IT WAS WINTER WHEN WE REMOVED THE SOIL (2020 - ongoing)

The need to question memories led me to work with family and inherited archives processed through material gestures, conceiving memories as temporary spaces where direct, mediated and contextual experiences converge. Ripping through what’s out of focus, what goes under the rug of family and countries narratives. During this residency I experimented with digital (video essay) and analog intervention, which led to photographic materialities, trying to convey memories and feelings transferring images to objects. On that journey, I randomly ran into nature elements just laying there, being symbolic, already uprooted from nature and its course, like urgencies insisting on the depths of the extractivism pattern the country I was born in followed blindly. This photobook project is an attempt to put together how the political and authoritarian developments changed the landscape of where I grew up and also the landscape of my family. I have worked on 5 dummies, which have been transformed from the accumulation of family gestures towards the integration of archive, documents and contextual factors that determined the narrative of my father’s life and mine.

CURATORIAL WORK

The sight, domesticated, looks for the referent. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is no longer just a question of the relations of dominant thought and the object extended towards it, but of the ambiguous relationship of an incarnated and limited being with an enigmatic world that it glimpses. The enigma fuels questions, activates experiences, dislodges preconceived notions and introduces layers, dimensions, adding a density that eschews the literal and explicit.

Along the way I worked on a curatorial proposal oriented to gather experiences of self taught, artists and photographers, women and disidencies, whose work is aligned to displace photographic images beyond the default high-definition optics of the camera. This work is intended to become a magazine next year and at the same time, a space in which these artists can get together in networking. Roundtable workshops nourished some ethical considerations I raised to create this artist run.

I’m interested to produce thinking from the local and from a shared language -despite the particularities it acquires in each territory- in order to expand them internally and towards these other latitudes, not the other way around. It is necessary to mobilize works crossed by the different historical social and political uprisings that have taken place in these countries, in addition to the memories that overlap as layers of colonization that, in a certain way, inhabits us and continue to express themselves in the subjectivities of the present. The continuities of the patriarchal system, the proliferation of imaginaries built on the basis of symbolic violence.. Exploring experimental photography making in these territories and its political power is to unlock, little by little, the narratives of the norm.

It is hoped that this space can help motivate more self-taught image makers and creators to continue exploring these indeterminate visualities, detached from the hegemonies that abound in media and social networks and also to disseminate this type of artistic creations that inhabit the edges, proposing other ways of seeing.