final object, I used manual collage processes combined with digital editing software (Adobe Photoshop and InDesign), exploring contrasts between analog and digital.
The design relies on fragmented composition as a metaphor for memory, while the book’s materiality contributes to a broader social reflection: the importance of preserving intimate, affective stories as collective heritage.
Imprint / Technical Rider:
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 180 × 180 × 15 mm; 40 pages
Materials: Illustrations made with paper, watercolor, glue and India ink; text block on Munken Pure 120 g/m².
Production and finishing: Offset printing by Norcópia; finishing: Bruna Chichavel; hand binding with French sewing, French binding and hardcover.
Resources and credits: Typefaces: Comico (attributed to Frode Helland, published by Indian Type Foundry) and Necto Mono (Collletttivo); text: António Silva; illustrations: Bruna Chichavel; software: Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop.
Curricular Unit:
Illustration Contexts and Practices (1st year)
Supervising Professor:
Rui Vitorino Santos
Keywords: Visual Narrative, Experimental Collage, Fragment and Montage, Enigmatic Narrative