Copias originales

2026

Published by Editorial RM, 2026

A distinctive new voice in contemporary Portuguese photography. A personal view of contemporary Mexico, through photographs made between 2022 and 2025. With contributions from two significant figures in contemporary art: Miguel Calderón and Julião Sarmento.

Copias Originales gathers photographs made by Portuguese photographer Carolina Pimenta between 2022 and 2025 while living in Mexico, moving between the streets of Mexico City and journeys across the country. The book traces an intuitive, attentive way of looking at the everyday, where the familiar and the strange, the sacred and the profane sit side by side without hierarchy. Without fixed geography or chronology, the book unfolds as a visual landscape built through wandering and association. It does not try to explain Mexico, but to stay with the uncertainty of looking, the moment just before an image resolves into meaning. The book includes an essay by Miguel Calderón and a text by Julião Sarmento, a testimony to his engagement with Pimenta’s work.

Author: Carolina Pimenta
Co-published: by Carolina Pimenta, Maricris Herrera y RM
Texts: Miguel Calderón & Julião Sarmento
Design: Estudio Herrera
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 392
Images: 350
Dimensions: 12 × 20 cm / 4.75 × 7.75 in
Language: Bilingual edition (Spanish-English)
Publication Date: October 2026

Press Coverage:
Neo2 Magazine

Purchase here

“Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Without walking and receiving reports, I would not be able to write any reports, let alone the shortest article, much less a whole novella. Without walking, I would not be able to make observations or studies.”¹

Robert Walser, The Walk

A delivery man with a tower of newspapers up to his neck: an image from the past lodged in the present. Most of Carolina's photographs give me a sense of déjà vu. I feel as though I’ve been there, as though they belong to countless, endless nights that spill into dawn, when the body knows it should sleep but insists on going on, wandering after everything has closed, walking aimlessly. The eyes begin to wonder whether what they are seeing is a hallucination, or simply the disorientation of being lost on one of Mexico City’s many avenues, or somewhere beyond. Living in Mexico is in itself like browsing through a catalogue of disorienting, mind-boggling images and experiences.

In this photographic series, I noticed a recurring pattern: injured feet. A foot in a cast, resting on a towel with blue and white stripes reminiscent of the beach. How frustrating to stand before the sea without being able to walk or dive into it. Another foot, injured, lying on a hospital stretcher, with blood-red toenails and drops of blood like varnish. How frustrating to interrupt the party, to be unable to dance. A third, wrapped in a shirt, reveals evidence of a fresh wound on the pavement. And finally, the most devastating image: the foot of a homeless person, a metal implant in the calf, protruding like a sore breaking through the skin against the asphalt. The sneakers, the trousers, the skin, all camouflaged in shades of asphalt. Feet need rest to continue the journey, to survive.

As I continue to review the images, I come across a walking aid abandoned in the middle of the street. I don't know why it reminds me that I am not a writer. Why am I writing this text if my strength lies in images? Images are a pretext for talking. We see them, scan them with our eyes, absorb them, and, whether we like it or not, our brain supplies them with words. Being primarily visual, I let myself drift into free association. I realise I am already more than halfway through this text, and then I ask myself: do I know how to write after all?

I always stumble when I want to say “train of thought” in Spanish. Tren de conciencia? Cadena de pensamientos? I don't know how to translate it, but I do know that these photographs are now mixing with my own train of thought.

“A man as intelligent and alert as you will understand this instantly. On a beautiful, long walk, a thousand useful and practical ideas come to mind. Locked up at home, I would ruin myself and dry up miserably.”²

I continue on and see pieces of cars scattered about. I have walked those streets. I recognise in them the cars of my childhood: buttons, doors, boots, metallic colours that are now extinct. I miss that era of wandering aimlessly, when GPS did not exist, and one had to ask strangers how to reach a destination.

In the midst of these questions, I catch sight of Carolina reflected in a mirror. I zoom in as far as I can, as if I could decipher, through the camera she is using, the key to this book. I conclude, as I always do, that the technical aspects don't matter; what matters is that her eye, her vision, reveals itself in these images, and that it now inhabits my unconscious.

I keep looking at the images. Just as Carolina's face appeared to me hidden behind a lens, so does the Virgin of Guadalupe. Not because I am religious, but because I am superstitious: I have always believed that she brings me luck. Behind the display case of a food stall in a market, something comes into view. Is it a body asleep, dead, or simply resting?

In Mexico, I constantly see people sleeping: on park benches, in the back of moving trucks; even the garbage collectors take naps in the back of the truck. I myself drift between wakefulness and sleep, and in that drowsy state, everything blends together: feet, asphalt, flesh, cement, celebration, tragedy.

I have always thought that the films I admire most, such as David Lynch's Inland Empire, do not lead you by the hand. They demand your participation as a viewer and leave open endings to be interpreted only through your own experience.

I return to the fact that I am more visual than literary, and that this text has focused on the role that feet play in these photographs. That brings me to another image: footprints in the sand that resemble hands, but also paws. Could they be the tracks of a quadruped? A line in the centre suggests a tail dragging behind. What creature left those marks? A monkey, a child in disguise, a hybrid of human and animal? Or perhaps the reflection of my own crooked gait, full of flaws?

The value of these photographs lies precisely there: they compel us to ask questions rather than provide answers. I could call Carolina to reveal the trick, but I decide not to, precisely because I don't want her to lead me by the hand.

As in Robert Walser's short novel The Walk, where the simple act of walking reveals the key to existence, Carolina Pimenta's photographs confirm that, even in the chaos where the living and the inert merge, we continue to breathe and move forward: with or without feet, but always with spirit.

Miguel Calderon,
2026