IXONE SÁDABA

Poètique de la Desaparition

Tortured, repressed, violated and manipulated all over this conflictive planet, the body irrefutably becomes transformed from a mere object to an everlasting bearer of speech. The very “speech of speech” urges us to speak instead of speaking about it, speak right up and out loud, speak against it, speak for it, let it speak. This is how French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sensorial and expressive omnipotence of the body in its interference with the external world, and this is how the body emerges in the work of Ixone Sábada, a young visual artist, performer and photographer based in Bilbao, Spain.

Sábada first gained notoriety in 2003 with “Ciceron”, a series of site-specific twin apparitions of herself. Further notable projects were to come in the following years. “Leviathan” (2007) suggested life’s conspicuousness in its absence from the devastated hurricane landscapes of the American West, and “Expulsion from Paradise” (2006) established duality as one of the artist’s recurrent motifs. Contrariwise, “Poètique de la Desaparition” shifts away from the clear filmic narrative construction of her previous series, in favour of a markedly abstract and introspective approach that pushes the whole work to its limits, both formally and conceptually. To use Sábada’s own words, “my new series does so much more than just bringing up a more complex, mature and tough vision of the body. It pushes the very same photographic image and all the meanings it carries towards full deconstruction”.

In the series, Sádaba, the ever performer, recurs once more to her own body to negotiate the idea of a naked body that is and is not. Somewhere before the final departure, the self and its alter ego, present or implicit in many of her previous oeuvres, are fused into one. A fading “me” emerges before our eyes, under the most tense and dramatic physical conditions. Multiple exposures and a body which cries, laughs, begs, enjoys -one and all at once- on the verge of hysteria and collapse…

Alarming and discomforting, Sádaba’s posture arguably serves as a metaphor for the condition of total expropriation, destruction and nihilism the body is subjected to today, as much as it brings into the foreground the existential right of not to be, in terms of placing oneself -in this case, Sádaba and her female being- within an alternative non-space that lies beyond codified language, politics and culture.

Sádaba’s discourse displays great affinities with the Lacanian view of femininity as a state of negativity existing outside the hermetically constructed male world. Such an interpretation allows a feminist reading of her work that the artist herself fully welcomes. “I am not a feminist in the strict sense of the term”, she explains, “but I happen to be a woman who works in a very close relationship with her body. In various occasions, I have had to reflect on how this is to be represented and where I place myself at the time of representation”.

“We perceive our bodies as the most common thing in the world, but has it ever occurred to us how socially limited the margins outside exhibitionism for a sustained engagement with the body are?” wonders Sádaba. For her, exposing one’s own body and self, speaking volumes through it, implies a fundamental political attitude as the most unmediated way to express identity. In her own words, “I try to explain that my body is face and hands, but it is also butt and vagina. I do not tend to show it off if I do not consider it essential, but if I reflect exactly on this -the body, its representation and signs- I am sorry but I just have to do it”.

“Poètique de la Desaparition” was originally performed before the camera as an unpremeditated response of personal exorcism. Yet, it could not have resulted less political. Just the presence of a suffering naked female body between the sheets of a double bed makes up for the absence of the politically and socially charged landscapes of Sádaba’s previous oeuvres. The political statement running through all this self-exposure is too explicit…

Somewhere between the material and spiritual realms, being becomes no-being, and so does representation. In Sádaba’s visceral response, movement, feeling and time are employed as tools for a wide-ranging critical analysis and formal deconstruction of the granted space that defines the photographic frame, rendering obsolete devices such as the unique still image, the representation space and the frozen time. Why all this? Is something wrong with photography, as we knew it? “To my point of view”, she explains, “the slavish dependency of photography on documentary has kept it aloof from art for such a long time that it has wasted too many of its possibilities on a conceptual level”. There is still too much purism left, there is still too much of this vain discourse of representation going on and it is a pity and it is unfair. Is there actually anything that is not representation?”

Ixone Sádaba brings an extraordinary fresh approach to the notion of time and the transcendence of the photographic medium. One of the most interesting elements in her work is the way she incessantly integrates movement, real time and performance into the still frame, as if she wished to show the movement and perturbation constantly present below the skin. Repetition, rhythm and eclipse… So many bodies, so many expressive possibilities; as if time were dilated into many parallel moments; as if time were comprised not from a unique moment but from millions of afters and befores within an eternal present in an infinite emotional and conceptual expansion.

“I have to say I don’t like Cartier Bresson. I don’t believe in the instant”, Sádaba once declared. “But I do believe in an event’s capacity to generate a different tempo, in which our perception contracts and expands”. What does narrative matter then, when everything is here, in the veins that enclose our blood, in the flesh that echoes the palpitations of our heart? Within one single frame, the manipulation of time creates a bridge between material and spiritual means, a spiral emanation of life in all its million possibilities.

An uncanny, magical process helps the body finally come to terms with itself. Body moving, body protesting, body breathing in La Poètique de la Desaparition…

© All Pictures: Ixone Sádaba

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Representing Gallery:
Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

MARCOS LÓPEZ

Sub-realismo criollo

An upside-down world, where everything has a slight tendency to fall off… This may be the case if you live on the northern hemisphere of this planet and mind taking a look down there. Yet, if you are raised in the underdeveloped south, you acquire a different awareness of gravity, balance and cultural resistance.

Everything is quite different in the south. Down here, right here, in Argentina, a place that could rightfully be the centre of the whole universe, Marcos López once “grasped the camera as an orphan child would grasp his nun’s skirt”. Since then and for more than two decades, a story has been unfolding about the unexpected things that occur when the south tries to get a little closer to the north and to its dream industry of hypes and prosperity formulas.

For López, the experience of living in Argentina is equivalent to inhabiting the other side of a broken mirror:

As an outcast confined in a cell, you look through the broken glass. You need to, precisely because you are the reflection. But then, your gaze comes back to the north and slaps our faces as if it were a degenerated, threatening monster, willing to devour us all for the years of post-colonial, capitalist deprivation it carries on its back.

Made out of photographs, poems and writings, the complex visual universe of Marcos López is formulated as a concise observational meta-commentary on this particular “mirror effect”, produced within a global senseless community. His glamorously kitsch aesthetic was born in the mid-nineties. Since then a series of projects and publications have appeared; among them “Urban Scenes” (1999), “Pop Latino” (2000), “The Player” (2006) or “Sub-realismo criollo”, his most recent work, in progress since 2005, all of which Lopez has won international acclaim for as one of the leading figures of Argentinean contemporary photography.

It is noon and the barrio throws over you the shadow of its old depressing walls. Not a soul in the streets. A waiter comes and asks to add your name in the reservation list. His green fluorescent T-shirt matches perfectly the turquoise walls, while the radio is on, playing the latest hits of resentment. Boredom, some bottles of Santa Fe beer left in front of a huge Coca-Cola advertising panel, the marks of red lipstick on your cup, a world swamped with traditional popular symbols and imported modernity… López could go on telling stories forever.

Highly orchestrated soap operas full of saturated colours, exaggerated gestures, bad actors and ugly settings, all imbued with a strong dose of a self-taught Argentinean surrealism. In Marcos López’s universe everything is purposely tagged as sub, under- or hyper-, in the same way that everything becomes a question of lack and excess in the absurd world that surrounds him.

What happens when the modality of “formal” bad taste, as seen, for instance, in Martin Parr´s popular iconography of burger restaurants and tourist leisure parks, is introduced in foreign cultural settings? What happens when kitsch in all its plethora is reflected onto the broken mirror? Well, then it becomes a signifying meta-kitch, i.e. an even more eloquent performative simulacrum of the original, as Marcos López suggests.

“Could resorting to jokes, masks and bright colours be just a way of distancing oneself, of not being too serious, of avoiding the intense feel of direct contact, body to body, soul to soul?”, wonders the artist. Back in the early nineties, he recalls himself passing gloriously from his black and white psychological portraits to colour. Ecstatic, he used to drink toasting to photography as a natural heir of Mexican mural art. But soon, the phantoms of the old comrades would disappear, second thoughts would take over and eventually habits would change. Marcos has learned the lesson: he hardly drinks alcohol in public gatherings of more than three people! What survives from his “revolutionary” past, are the seeds of a growing irony and scepticism towards both the ethics of underdevelopment and the medium of photography.

“The attempt to promote an illusory belief that life is worth it, is useless. The only secret for a good portrait is to create an atmosphere that can show this desolation, this nothingness”. In López’s theatrically staged pictures, the apparent shift from the real into the realm of myth -be it religion, as in “Roast in Mendiolaza” (2001), or pure flesh fiction as in “Dressing Room” (2004)- operates, paradoxically, as an ironic and painful metaphor of the mutilation of dreams. It produces a sudden landing to reality and it transforms blood, flesh and myth to enacted paraphernalia of a homeland that hurts, reminding us that the real world is the one made of annihilated hopes.

