Clara Ramalhão is a rare example of how dedication to the exact sciences can, and in her case only must, coexist with a devout and fulfilled passion for Art as the greatest good and supreme instrument for the true healing of the Being.
A Neuroradiologist at the Pedro Hispano Hospital, with an academic connection to the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICBAS) at the University of Porto, the truth is that, under Clara Ramalhão’s gaze, imaging, the clinical speciality for which she is professionally recognised, takes on a whole multidimensional truth, becoming alive, nomadic, eternally wandering. In photographic portraits, phrases and actions to which she has given life and body over the years.
African Soul
Clara was born in Mozambique, and this intimate, not insignificant connection with the African continent is all too evident in her clinical and artistic work. Her photographic series often focus on the continent, as in the exhibition ‘People and Places that Cross in an Ochre Scenery’, which highlights the life and landscapes of the Sahara desert and Jordan, as a visual tribute to the ochre colours and vibrant Muslim culture of these places.
In the clinical field, which is always human, she has developed cooperation projects and projects to support the human development of the country she was born in and which she saw from afar as she grew up – in terms of training doctors and technicians in Imaging at Maputo Central Hospital, since 2009, having pioneered the first cooperation project in this speciality in sub-Saharan Africa, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – and which she is now replicating in Guinea Bissau, at the Imaging Service of Simão Mendes Hospital, at the invitation of the local Ministry of Health, since 2023.
From this work emerged the NGDO Massala – Associação de Médicos no Abraço a Moçambique – in 2016, which aims to improve health services in the country through advanced imaging technologies to detect Laryngeal Papillomatosis, a tumoural lesion, usually benign, but with potential morbidity and mortality due to possible malignancy when not identified and treated in time.
Today, the project is part of an action with a broad horizon, the ‘National Plan for the Screening and Treatment of Children with Laryngeal Papillomatosis’, and is supported by Millennium bim. ‘It’s a project that not only strengthens ties between Portugal and Mozambique, but also provides more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatments for local communities and has certainly already saved many lives, and will continue to do so.’
Built in the Otorhinolaryngology Department of Maputo Central Hospital in June 2018, this new service is actually the concrete result of several years’ work in Mozambique and, during the last mission, the NGDO organised and carried out a Medical Mission in the country. ‘This mission was a huge success that resulted from an exceptional cooperation process with the Mozambican medical teams and was carried out at the Diagnosis and Treatment Centre for Laryngeal Papillomatosis in the Otorhinolaryngology Department of Maputo Central Hospital,’ she recalls.
Treating and portraying
During this period, Clara and her team carried out surgical operations on around 30 children. ‘We are a group of doctors who, altruistically and with open hearts, try to respond to the areas of greatest need in the health of the Mozambican population,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been coming here for many years. This country has always called me, first for emotional and family reasons, and now because I’ve fallen in love with it, with the people, with the images I see here, and with what they make me feel. I’d like to give it back to this land and these people. We are together and aware of the noble cause we are embracing, with the promise of moving forward with conviction, and we have to thank the partners who have supported the purchase of the equipment, which is expensive, the volunteers who came with me from Portugal and, of course, the Mozambican doctors and support teams who have been with us and who have continued this work of improving the lives of those who seek care at Maputo Central Hospital since last year.’
Last year, Clara and the team of doctors who accompanied her carried out surgical operations on around 30 Mozambican children with ‘Laryngeal Papillomatosis’, a disease which, when not diagnosed or treated in time, can be fatal
Here, treatment meets portraiture. Both are always present in Clara’s gaze, and both are the result of the incessant journey in the search for a cure. Whether it’s through science, goodwill or the inexplicable mysteries of art and how it makes us feel alive, human or whole. ‘The primary focus of my work is the gesture, the colour of the expression, the gaze of the other, perceived by my own’.
And it is here, in the constant dialogue between reality, image and words that her true form of artistic expression lies, a consequence of the systemic learning of her daily life as a doctor, of an end for her, or a continuity for everything, which she doesn’t know. ‘I don’t know, there are in fact similarities that, when I think about them and when I live what I feel, I discover, between clinical practice and creation, or recreation, which happen in photography and in what I write. I think it all starts with the way I perceive the world. I don’t try to explain it, I try to live that way of being, of being.’
In this kind of intrinsic mechanism that can only be explained when you don’t try to do so, it’s in the winding but not wandering journey through life that the unanswered questions and, more than anything, the unapprehended answers lie. ‘Life enchants me. I don’t know where it comes from or why I’m looking for it. But I do know that I often find it in glances, many of them in Mozambique, and my only regret is that I can’t reproduce it in all its splendour, because it’s bigger than the words I write and the images I portray.’
Travelling life and work
She usually prefers large formats (almost always opting for semi-gloss and Dibond), which he considers to be the most accurate choice for expressing his images, thus trying to convey, in the most direct way possible, the passion he puts into what he does and, at the same time, ‘honour the grandeur of what his gaze captures’. Her work has been exhibited in prestigious venues such as the Ordem dos Médicos in Porto and the Douro Museum (in Portugal). In Maputo, at the Camões IP, and in various other places such as, just recently, at the Clérigos Museum. ‘Photography allows me to freeze ephemeral moments, transforming them into eternal memories.’
With her emotions running high, but in permanent coexistence, ‘not always peaceful’ but always complicit, with reason, his life, his work and its results, in book, exhibition or beneficiaries of his art, are, he says, ‘the materialisation of a dream’ that she has no trouble identifying: ‘to be able to share with the world “my” images wrapped in a very specific message, and my deep, umbilical and blood relationship with Africa and its people.’
Pedro Cativelos
