This book offers a sustained study of Hudinilson Jr.’s Cadernos de Referências, more than 130 notebooks produced in São Paulo between the early 1980s and 2013. Rather than treating them as personal objects or marginal artefacts, it approaches the Cadernos through the lens of low theory, considering scrapbooking as a generative practice situated between visual culture, media, and contemporary art. By introducing the notion of scrapscape, the book describes the Cadernos as unstable terrains emerging from the circulation and residue of mass media. Within these terrains, cutting, photocopying, collecting, and tactile handling operate as ways of thinking with images. Scrapbooking is not approached as a genre, but as an undisciplined method rooted in proximity, repetition, and minor gestures, where attention, desire, and practices of self-imaging take form across surfaces, reopening the question of Narcissus beyond the logic of mere reflection. Situating Hudinilson Jr.’s practice within the Brazilian cultural landscape of the late dictatorship and the political period of abertura, the book reads the Cadernos in relation to xerox art, mail art, underground publishing, and urban interventions that reconfigured the uses of the body and mass media. Rather than approaching them as an archive of images, it frames them as a practice of dis-production: a daily, haptic, and intimate labour through which fragments of visual and material culture are reworked into a slow process of self-design, resistance, and becoming.
Simone Rossi is a researcher and editor in visual culture. He holds a joint Ph.D. from Università Iuav di Venezia and Universidade de São Paulo and is a recipient of the 13th Italian Council award. His research follows the material life of images and their entanglements with perception, embodiment, and desire, engaging closely with Latin American contexts and publishing as a critical field.