Though clearly “fabricated in Argentina” and for Argentineans, López’s psychological penetration of the grotesque transgresses universal territories. His underdeveloped, deformed Warhol aesthetics is charged with the bittersweet flavour that inevitably any critical observation produced in the south inherits. Namely, this “curse” and “blessing” of belonging in the so-called “periphery” is what attributes to his sseemingly hilarious and hyperbolic imagery a documentary aura that captures the spirit of his reality. Down here, on the other side of the mirror, photography becomes an “autopsy of failure”, exposing in all its glory the act of “performing” stuffed illusions and slippery identities, just before the lights faint, just before identity surrenders to nothingness…

Pessimist, nihilist, more sceptical than ever? Lopez’s whole artistic practice critically questions the paramount role of imitation and repetition within the contemporary context of the imported cultural and consumerism models. “It is not necessary to take two hundred portraits in the American South, as Richard Avedon once did, in order to say what is left to be said”, reflects the artist in his writings. After more than two decades of commitment to his medium, he confesses being a bit overwhelmed by digital excess and by the pressure implied when belonging to the contemporary art “set”. “To tell the truth, I feel like it is time to retire, the way boxers do. I would like to go towards religion. I would like to have more faith…”

©All pictures: Marcos López

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

CHAMBLISS GIOBBI

Catalogue texts published in the event of the solo exhibition of Chambliss Giobbi at the MiTO gallery, Barcrelona (20/11/2008)

original version_ Spanish (scroll down for the English version)
Los collages sonoros de Chambliss Giobbi

Al contemplar los fotocollages de Chambliss Giobbi, uno no puede evitar establecer una especie de paralelismo con el universo decadente, grotesco y emocionalmente turbulento de artistas como George Grosz, Francis Bacon y Lucian Freud. Hay algo desolador en todos esos cuerpos ásperos y fragmentados en mil piezas y ángulos, algo que lleva en sí toda la locura cotidiana y el frenesí mediático, como si se tratase de una recolección al azar de aquellas imágenes procedentes del ciberespacio con las que Joan Fontcuberta construye sus “Googlegramas”. Sin embargo, no sería ni mucho menos preciso describir a Chambliss Giobbi como fotógrafo o pintor en el sentido convencional de la palabra. Tanto las múltiples capas de sus composiciones como las cualidades pictóricas de sus personajes delatan nuestros ojos. El hibridismo de sus imágenes es lo que nos lleva un paso más allá de lo que se supone que es lo figurativo, la fotografía y la representación en sí.

Puede ser que todo haya tenido su raíz en aquel instante decisivo de 1998 que produjo la repentina rendición a las artes visuales de quien fue durante años un distinguido compositor de música clásica. Todo sucedió rápidamente: el encuentro con aquel grueso libro que yacía olvidado y polvoriento en el rincón de la librería de Manhattan, la vuelta al estudio, la necesidad obsesiva de recortar, pegar y plasmar minuciosamente nuevos personajes a partir de centenares de rostros en blanco y negro, y, después, la fuga definitiva hacia la fotografía, hacia exhaustivas y largas sesiones con el fin de recopilar más rostros y más ángulos. Rompiendo a trozos y encolando fotografías, dando luz a mutaciones antropomórficas errantes, tapando las fisuras de estos nuevos cuerpos con cera, observando cómo esta última se diluye generando masas y ríos de color… A medio camino entre lo analógico y lo digital, la obra de Chambliss Giobbi vuelve a los orígenes recuperando el collage en sus propiedades más físicas y artesanas.

Si bien han sido muchos los impulsos que han guiado este desfile orgiástico, uno de ellos es especialmente destacable: en la obra de Chambliss Giobbi no hay nada en manos de la suerte. Es más, cada uno de estos retratos está sustentado en un proceso de diálogo e interacción entre el artista y sus modelos. Algunos de ellos son familiares, amigos, incluso Giobbi mismo. Otros (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) son actores, performers, leyendas urbanas de la escena underground de Nueva York, encarnaciones de mitos fabricados por la cultura mediática. Ya sean una cosa u otra, al posar ante su cámara, todos estos seres se revelan como personificaciones de identidad escenificada, puros espectáculos en movimiento. El cruce entre la emotividad y la paranoia mediática convierte el proceso de fotografiar estos personajes —un proceso invisible tal vez para el espectador, pero absolutamente fundamental para la concepción de la composición final— en un estado de éxtasis dionisíaco. Desde luego, la extrema variedad de poses y de ángulos satisface la obsesión insaciable del fotógrafo-voyeur por el cuerpo ajeno, pero también incita al exhibicionismo entre los retratados. De ahí que no sería incorrecto afirmar que el resultado final, la pieza acabada, proporciona el marco para la interpretación performativa de dicha frustración y tensión. Es el artista quien finalmente se ve sometido a la ávida necesidad que tienen estos personajes de exponerse bajo los focos del estrellato.

Como un palimpsesto meticulosamente compuesto al borde de una fragmentación convulsiva, así son las piezas de Giobbi. En ellas, una sola cara o vagina nunca es suficiente. Sin embargo, frente a un cuerpo multiplicado y clonado, los ojos parecen preservar su protagonismo como el elemento permanente y estático de la composición —los ojos en su papel histórico por excelencia como las puertas del alma—, junto a una carne pletórica y sepultada a la vez. Si fuera posible captar el flujo de la sangre en las venas, el pálpito del corazón y los destinos de los párpados, todo esto se hallaría en las imágenes de Giobbi. Tal es su fuerza psicológica. Si el cubismo aspiraba a atestiguar una realidad polifacética con miles de posibilidades, si el futurismo de Boccioni pretendía enseñar un mundo en movimiento y evolución perpetuos, los fotocollages de Giobbi hacen referencia a un universo que ya está irreversiblemente desmembrado y mutilado, a un mundo incapaz de adquirir significado como un todo. Las ideologías están muertas y, con ellas, las partes y el todo. Sólo quedan reflejos y residuos visuales, miles de voces incongruentes y una Babel por descubrir: la Babel que llevamos dentro de nosotros.

Aunque son escasos los elementos en común entre los collages analógicos de Giobbi y el legado de John Heartfield —uno de los pioneros del fotocollage—, un estudio comparativo de los dos artistas estimula un nuevo punto de reflexión crítica sobre el trabajo de Giobbi. Heartfield, en diálogo con George Grosz, fue célebre por sus fotocollages de carácter activista a través de los cuales denunciaba la degeneración individual y colectiva en la época de Weimar, anticipando el inicio de la decadencia y del caos en la Europa de entreguerras. En un contexto similar, la obra de Giobbi, lejos de ser explícitamente política, no deja de estar aferrada a los tiempos que corren y, con ello, resulta algo más que un mero planteamiento de angustia individual. No sólo introduce la problemática del cuerpo humano como un campo de batalla para la identidad y la representación, sino que “somatiza” la frustración, la recesión y la crisis de representación en una ciudad y un mundo tras el 11-S. Como si fueran productos de una peculiar mutación biogenética, los cuerpos de Chambliss Giobbi llevan los síntomas de una enfermedad difícil de diagnosticar pero presente en nuestras vidas. Aunque, a su vez, esos mismos cuerpos dilatados en el espacio y el tiempo, fundidos dentro de su propia matriz, dan lugar a un expresionismo psicológico, albergado en la universalidad de la naturaleza humana.

Así pues, es en la dilatación de un tiempo y un espacio en forma de emociones viscerales donde se encuentra el eje de la sinestesia universal de la que Giobbi viene ocupándose desde sus años de compositor. Y es en una de sus series más recientes (Head of Fisher Stevens, 2007) donde el artista parece alcanzar más claramente su meta. Con la ayuda del “magic sculpt”, un material de plástico, los miembros de sus figuras emergen de la superficie plana como piezas plásticas autónomas a la conquista del espacio. Asimismo, la presencia de una puesta en escena más elaborada complementa la búsqueda de un principio estético más orgánico, capaz de transmitir una realidad en la que lo global y lo natural se funden con lo autorreferencial y lo artificial.

Afán por la simultaneidad y la tridimensionalidad, desafío ante categorizaciones estéticas rígidas y reinvención de la técnica; anulación, transgresión y flujo: la experiencia de la vida. Si antes lo fueron el ritmo y la melodía, ahora para Giobbi lo es la fotografía. Igual que la música fluye en una simultaneidad condensada sin necesidad de ser concebida como un todo, nuestra mirada viaja sin obstáculos por las composiciones del artista neoyorquino. En nuestro camino, nos encontramos con una sinfonía de cuerpos y rostros, proyecciones gráficas de una partitura universal inscrita en el tiempo y en el espacio. Así llegamos a descubrir las piezas de Giobbi en su esencia más absoluta, como estudios psicológicos profundos y turbulentos, como mapas de emotividad y expresividad contenida. Son la totalidad y sus partes colapsándose y naciendo a su vez, son reflejos del mundo que nos rodea, un mundo en constante transmutación. Son collages sonoros perpetuos que fluctúan rítmicamente entre el presente y el pasado, el tú y el yo, la vida y el arte…
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The Sonorous Collages of Chambliss Giobbi

When contemplating the photocollages of Chambliss Giobbi, we cannot help being drawn back to the decadent, grotesque and emotionally turbulent world of artists such as George Grosz, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. There is something so devastating in all these mutilated and cut into a thousand pieces and angles bodies; something that carries within it all the everyday madness and mediatic frenzy, as if a random recollection of visual bits were taking place in the manner of Joan Fontcuberta’s “Googlegramas”. Nevertheless, it would be far from accurate to describe Chambliss Giobbi as a painter or a photographer in the classical sense of the term. Both the multiple layers of his compositions and the pictorial quality of his characters deceive our eyes. It is rather the hybridism of his images that takes a step ahead of what is strictly supposed to be figuration, photography and representation in itself.

