Produced in collaboration with the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Portugal, between 2013 and 2017, Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes is Martins’ most accomplished body of work to date, marking a clear departure from his default methodology. Its a poignant study on the tensions and contradictions inherent in the representation and imagination of death, in particular suicide, and the decisive but deeply paradoxical role that photography – with its epistemological, aesthetic and ethical implications – has played in its intelligibility and perception.
In this publication Martins adopts a hybrid approach which encompasses the use of fictional and documentary images, previously unseen archive material such as historical photographs, confidential case and medical files, crime and suicide-scene evidence, photo-installation and text, all the while tapping into the scholarship of several field experts.