Brazilian society seems to be pressing forward with devouring strength, systematically forgetting the memory of the past. Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó tries to fight against this collective loss of memory by appropriating found albums and photographs from private and public archives. The use of appropriation to counter the loss of memory is a driving force in the work of Rosângela Rennó. It is a form of fighting collective repression and a future that is void of a past; appropriation is a means of combating emptiness, the vacuum in the kickback of the motor of the future. In her own way Rennó seems to operate as a tracker. This is true of her early work Imemorial, in which she updates portraits of workers who died during the construction of the future-oriented city of Brasilia. In the works Cicatriz (Scar) and Vulgo (Alias) Rennó performs a kind of mental archaeology, in which photographs of former inmates, glass plate images she discovered in the Carandiru jail in São Paulo, are enlarged to an almost painful dimension, so that in looking at the over-sized images we physically sense the coldness of these early formal identity photographs, on the one hand, and the living presence of the individuals (including all their scars, tattoos, imperfections of the skin and stubborn whorls of hair), on the other.