Perhaps it all started in that decisive moment back in 1998 when he, who had for years been a distinguished composer of classical music, suddenly surrendered to the visual arts. It all happened fast: The encounter with that forgotten and dusty thick book at a corner of a Manhattan bookstore; the return to the studio; the obsessive need to cut, copy and make new characters out of hundreds of black and white faces; and, finally, the definitive fleeing to photography, to exhaustive photo-sessions recompiling more faces and angles for hours on end. Tearing and gluing prints, giving birth to errant anthropomorphic mutations, applying onto their fissures bees’ wax and watching how this dissolves into new masses and rivers of colour... Half analogue, half digital, the collages of Chambliss Giobbi take us with their physicality back to the origins, to collage in its more primitive essence.

If there have been many impulses for this orgiastic parade, one thing is certain: In the work of Chambliss Giobbi nothing is left to coincidence. What’s more, each one of these portraits is based on a process of interaction and dialogue established between the artist and his models. Some of them are family and friends or even Giobbi himself. Others (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) are actors, performers, urban legends of the NY underground scene, incarnations of myths fabricated by popular culture. Be that as it may, once in front of his camera, all of Giobbi’s subjects are rendered personifications of staged identities, pure spectacles in movement. The crossing of emotion and mediatic paranoia turns the process of photographing these people —a process which may be invisible to the spectator, but so fundamental for the conception of the final composition— into a state of Dionysian ecstasy. The extreme variety of poses and angles obtained by hundreds of shots satisfies the insatiable obsession of the photographer-voyeur for the body of other, but it also incites exhibitionism on behalf of the subject. Following this, it would not be wrong to affirm that the final art piece provides the aesthetic frame for the performative interpretation of such a frustration and tension. It is the artist who becomes subjected to these characters’ avid need for self-exposure under the lights of stardom.

A meticulously composed palimpsest on the verge of a convulsive fragmentation, this is what Giobbi’s pieces are. Within them, a single head or vagina is never enough. Still, opposite a cloned body, the eyes seem to preserve their protagonism as the permanent and static element of the composition; the eyes in their per excellence role as the gates to the soul, alongside a plethoric flesh. If it were possible to capture the blood flow in the veins, the heartbeat and the destiny of each blink, all would be found in Giobbi’s images. Such is their psychological power. If Cubism aspired to bearing testimony to the multifaceted reality of thousands of possibilities, if Boccioni’s Futurism pretended showing the world in movement and perpetual evolution, Giobbi’s photocollages make reference to a universe irreversibly dismembered and mutilated, to a world incapable of assuming significance as a total. Ideologies are dead, and with them the part and the whole. What remains is a handful of visual reflections and residues, thousands of incongruous voices and a Babel to discover; the Babel each of us carries inside.

Although there is little in common between Giobbi’s analogue collages and the legacy of John Heartfield —one of the pioneers of photocollage— a comparative study of both artists propels an interesting, newly formed critical viewpoint for Giobbi’s work. Heartfield, being in a constant intellectual dialogue with George Grosz, is well known for his activist photocollages through which he denounced the individual and collective degeneration of the Weimar period, thus anticipating the beginning of decadence and chaos in the interwar Europe. In a similar way, Giobbi’s work, though far from being explicitly political, is a product of the current times and as such, it results to something more than a plain expression of individual anguish. It does not merely introduce the problematic of the human body as a battlefield for identity and representation. It actually “somatises” all the frustration, recession and crisis of representation as experienced in a city (New York) and a world after 9/11. Subjected into a peculiar biogenetically-like mutation, the bodies of Chambliss Giobbi seem to carry the symptoms of a disease hard to diagnose but present in our lives. At the same time, these very bodies, dilated into space and time, fused in their own raw material, give birth to a profound psychological expressionism, sheltered on the universality of human nature.

It is in the dilatation of a time and a space in the shape of visceral emotions where the core of the universal synaesthesia Giobbi has been dealing with since his time as a composer lies. And it is in his most recent collages, which escape from the flat aluminium panels, emerging as autonomous sculptural elements, where the artist seems to be clearly approaching his goal. Likewise, the presence of a more elaborate mise-en-scene in other recent works, such as Portrait of Fisher Stevens II, 1997, complement his search for a more organic space; a space capable of transmitting a reality in which the global and the natural is fused with the self-referential and the artificial.

Longing for simultaneity and three-dimensionality, challenging rigid aesthetic categorizations, reinventing technique. Transgression and flow: the experience of life. If melody and rhythm meant everything to Giobbi before, now it is photography. In the same way that the music flows without any need to be conceived as a total in a condensed simultaneity, our gaze travels through Giobbi’s compositions without any obstacles. In our way, we encounter ourselves with a symphony of bodies and faces, graphic projections of a universal score inscribed on time and space. We thus reach to discover Giobbi’s artworks on their most absolute essence: as profound turbulent psychological studies, as maps of condensed emotiveness and expressiveness. They are the whole and its parts, collapsing and rising to birth at the same time. They are the mirrors of the world that surrounds us, a world in a constant transmutation. They are perpetual sonorous collages fluctuating between the past and the present, individual and collective self, life and art…

LES RENCONTRES D´ARLES PHOTOGRAPHY 2008

Christian Lacroix et ses invités

Con Christian Lacroix como director artístico invitado, la última edición de Les Rencontres d´Arles, celebrada entre el 8 de julio el 14 de septiembre, se dejó seducir por la moda, llegando a competir por una sola vez con Hyères y sus excentridades. Dar carte blanche a un creador como Lacroix tiene resultados inesperados pero nunca indiferentes, especialmente cuando éste convierte un festival consagrado en el “jardín de sus delicias”.

Este año, Arles lo fue toda moda. Del Cloitre San Trophine hasta el Parque de les Ateliers, del Espace Van Gogh a la Eglise des Trinitaires. Y la moda a su vez lo fue todo, una moda democrática y generosa que rompió con la dicotomia entre lo artístico y lo comercial, lo efímero y lo eterno, el diseño y lo kitsch. Sí, la moda se vistió de pueblo y, cuando empleamos la palabra “pueblo” en el caso de Arles, es en toda su gloria. Dentro del casco viejo, no hay prácticamente ni un rastro de HM o Zara. Más bien abundan tiendecitas con los souvenirs taurinos y los mantelitos típicos de la zona cuando no se trata con iglesias reformadas en bodegas, y petites patisseries...


...como esta!


En Arles este año, la moda fue moda en el sentido más agrio de la palabra, una moda modesta adaptada a los tiempos de crisis que corren. Nada de pretensiones resacosas, nada de divas como Lachapelle o Steven Klein. Solo hubo algo de los grandes, Richard Avedon, Paolo Roversi y Peter Lindbergh, algo de esa mirada onírica y neorrealista de los ochenta moribundos que lamentaban con el champagne en la mano el fin inminente del glamour, algo de este ideal súblime y decadente que hacía a Ava Gardner temblar en las corridas de toros, algo de esa belleza barroca y chic siempre con fondo un Waterloo, como le gusta a Lacroix. Nada podría ser más actual,¿no os parece?

De ahí la fotografía ligada a la moda. De ahí una serie de exposiciones de lo más interesante este verano en Arles, exposiciones basadas en la inserción de la moda en la vida cotidiana, con una predilección marcada por las bodas y los deslices de la haute couture en la calle. Fotografías de bodas arlesianas, remontadas en los sesenta y setenta, y álbumes de marriage por Jean-Christian Bourcart....

¡Qué bonita es la moda vista en sus aberraciones cotidianas! ¿Así no es como se completa el círculo vicioso de las tendencias? Del mercado a la calle, de la calle a la basura, y a empezar de nuevo...
Merecería la pena plantearse una boda sólo por este tipo de experimentación estética!

En Arles sumergió una moda que más que con vestidos pretende conectar con la realidad; una moda que delata involuntariamente el ser y el cuerpo propio; una moda que plantea cuestiones relacionadas con la identidad, su representación y comunicación; una moda sintomática de la antropología actual que dicta que ser moderno es proyectar tu esencia conceptual, disponer de una biblioteca, saber apreciar los vestigios del pasado, el encanto del kitsch y la acumulación... De ahi, Pictures from the Street una exposición en la que Joachim Schmid ha reunido algunas de las miles de fotos de la calle que lleva coleccionando desde el 1982.

La acumulación en toda su gloria...

De ahí también la moda como postura política de rebeldía y reivindicación sexual en los primeros retratos fotográficos. ¿Qué fácilmente inspirados se podrían ver Vivienne Westwood o Jean Paul Gaultier en las fotos de las cortesanas del siglo IXX, tal como éstas fueron registradas por la policía parisina? La moda en su estado más puro, en su momento de nacimiento: los retratos de las grandes damas y las reínas sexuales de la época delatan involuntariamente que la consciencia de estilo llegó a existir antes de Coco Chanel. Todo apunta a una de ellas que no estuvo en Arles pero merece ser merecida: es la Marquesa de Castiglione, que escenificaba sus autorretratos para pintar luego los detalles de sus vestidos.

Lo mejor: Entre famosas cortesanas y policías, una exposición sobre el copyright en la moda trataba sobre la manera en la que los diseñadores registraban para evitar plagios sus creaciones en books repletos de marravillosos looks de los años veinte y treinta.

Si esto no es estilo, me pregunto, ¿qué lo es?

Otro highlight del Festival: Clothes in Motion: History of the Fashion Video, una muestra acerca los diversos lenguajes y canales de proyección de la moda. Allí nos encontramos con noticiarios franceses de moda de los 30s y 40s (algo más o menos de este estilo), con las incursiones de fotógrafos de moda como Peter Knapp y Jeanloup Sieff en el cine, con fragmentos de varios programas televisivos de moda realizados en los años sesenta, como Dim Dam Dom (1965-1971), y con toda una serie de vídeos que Jean Paul Gaultier generó junto con creadores como Jean Baptiste Mondino en los ochenta y noventa para la promoción de sus colecciones. Pero también descubrimos que creadores como Jean-Luc Godard y William Klein habían flirteado con el mundo de la moda. El último con su sarcástico Qui-etes vous Polly Magoo en 1966 (la escena del desfile es formidable!) y con Mode en France en 1985.

Es una pena que no lo podemos reproducir todo lo que han visto nuestros ojos pero, para recompensar, ahí están unas imágenes de las fotos de desfiles de Guy Marineau y varias fotos tomadas en el apartado dedicado en las publicaciones y los medios de difusión impresa de la moda, en la que aparecían todos los dípticos promocionales de la Maison Margiela. Tampoco han faltado los blogs. La exposición terminaba con un apartado especial dedicado a los fashion bloggers, las promesas del futuro!

La moda es vanguardia, la moda sale de los bajos y los almacenes... Es lógico ir olfateando los nuevos talentos. Sin embargo, el apartado de los fotógrafos nominados nos resultó un pelín decepcionante. No por la calidad de los trabajos sino por los registros y los estilos. ¿Hemos chocado tal vez hoy contra la pared a nivel creativo? Hoy, la fotografía de moda sigue encasillada en la intimidad y la instantaneidad, en un registro de representación que ya se ha visto más que lo suficiente desde los tiempos de Corinne Day y la época dorada de las revistas de tendencias en los noventa.
La única diferencia hoy es que a todo esto se le ha añadido el minimalismo y la nitidez nórdica y esto es algo que hacen muy bien gente como Daniel Riera, Jamie Isaia, Cameron Smith , todos presentes en Arles.

Casos de locura imaginativa como él de Tim Walker siempre llevan un precedente como Cecil Beaton.

Pero casi que nos ha convencido más Grègoire Alexandre.

Han pasado 18 años desde el 1991. ¿No es el momento de tirar adelante?

¿Es tal vez por la sequía creativa actual que la programación de Arles este año ha apuntado a un concepto de fotografía de moda más sofisticado e híbrido interpolado con proyectos fotográficos procedentes del arte o del documental que llevan la representación un poco más allá? Puede ser. Más que en el esteticismo y la historia de la indumentaria, los diseñadores hoy se inspiran en lo social y lo humano para crear sus colecciones -mejor ejemplo que las colecciones de la última temporada no podría haber.

Uno de los autores en esta línea es Sanuel Fosso, artista de origen africano, quien traslada en sus autorretratos símbolos y elementos de la iconografía de la moda, demostrando que los límites de la representación y de la reinvención pueden ser infinitos.

Pero también la figura, el vestido, el uniforme, el estilo mismo se configura no sólo dentro de las redes de mercado, sino también en el seno de sistemas con fines exclusivamente políticos e ideológicos pese a apropriarse lo comercial. De ahí, las niñas de Vanessa Winship, colegiadas Kurdas de Anatolia con sus uniformes, y los testimonios de las mujeres de Achinto Bhadra, todas víctimas de abusos y violencia que transforman su dolor en fuerza, escenficando su propio cuerpo a través de vestidos y maquillaje. Imágenes que nos dicen mucho sobre la complejidad de la moda, del vestido y de sus creadores…

Todo esto fue sólo una pequeña parte de lo que pudimos ver... aparte de las fiestas taurinas y los platos de taureau que desgraciadamente nos acompañaron a lo largo de nuestra estancia.:-(

Transcendiendo medios, transcendiendo representaciones y filosofías, la programación de Arles ha puesto en manifiesto, por una vez más, que la moda puede ser un tema mucho más versátil y mucho menos purista de lo que normalmente se espera -gracias a la fotografía!
Lacroix ha aprobado el examen con buena nota.

Todas las imágenes: copyright ge+n.

Natasha Christia trabaja en el ámbito de la fotografía. Escribe, comisaría exposiciones, edita libros e imparte seminarios. En la actualidad, está a punto de producir su primera pieza audiovisual sobre el fotógrafo alemán Andréas Lang para 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

RAMÓN MASATS

La Nueva Mirada_Ramón Masats
Fotografías inéditas 1950-1960

_Castellano

Si bien fueron muchos aquellos fotógrafos españoles innovadores que en los años cincuenta aspiraron a romper con el oficialismo edificado de la posguerra, con el fin de dar paso a un nuevo discurso fotográfico que estuviera vinculado a los movimientos de la vanguardia internacional, nadie llegó a ocupar el lugar excepcional de Ramón Masats. Nacida de forma casual y temprana, su mirada singular dio luz a una radical modernidad que marcó profundamente el rumbo que tomaría el arte fotográfico en este país, siempre al margen de conformismos y de ideologías endogámicas.

Kowasa Gallery dedica a Ramón Masats una exposición y un libro de más que setenta fotografías de época, en su mayoría poco conocidas e inéditas, que pretenden dar en gran parte un énfasis especial a la etapa de los años 1953-1957, cuando el jovencísimo amateur de Terrassa iniciaba su recorrido por el mundo de la fotografía en busca de un lenguaje propio. Nuestro objetivo es doble: en primer lugar, destacar en qué consiste la particularidad del “fenómeno” Masats y, por otro lado, impulsar una reflexión revisionista que desafíe la necesidad de inscribir y de encasillar su fotografía en las corrientes estéticas internacionales de la época (la Nueva Subjetividad de Otto Steinert, la visión documentalista difundida por la exposición del MoMA, “The Family of Man”, en 1955, y las diferentes manifestaciones del Realismo Humanista en Francia y en Italia). Ya en sus primeras incursiones en el campo de la fotografía, la práctica de Masats parece desobedecer un estilo concreto. Sobria pero a la vez irónica, seca y realista pero a la vez imaginativa y sarcástica, la suya es una visión rotundamente personal, impregnada por la naturaleza con un instinto intuitivo extraordinario para detectar “la humanidad del momento”.

Al igual que el resto de los fotógrafos de su generación, Masats está condicionado por su época y, en este sentido, sus recursos iconográficos se ven delimitados en un registro costumbrista tradicional, en el que abundan los ancianos, los niños y los campesinos. Lejos de cualquier necesidad de serenar y de depurar, lejos de adornos superfluos, su abanico creativo se enlaza con el reportaje como encarnación absoluta de los valores de la modernidad humanista, de la cual, sin embargo, acaba haciendo su propia versión. Porque más que mostrar, a Masats le gusta sugerir. En sus espesos encuadres no-figurativos de los primeros años, que él califica como ejercitaciones en los trucos de composición, su intuición le lleva a construir su propia arquitectura visual. La precisión compositiva, el diálogo entre la materia y el cuerpo, el especial tratamiento de la luz y el profundo entendimiento de la forma mediante un revelado contrastado le permiten generar en sus imágenes yuxtaposiciones inesperadas, mediante las cuales la vida de la calle y sus personajes respiran nuevos significados. Masats juega con el valor simbólico establecido de los objetos y de sus sujetos: fragmenta, altera, descontextualiza y desplaza los signos torciendo con ironía y humor los grandes tópicos y los mitos colectivos de la cultura que los envuelve.

De un modo similar, la selección del material y la paginación de este catálogo se rigen de un criterio subjetivo y atemporal que, al priorizar las asociaciones formales, pretende dar visibilidad a la estructura mental de Masats y a su registro de imágenes -un registro imaginario, plasmado además en una etapa temprana, antes de que el autor estableciera su concepción cultural de la fotografía. La selección no ha sido fácil. Kowasa Gallery conserva en sus cajones la mayor parte del archivo de esa primera etapa (1953-1964). Se trata de alrededor de unos 200 tirajes de época. Poca importancia les cede Ramón Masats, que ha vivido siempre intensamente su presente creativo sin dar demasiada importancia al pasado. Sin embargo, sacar a la luz este material ayuda a evidenciar constantes presentes en su trayectoria desde sus primeros pasos hasta la actualidad. Al embarcar en la aventura de la fotografía en los años cincuenta, Masats se alimentó de un lenguaje basado en la contraposición de formas y de connotaciones para generar su geometría en blanco y negro, y, al regresar de nuevo a la fotografía en los ochenta, retomó los mismos recursos para sus geometrías cromáticas. Hay algo más que una mera casualidad en todo este camino.

Escribía Oriol Maspons a Carlos Pérez Siquier a finales de 1957: “Apunta ahora un nombre. Ramón Masats, el fotógrafo aficionado español más completo. Es una bomba. Ahora se va a París a hablar con Ernst Haas y Cartier-Bresson para ver si se mete en Magnum”[1]. Puede ser que Masats finalmente no haya llegado a formar parte de Magnum. Sin embargo, vista desde la perspectiva de hoy, su temprana obra constituye prioritariamente un testimonio histórico.

De las escenas y los personajes “casposos” de Las Ramblas al milagro turístico del “Typical Spanish luncheons”, Ramón Masats fue capaz de percibir lo que se estaba cociendo debajo de la superficie en una época sordomuda lastrada por el legado de conservadurismo. Premonitoria de la apertura de la modernidad que conmemoraría Miserachs, otro grande de la época, en su libro “Costa Brava Show” (1966), la “Nueva Mirada” de Masats fue destinada a destapar una realidad que estaba a punto de desvanecerse por una vez y para siempre…

[1] “Maspons a Pérez Siquier – 21/03/57”. Frase citada en Laura Terré Alonso, Historia del Grupo Fotográfico AFAL 1956/1963. Sevilla: Photovision, 2006, pág. 411, p.f. 984.

_English

There were many innovative Spanish photographers in the fifties who aspired to break from the dominating post-war formality and who aimed to bring forward a new photographic discourse related to the movements of the international avant-garde. However, none among them was destined to occupy such an exceptional position as Ramón Masats. Born early and in a casual form, his singular vision ushered in a radical modernity, profoundly marking the course that Spanish photographic art would take, always on the margin of conformities and endogamic ideologies.

Kowasa Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Ramón Masats with a catalogue of more than seventy vintage prints, the majority of which are little known and have never before been published. Special emphasis has been placed upon the years 1953-1957, when the young amateur from Terrasa was making his own way through the world of photography in search of a personal language. Our aim is twofold: firstly to underline the uniqueness of Ramón Masats, and on the other hand to stimulate a revisionist reflexion that challenges the existing need to inscribe and to pigeonhole his photographic practice in the international aesthetic movements of the era (the New Subjectivity of Otto Steinert, the documentary vision spread by “The Family of Man” show at the MoMA in 1955, and the different manifestations of the Humanist Realism in France and in Italy). It is clear that since his very first incursions into photography, the practice of Masats disobeys any concrete style. Sober but at the same time ironic, dry and realistic, yet imaginative and sarcastic, his vision is fully personal, impregnated by nature with an extraordinary intuitive instinct for detecting the “humanity of the moment”.

Like the rest of the photographers of his generation, Masats is conditioned by his time. In this sense, his iconographic resources are delimitated by a traditional register, in which old men, children and farmers abound. Distancing itself from a necessity to serenade or purify, or from superfluous adornments, his creative range is related to reportage as an absolute incarnation of the values of humanist modernity. However, Masats ends up making his own version out of all this: rather than showing, he likes to suggest. In the dense non-figurative images of the early years, which he himself has qualified on various occasions as exercises in the tricks of composition, his intuition leads him to construct his own visual architecture. The precision of composition, the dialogue between material and body, the special treatment of light and the profound understanding of form revealed through a contrasted developing process of his prints, all these elements allow him to generate unexpected juxtapositions within his frames, through which life on the street and the characters found therein obtain new meanings. Masats plays with the established symbolic value of his subjects: he fragments, alters, decontextualizes and displaces these signs, and with great ironic humour subverts the big themes and collective myths of the era in which he lives.

In a similar way, the selection of the material and the layout of this catalogue are imbued with a subjective and timeless criteria, which employs formal associations in order to give visibility to Masats’ compositional structure and imaginative register, captured in a time before the author had established his own cultural conception of photography. The selection has not been easy. Kowasa Gallery preserves the major part of the archive of this very first period (1953-1964), about 200 vintage prints. Ramon Masats, who has always lived his creative present in an intense way without conferring too much importance on the past, finds little importance in them. However, by bringing into light this body of work, the binding elements of his trajectory from his first steps until our days are made clear. When Masats first embarked on his adventure of photography in the fifties, he developed a style based on the positioning of forms and their connotations, generating a black and white geometric language. In the eighties, when he came back to photography, he put these very same resources at the service of his colour geometries. There is something more than mere coincidence in this story.

In a letter to Carlos Pérez Siquier in late 1957, Oriol Maspons commented, “Take a note of a name. Ramón Masats, the most complete Spanish photographic enthusiast. He´s ace. He is going to Paris to talk with Ernst Haas and Cartier-Bresson to see if he can get into Magnum”[1]. Whilst it may be true that Masats has not become a member of the agency after all, in the eyes of today his early work constitutes an extraordinary historic testimony.

From the out-dated scenes and characters of Las Ramblas to the touristic miracle of “Typical Spanish Luncheons”, Ramón Masats was able to conceive what was going on below the surface in a deaf-mute era burdened by the legacy of conservatism. Premonitory to the advent of sixties modernity, commemorated by another big photographer of the time, Xavier Miserachs in his book “Costa Brava Show” (1966), the “Novel Gaze” of Ramón Masats was destined to reveal a reality that was ready to fade once and for all.

[1] “Maspons to Pérez Siquier – 21/03/57”. Citation in Historia del Grupo Fotográfico AFAL 1956/1963, by Laura Terré Alonso. Photovision: Sevilla, 2006, pg. 411, footnote 984.

KOWASA gallery, Barcelona
Exposición fotográfica del 27 de junio al 2 de agosto de 2008
Portada: ©Ramón Masats, Barcelona 1955 (tiraje de época)
Texto: ©Natasha Christia
Maqueta: Gabriel Espí

LALLA A. ESSAYDI

Les Femmes du Maroc

In “Les Femmes du Maroc” Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex issue of female identity from her adult Arab and Western perspectives. Originally from Morocco, but currently living and working in Boston, the artist sets her arresting, large-scale colour photographs within an uninhabited family-owned house, where she spent weeks during her girlhood in punishment for transgressing the rules of gender conduct. Against this very same setting, she places her femmes; old women, brides and young girls, covering their bodies with waves of hand-applied henna calligraphy that extends onto the surrounding walls and floor. Through the combination of calligraphy, an Islamic sacred art-form reserved solely for men, and of henna, an adornment practice traditionally relegated to women, Essaydi crosses a prohibited threshold, foregrounding thereby an intimate female body beyond the encoded patriarchal structures and the stereotypical cultural patterns of the Islamic society.

Though abundant in words, the series reinforces a discontinuity between presence and absence, volume and vacuum; and it does so by means of a subversive minimalist aesthetic of crème nuances, which cancels all existing fissures and spatial boundaries. A cloud of a transparent spatiality revolves around bodies, white robes and veils, rendering them all into a one-dimensional blank surface. White and ethereal, Essaydi’s woman becomes plain decoration. Constrained not just merely between walls, but also within the tangled layers of a pre-existing iconography as a licensed symbol of fertility and purity, she is fated to visibility exclusively in the transitory moments of marriage, birth and puberty, alongside eggshells, sugar and virginal flowers. As such, the female identity is seen possessing no outlet for expression within a house, whose bounding walls project nothing but perpetual silence. However, it is in this confined domesticity, in this non-language and no-man environment, where fundamental distortions and rebellious actions of expression can be conveyed…

If, annihilated within the patriarchal hierarchy, the woman is designated a performative voicelessness, this lack of regulative expression certainly allows for her occupying a space outside the margins of given interpretations. Following the Lacanian “Pas-tout”, Essaydi’s female bodies, always in fluidity, arise as corporeal expressions of a semi-ghostly womanliness. But, whereas they might assert that “le femme n’existe pas”, at the same time, as bearers of flowing no-essence they generate oppositional alternative spaces of undiscovered meanings.

Beyond challenging femininity and Islamic tradition, Essaydi creates, both as a woman and an artist, an open contextual space, where the engagement with self-expression goes through the denial of a preconceived identity. In this respect, “Les femmes du Maroc” suggest a territory beyond representation, where femininity is less femininity than a topos, where the Orient is less a place than a topos, where aesthetics in itself is revealed as a congeries of references originating from a quotation or from an amalgam of some previous imaging. Caught somewhere in between identities, Essaydi’s mysterious white spatiality underscores all this as much as it becomes an efficient, wide-ranging tool towards the articulation of a visual language which speaks from this impermissible hidden universe.

Text: Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Lalla A. Essaydi
All Rights Reserved

Published in Next Level Magazine, 02/2008

PHE08: Towards New Topographies

Meeting with Sérgio Mah, PHE08 new art director

PHotoEspaña, Madrid’s International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, opens its gates on June, 4. Eleven years have already passed since 1998, when la Fábrica, a cultural management entity, launched what was to become one of the most prominent cultural events in the world. The programme of this upcoming edition consists of fifty exhibitions in museums, public institutions and art galleries. From the beginning of June till the end of July, two-hundred image makers from all over the world will present their works during this big “fiesta” of photography which will literally place Madrid once more at the heart of international attention.

Faithful to its main commitment, PHotoEspaña has served all these years as a fresh and solid platform for international photography beyond frontiers, strict policy strategies and narrow-minded public interests. Encompassing various subjects and genres -from pure documentary bias to arty, conceptual approaches and from human drama to lyricism and humour- the Festival has maintained a balance between tradition and innovation. During PHotoEspaña, both prestigious artists and promising young talents can have their own share of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. At the same time, the Festival boosts the spirits of a country with a relatively poor photography panorama, at least as much as institutional support, infrastructures and art market dynamics are concerned, demonstrating that things are not always what they appear to be. By supporting an extraordinary feedback from the local creative industry and the international contemporary photography scene, it seduces more and more visitors each year. Numbers speak for themselves: in 2007 they were more than half a million; this year the numbers are expected to increase. With all rights then, PHotoEspaña has set its reputation on stone beyond dispute, if not as “the most important photography festival in the world”, as the French newspaper Le Monde has put it, certainly as an ambitious cultural event in full expansion.

The Festival has always adopted alternative approaches to photography, leaving full liberty to its various artistic directors to undertake different conceptual paths. Each edition is dedicated to a specific topic developed in the Official Section, which includes shows hosted in major museums and institutions. After a short break -PHE07 lacked a concrete subject- the new edition comes back to its roots, directing its spotlight on the notion of “Place” approached, according to the festival’s central statement, “as a physical and concrete reality but also as a concept which refers to mental, virtual and mythical territories”.

Does it not all sound a little familiar, however? Engaged with topics such as “City” and “Nature”, the previous editions of 2005 and 2006 respectively contained a great deal of “topography” and “geography” as their inherent elements. In what sense does the new edition mark a novel direction? The Portuguese curator Sérgio Mah, who has been appointed artistic director of PHotoEspaña over the next three years, does not deny the interconnection of this present edition with its predecessors. “Unarguably, the notion of place encompasses meanings such as the city or nature”, he admits. But then he goes further to assert that the very same notion embraces much more than spatiality, since it can obtain both physical and emotional dimensions. “Actually, “place” has always been a big issue in photography and still is today”, explains Mah. “Artists finding themselves in specific geographic contexts offer their own dimension of the world. Place is precisely what sustains the connection between the photographer and the subject he photographs. It provides him with the framework for a consistent statement about a reality he knows better and the ground for a further sustained critique based on attitudes and local ethics. Therefore, photography gains a paramount importance in the way we understand places and the social and geographic meanings we attribute to them”.

Effectively, photography occupies a key role in our understanding of the world, and, invertedly, the awareness of finding oneself belonging somewhere is a very crucial element in photography. Let us take as an example the fact that many of the great masters of the medium have been inextricably related to specific places: Atget and Brassai with Paris, Walker Evans with the American South, Bill Brandt with London. All these creators are somehow responsible for what these “toponyms” are in the popular consciousness today. But there is more to this, which brings us to the deep political dimension of the issue. As Mah rightfully remarks, “photographers find themselves in supposedly unimportant locations but the way they decide to take pictures confers on “non-places” new meanings and connections. The social and political parameters of this posture become extremely important today, especially if one considers that due to the abrupt change of international economy, places everywhere tend to all look the same”.

Globalization versus history, memory and symbolic values… In response to all this, PHotoEspaña’s statement brings to the foreground the mission of contemporary photography, which is to encourage heightened awareness. According to Sérgio Mah, “place becomes the tool through which the contemporary photo-lens can explore the world, adapting territorial perspectives that counteract the predominating post-modernist and capitalist perspective”. Enclosing a more global vision, “place” also becomes the “leitmotif” of a clear curatorial proposal that slide-steps fancy conceptual worrying: “As a huge democratic event appealing to thousands of people in a metropolis such as Madrid, PHotoEspaña is more in need of a main motif that clarifies different perspectives and aspects of photography as a practice within visual arts, than of a specific theme”.

Following these guidelines, the exhibitions of the official section are dedicated to international creators as diverse in their practice and philosophy as Bill Brandt, Robert Smithson, Roni Horn, Florian Maier-Aichen, Henryk Ross, Minerva Cuevas, Cristina Garcia Rodero and Harri Pälviranta, alongside young talents. Among the most significant presences in this year’s statement are also photographers of the calibre of Eugene Smith, Thomas Demand and Javier Vallhonrat. Each belonging to a different generation, country and artistic string, these three creators stand as rigorous examples of the distinct ideological and conceptual formulas, through which photography has integrated the notion of place in its visual discourse.

El Centro Cultural de la Villa/Fundación Santander presents a retrospective exhibition on Eugene Smith (1918-1978), one of the greatest documentary photographers of all times. Smith passed on to become part of the pantheon of the classics of photography for his incessant, uncompromising personality; he would not hesitate to resign from all big magazines of the time, such as Newsweek and Life, once they raised obstacles to his work. In the forties, Smith gained acknowledgement for his brutally vivid World War II photographs and from the fifties onwards, he undertook his famous photo essays that established empathy to specific places and their inhabitants’ human spirit. Two of his most emblematic projects are the incomplete Pittsburgh photo essay, envisioned as an epic approach of the city as a living entity, which Smith started in 1955 after joining Magnum and Minamata (1971), a long-term project on the effects of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Eugene Smith’s lifelong commitment to the documentation of the immediate relation of places and their people with history, reflects a crucial moment in the history of photography, during which the quest for veracity attributed to the photographic document a decisive role in the ethical projection of minorities and non-places.

The pseudo-documentary images of German photographer Thomas Demand (Munich, 1964), which will be on display at the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, highlight a totally distinct spatial awareness. After making his first steps as a sculptor, Demand turned to photography as a way to record his ephemeral paper constructions. Then photography took over, becoming the model in itself. Employing as his point of inspiration pre-existing images released in the press, Demand meticulously reconstructs life-sized exteriors and interiors with coloured paper and cardboard. Demand’s seemingly inoffensive and ordinary ambiences start to make sense as sceneries of controversial public relevance coming to our awareness through media coverage. In this way, a simple domestic setting, like a kitchen, is transformed into the Kitchen in Sadam Hussein’s Hideaway in Tikrit, and a regular building becomes the embassy of Nigeria in Rome where the Yellowcake story unfolded in 2003. Of course, in the same way that the assumption about the uranium supposedly linking Iraq to the mass production of weapons was a forged hypothesis that scrutinized our perception of reality, Demand’s facsimiles of natural environments and architectural spaces create a false illusion of realness pushing the medium of photography towards uncharted territories. Things enter reality through photographs to such an extent that places themselves are transformed into stylized paradigm simulations of prefabricated media news and key facts of contemporary history. A surveillance camera is always there to record all experienced reality, which seems to start and end within a screen…

Entangled with photography and video-installations, the work of Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat (1953), which will be shown at Canal de Isabel II, conveys the capacity of photography to uncover the emotional and psychological potential of the places we inhabit. In their majority, Vallhonrat’s ambiences consist of an attempt to “humanize” natural spaces, by domesticating them through the construction of a fictionalized reality. But, humanizing in Vallhonrat’s language is equivalent to imbuing settings with a complex emotional temperature, in which the unpredicted but always poetic nuances of human feelings generate unexpected exposures and contradictions.

The three artist cases reviewed above give only a fragmented idea of the various approaches to be manifested in June. PHotoEspaña is in constant growth, establishing a nexus of further contributors; among them the galleries and art venues participating in the Off Section, and a foreign country as satellite guest. If last year’s collaboration with French institutions in Paris and Arles marked the first experiment towards an international expansion of the Festival, this year’s edition involves a synergy with Portugal. A wide range of cultural projects in Lisbon and the Algavre, organized by the Portuguese Ministry of Economy and Innovation, will provide an excellent opportunity for a thorough insight into the panorama of Portuguese photography, which still remains relatively unknown.

The PHotoEspaña programme also fosters a strong theoretical and pedagogical framework, through a series of debates (Encuentros PHE), workshops, seminars and master classes with leading photography masters at the Campus PHE in Aranjuez, and the portfolio review Descubrimientos PHE, one of the festival’s main activities designed to promote up-and-coming photographers. Last but not least, the Festival includes a roster of awards that recognize the work of achievements of artists and professionals dedicated to photography, and various events, such as film screenings.

The philosophy of PHotoEspaña is a compendium of different activities, which do not wish to offer exclusively one perspective in the notion of place or photography, but instead, pretend to show the range of attitudes, behaviours and methods in the visual arts. “There are several entrances to access the culture of the photographic”, stresses Mah. “In PHotoEspaña, our principal aim is to mingle photography with other media and disciplines, as well as to impulse a reflection on the idea of the photographic experience rather than on photography itself”. Indeed, the photographic experience as such is not confined within a sectarian world of cameras, but can also be encountered in painting, film and video. In the same way that the theatrical practice does not merely exist within the theatre, one cannot establish strict frontiers of what is -or, more accurately- what has to be photography and its strategies. And that is where a must-attended event such as PhotoEspaña enters the game, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover new aspects of the medium and its creators.
We are looking forward to it!

PhotoEspaña 08, Madrid, June, 4-July, 27, 2008
Thomas Demand
Javier Vallhonrat
Eugene Smith

Published in Eyemazing 02/2008

JÖEL-PETER WITKIN

Human Kind (Original title: Jöel-Peter Witkin and his unresolved paradoxes)

Loved, hated, but, above all, famous for pushing photographic representation to its limits through his tableaux vivants of all kinds of sufferers and social outcasts, such as giants, dwarfs, fetishists, hermaphrodites or even dead corpses, Jöel-Peter Witkin has been at the focus of major controversy among critics over the last three decades. Viewed as products of aberrant perversion and nihilism, his “obscene” nude saints, stuffed animals, leather straps and skull pieces have raised waves of fury and revulsion among neoconservatives and the Christian coalition in the States. In the meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals and critics celebrate Witkin’s oeuvre as a major expression of the vast complexities of the human soul and as unconditional worship of the Other, beyond suffering and death. Unquestionably, one thing is certain: Witkin leaves nobody indifferent...


Jöel- Jöel-Peter Witkin’s resume transgresses distinct eras, styles and tendencies. Back in the sixties, while enlisted in the army, he would draw inspiration for his assignments of military accidents from Weegee and Diane Arbus. The seventies brought a new life full of reflection and introspection. After obtaining his degree in sculpture in 1974, Witkin left New York and went on to pursue his graduate and postgraduate work in the theory of photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The fruit of his studies was “Revolt against the Mystical” (1976); a thesis that encapsulated his personal commitment to the medium. The time had come to put theory into practice. In the early eighties, his earlier series of Christ, the “incarnation of the absolute creator”, and Woman as “source of all human life” had already transformed into a newly elaborate, aesthetically and conceptually, body of work, which literally set out to demonstrate the corruption of flesh by mortality, allowing for mutation to become the binding evidence of an apocalyptic corpse iconography. It was also in the eighties when Witkin found his way to galleries and museums at the same time when Andres Serrano was provoking with his “Piss Christ”. Verberating with the extreme conditions of life and death, his breathtaking work gained him international critical acclaim, notoriety and a handful of grants and awards.

Many years have passed since the roaring eighties, but Witkin’s universe has lost neither its relevance nor its capacity for constant reinvention. Especially today, when provocation, apocalyptic visions, flesh disorders and biogenetic mutations have become such hype in contemporary photography, Witkin might even be considered a classic! Still, though his practice comes to terms with the predominant dislocation of the established photographic representations, Witkin covers an alternative space and, surprisingly, he does so by employing as his point of departure, rather than Photoshop tricks, the long rooted quest for veracity in the photographic medium. Challenging imagination through veracity takes much more work than creating 3D artificial worlds, but Witkin’s effort has paid off. His modus operandi is the crippled flesh of life with his masters and slaves and his sole aim is this: revealing before our eyes a reality we deny to face; awakening consciousness by paying tribute to an unknown and unseen Mankind, so unbelievably real…

Depraved human beings or their mutilated fragments in obscure poses and symbolic gestures… Literally “anyone bearing the wounds of Christ” is transformed into a subject of appraisal in Witkin’s pantheon, providing la raison d´être for his romantic, quasi, mystical conviction about the purifying mission of the artist. In an interview, Witkin once confessed his kinship with his models, emphasizing that his oeuvre derives from the need to love, though through darkness. The way to paradise usually goes through hell. “The art that does not point towards some idea beyond the senses is not art at all!” Everybody deserves to be praised, but this democratic sanctification may only be accomplished through a creation of atrocity, thus an aesthetic against the senses. Since the beginning of his particular journey, Witkin has remained faithful to his particular vision, constantly entering regions feared by the majority of artists. In recent works, such as “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris”, “Bad Student” and “Oedipus and Iocasta” (2007), decapitated bodies, heads, arms or penises become part of new fictional narratives or elegant still-lives. All these are pictures with a tremendous emotional impact, but for Witkin mental or physical anomaly is no less respectable than normality. The formless and the deformed are brought back into light. Disgust, horror and cruelty in their extremity are removed from their negative connotations, becoming parts of a new cognitive experience, where the notions of physical beauty and aestheticism obtain transcendental dimensions.

Witkin´s impulse to make photographs like “Retablo de Mexico” (2007) begins with preliminary sketches with diverse references that encompass the history of art, mythology and photography. The big masters of the past, Giotto, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Velázquez or Picasso, provide the formal and spiritual “high-art” framework for an unkindly matched religious-like iconography, in which fetishized nude bodies of an ambiguous sexuality are transformed into eternal beings in the context of a disturbing and ineffable present. What nourishes Witkin’s practice is not God but rather the mystic sublime elevation and pathos, encountered in any religious and artistic experience. “A One and Present Time” (2007) is imbued with this kind of extreme autoerotic ecstasy provoked in the midst of a divine appearance. Sensitive to eroticism, be it female of male, childish or adult, Witkin does not hesitate to express his appreciation of a rather universal form of beauty. Images like this may entail a great dose of lust but also gain a dimension as indirect metaphors of madness, disease, and, above all, loss. It may be the loss of a limb or even the loss of a big passion… Placed in the fringes of human ethics, Witkin’s baroque desire is inevitably anchored in irrationality and absurdity. Yet, this mood per se is not a surreal-like exploration of the sphere of the unconscious and the dreams, but rather culminates from the author’s strife “to create experiences that no one has seen or felt before”. Witkin manages to go where the Surrealists did not have the courage to. In a similar but much more extreme way than 19th century photographers, such as Holland Day or Louis Darget, he uses the camera eye to reveal a Mankind whose existence lies beyond nature and experience, calling into question our limited perception of reality.

Besides mysticism and anguish, Witkin’s world is also tainted with irony, humour and a rather down-to-earth vision. “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris” and “Sailor Jim in the luxury of war” are a very good example of this. Despite the fact that both of these staged tableaux vivants do not depart from the realm of myth, their titles hint towards rather down-to-earth connotations. Witkin lives in 2008 and has the need to place himself within and respond to the events that have marked our lives in the last years. In a hieratic, comical posture, his Querelle-like “Sailor Jim” may be viewed as a Roman warrior coming out of a napoleonian victory with his SM paraphernalia. The whole image definitely works as an ironic commentary and as an explicit parallelism of the contemporary political status quo of fear and aggression today with a sadomasochistic game.

Is Witkin a genius or a pervert? Many scholars have often attempted to label him in these terms. Some have looked for possible answers in his supposedly sinister present (his marriage to a tattoo artist!), while others go back to his childhood of religious duality, as the son of an Ukrainian Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother who did not manage to conciliate their religious differences in Brooklyn of the forties. From his own side, Witkin loves to warm the spirits. He often recalls that as a small child he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his house, in which the decapitated head of a small girl rolled to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Ocassionally, he has also referred to the recurring symbolic retrievals of his lost twin sister in pre-natal or infant cadavers in his work. All this has definitely fuelled a quite intriguing myth for all those who allude to Freud and Lacan for their interpretations.

Regardless all ethical or moral issues inherent in the work of an artist whose common practice includes finding his models through newspaper advertisements, the internet, in medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin’s art deserves our attention for the awareness it arouses. It calls for a sort of aesthetic response to universality in the Kantian sense of the term. It calls for a reading of Life and Death and Art after Art. Coming or not out of his personal experiences, frustration or repressed wishes, or just from Rimbaud’s illusory verse “I did not exist, I was different”, Witkin’s artistic posture is one that embraces game, death and risk alongside eroticism and baroque passion.

The very process of creation entails exposure and risk, not only for the artist himself but also for his prints. Having photographed, Wiktin spends hours in the darkroom scratching and piercing his negatives, in order to achieve the blurry texture and the artificial look his copies are famous for. But mission is more important than vertigo. “My work expresses the reaction of my consciousness”, once stated Witkin, pointing to the possibility of an aesthetic healing through a state of artistic confusion based on revelation. Incompatible with the artificial world of blind conformists, intransigent towards social pressures, beyond the limits of representation, in the fringes of life and death, Witkin’s entire universe of paradoxes borrows something from Georges Baitalle. If in the Bataillian universe eroticism has a lot in common with death, violence and dark instincts as an extreme state of bridging the physical discontinuity of the human beings, Witkin overcomes the boundaries of ugliness and beauty, morality and morbidity. In order to bridge the discontinuity of the field of vision, he brings before his lens in an extreme form of multiculturalism all those who are drastically foreign to us, “the unloved, the damaged and the outcasts”.

It is precisely this exploration of unknown territories, what attributes to Witkin’s haunting silver antique-quality prints their Benjamian “aura” of the first photographs. As signs of a hidden, mystic world, specimens of an unknown humanity emerge out of them. In the same way that in the early daguerrotypes the procedure of long exposure imbued the models with living and growing within the instant, in Witkin’s yellowish fading photographs everything is predisposed to endure, abolishing the ephemeral. His deformed protagonists look at us. Their gaze carries the sharpness of what is seen for the first time. It penetrates our visual camp, resisting the process of any expected spectatorial identification. Unaffected, these accidental actors play their roles in the distance. In their “halo of silence”, they are transformed into a sacred synecdoche of the suffering anchored in the heart of human life.

The unknown enters timelessness and timelessness is compressed in the stillness of a single photograph. Effectively, Jöel-Peter Witkin has conferred on these beings their right to form part of the theatre of life…

All images: Jöel-Peter Witkin
Text: Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved

Representing Gallery: Baudoin Lebon, Paris

Published in Eyemazing 02/2008.

KATHERINE DI TURI

Glamorous Day Dream

/spanish version

En Glamorous Day-Dream, Katherine Di Turi “disectiza” el interior de revistas de moda para producir a partir de cortes y yuxtaposiciones directas, collages particulares, en los que la iconografía mediática de modelos, telas, accesorios de lujo y joyas, se desdobla en múltiples contextos y significados. Aún así, Di Turi no se conforma con la mera recopilación y alteración de imágenes preexistentes, sino –igual que en sus series anteriores Mountain Traces (2006) y Finca La Serrana (2007)- desplaza sus piezas a la esfera de la fotografía. Como tales, los collages de Glamorous Day-Dream se convierten en reproducciones fotográficas, y operan tanto como documentos y “simulacros” de obras plásticas efímeras, así como productos artísticos autónomos. Fabricadas a partir de experiencias visuales mediadas, estas nuevas configuraciones desafían, en la tradición del readymade post-Duchamp, las nociones heredadas de “autoría” y “original”.

Deconstrucción, fragmentación y síntesis hacia mutaciones inesperadas… Volúmenes y masas geométricas desproporcionadas destacan, en lugar de afinar, las fisuras de un entramado de cuerpos, texturas y colores. Lejos de cualquier voluntad de proyectar una entidad orgánica, Di Turi conserva en sus fotografías esos rasgos, constando que toda belleza equivale, en cierta manera, a una construcción artificial. Cargados con su parafernalia de texturas y objetos de lujo, los cuerpos femeninos de Glamorous Day-Dream son contemplados como herramientas vacías de dominación visual y como íconos exóticos degradados de unas estructuras de mercantilización condenadas a quedarse obsoletas. En la cultura de la belleza y de las tendencias hay siempre una fecha de caducidad…

Sin embargo, cabe señalar aquí que el posicionamiento de Di Turi hacia la moda no implica el rechazo de esa última. Al contrario, hay un elemento onírico, casi hiperrealista, en la convivencia de fragmentos tan diversos en el mismo encuadre. Efectivamente, ¿no está fabricado el mundo de las ilusiones lujosas a partir del imaginario de las emociones? Pero, también hay casos en los que la artista se permite a sí misma el desliz hacia una trasgresión extrema. En sus trípticos de blanco y negro, la forma toma posesión del contenido y un mestizaje conflictivo lleva a cabo mutaciones inesperadas. Fragmentos descontextualizados plasman algunas de las composiciones más abstractas y complejas de toda la serie, que frustran pero a la vez activan la imaginación. Una armonía perturbada se establece y, al hacerlo, pone en evidencia la falta eterna de reconciliación entre los cuerpos. Envuelto y revuelto simultáneamente, el cuerpo femenino opera como continuum casual de la violencia inherente en cada intento de conquistar la belleza y como metáfora sobre la imposibilidad de representación.

Pero, más allá de quedarse inscrita en discursos femenistas, la obra de Di Turi ofrece un planteamiento integral de los cánones de representación y de la naturaleza de los objetos de arte. Fiel a la línea de sus trabajos anteriores, la artista juega con nociones como el objet trouvée, la perpetuación infinita de los medios, y sobre todo, la ambigüedad inherente en cada representación. En Glamorous Day-Dream, lo que aparenta ser un collage, es su “reproducción” fotográfica. A través de lo que supuestamente es su “imagen”, el objeto original pasa a ser “otro” y se reivindica como un presente artístico autónomo. Como si fuera una de las sombras en la caverna de Platón, una sola toma fotográfica envuelve algo de una creación pasada: símbolos, significados y contextos distintos…

No pretende, pues, Di Turi instaurar los valores de “autenticidad” y “originalidad”, sino centrar su atención en la resignificación/apropiación ante la cual se encuentra cualquier producto artístico hoy, cuando la experiencia se ve plasmada más a partir de una “dada representación visual de la realidad” que a partir de la “realidad” misma. Pero, al “encerrar” cada una de sus piezas dentro del encuadre de una sola imagen, Di Turi las vincula con las cuestiones ontológicas del dispositivo fotográfico: el pasado versus el presente, la recuperación versus la pérdida, el olvido versus la memoria… Por ello, no es de extrañar que su método de trabajo consista en un proceso parecido de “trasgresión vertical”. Los fotocollages de la serie se desvelan literalmente como “estratografías” de fotografías enterradas en los lomos de revistas olvidadas, que remiten a instantes, tendencias y modas pasadas. En su proceso de excavación, la artista juega con lo arbitrario, lo casual y lo inesperado, e incita a la construcción de un espacio de reflexión alternativo. ¡Todo merece la pena ser contemplado! Pero, son tantas las capas que nos deniegan el acceso. Igual que en el mundo actual de saturación mediática, el universo de Di Turi es significante de una visión fragmentada y desarticulada.

Sostenía Maurice Blanchot que la imagen tiene que sufrir necesariamente una serie de muertes para recobrar su visibilidad y autonomía. En la línea conceptual de artistas visuales como Joachim Schmidt y John Stezaker, Katherine Di Turi elabora una práctica de reciclaje y recuperación, con el fin de reactivar un nexo visual tan sepultado por las relaciones normativizadas de representación, como es la iconografía de la moda. Y, lo logra. No hace falta subrayar que en la era digital, una actitud semejante equivale a una postura política que contrarresta el espíritu universalista de sobreproducción y de consumismo visual. Pero, -y, retomando el tema-, si la acumulación de imágenes sirve para evidenciar el cuerpo como un anacronismo obsoleto, el afán de alterarlas, conduce inevitablemente a una mutación de la carne y del espíritu fuera de los márgenes establecidos. Vista desde dicho prisma, la serie Glamorous Day-Dream puede ser designada como una “arqueología revisionista” de la vida y del estilo moderno. Es en la vida de las fotografías después de su propia “muerte” donde cobra sentido una vida más allá de la fotografía…

/english version

In Glamorous Day-Dream, Katherine Di Turi dissects the interior of fashion magazines in order to produce –out of cuttings and direct juxtapositions- a series of particular collages, in which the mediatic iconography of models, textiles, luxurious accessories and jewellery unfolds into multiple contexts and meanings. Di Turi does not simply conform to a sole recompilation and alteration of preexisting images, but –in an analogous way as in her previous series Mountain Traces (2006) and Finca La Serana (2007)- she shifts her work to the area of photography. Thus, by becoming photographic reproductions, the collages of Glamorous Day-Dream operate not only as documentation and simulacrum of ephemerous plastic works, but also as autonomous artistic products. Produced from mediated visual experiences, these new configurations challenge the inherited notions of “authorship” and “original” in the tradition of the post-Duchamp readymade.

Deconstruction, fragmentation and synthesis towards unexpected mutations; disproportionated volumes and geometrical masses emphasize, instead of smoothing, the fissures of a knot of bodies, textures and colours. Far from any intention of projecting an organic entity, Di Turi conserves these features in her photographs, so as to underline the fact that all beauty is equivalent, in a way, to an artificial construction. Charged with a paraphernalia of textures and luxurious objects, the feminine bodies of Glamorous Day-Dream are contemplated as empty tools of visual domination and as exotic icons, belonging to a mercantile system condemned to become obsolete. There is always an expiry date within the culture of beauty and trend.

However, it is important to emphasize here that the stance Di Turi takes against fashion does not imply any rejection. On the contrary, there is a suggestion of a dreamlike,quasi hyperrealist- element to the coexistence of such diverse fragments within the same frame, which has its roots in the emotional imagery of fashion. However, in some cases, the artist allows herself to slip towards an extreme type of transgression. In her black and white series, form takes over content, and a conflictive crossbreeding throws up unexpected mutations. Descontextualized fragments shape some of the most abstract and complex compositions in the whole series, causing a frustrating but at the same time active impact on the imagination. A disturbed harmony is established and, as such, gives evidence of the eternal lack of reconciliation among the bodies. Wrapped and stirred at the same time, the feminine body here operates both as a casual continuum of the violence inherent in any attempt to conquer beauty, and as metaphor for the impossibility of representation.

Still, much more than reducing itself exclusively to a feminist discourse, the work of Di Turi offers an integral questioning of the canons of representation and the nature of art objects. Faithful to the guidelines of her previous projects, the artist plays with notions such as the objet trouvée, the infinite perpetuation of media, and above all, with the ambiguity found within any representation. In Glamorous Day-Dream what appears to be a collage is actually its photographic reproduction. Through what is supposed to be its visual mirror, the original object becomes “another”, claiming for itself an artistic autonomous present. Here a sole photographic take embraces something belonging to a past creation - different symbols, meanings and contexts, as if it were one of the shadows in Plato´s cave.

Clearly, Di Turi is not attempting to restore the values of “authenticity” and originality, but rather focuses her attention on borrowing and giving new meaning to processes that operate on any artistic products today, when experience is based more on “a given visual representation of reality” than on “reality itself”. But, by “shutting” each one of her art pieces within the frame of a sole image, Di Turi connects it with the ontological questions of the photographic device: past against present, recuperation against loss, oblivion versus memory. It is not surprising then that her very own methodology loans elements from a similar process of vertical transgression. The photocollages of the Day-Dream series emerge, in literal terms, as the layering of photographs buried in the spines of forgotten magazines, which allude to instants, trends and past fashions. In her process of excavation, the artist plays with the arbitrary, casual and unexpected, providing a field for alternative reflection. Everything deserves to be contemplated! But, there are so many layers obstructing us from access to all this “everything” as a whole. Exactly as occurs in the contemporary world of mediatic saturation, Di Turi´s universe presents itself under the full possession of a fragmented and disarticulated vision.

According to Maurice Blanchot, the image must necessarily suffer a series of deaths in order to recover its visibility and autonomy. In the conceptual line of visual artists like Joachim Schmidt and John Stezaker, Katherine Di Turi elaborates a practice of recycling and recuperation, with the aim of reactivating a visual nexus entombed by the regulations of representation, as found in fashion iconography. And she manages it. Here it is unnecessary to underline that in the digital age, Di Turi´s attitude is equivalent to a political posture which counteracts the universalist spirit of over-poduction and visual consumerism. But, coming back to the issue, if the accumulation of images results in the body becoming an obsolete anachronism, their alteration drives inevitably toward a mutation of flesh and spirit outside of all established margins. Viewed under this prism, the series Glamorous Day-Dream can be described as a revisionist archeology of modern life and style. It is in the life after the “death” of a photograph where a life beyond photography gains meaning.
Exhibition Text : Katherine di Turi, “Glamorous Day-Dream”

Square Studio, Barcelona, April, 17-28, 2008

All images: Katherine di Turi

Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.