Espiritus de Invierno

In many parts of Europe and especially in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Basque Country), archaic and mysterious figures regularly haunt carnival rites since the Middle Ages (but referring, according to some specialists like A. Darpeix, member of the historical and archaeological society of Perigord, to a distant shamanic and Neolithic antiquity). They are masks adorned with skins of animals, vegetables, and straw, surrounded by bells and bones, often crowned with horns and pieces of wood. Thus arises the wild man within modern paganism to symbolize the rebirth of nature emerging from winter. The figures are essentially ambiguous, at the crossroads of nature and culture. The masks always speak of the mysteries of existence: in traditional societies, they were or still are the figures of ancestors and spirits of the dead, that of protective or evil spirits.

Votos

An ex-voto is a votive offering to invisible forces, mainly given in fulfilment of a vow after being healed. It often takes form in the mold of the wounded member, a print that has been directly in contact with the body of the helped. This cyanotype was made with a radiography of my sick lungs, and plants I found dead in an exploited forest. In this photograph, I link the wounded wilderness – the French call forests “Earth lungs” – with my wounded lungs. Since Magic involves using analogies to weave links between a representation and its object in order to affect it, what kind of magic system is invoked when we summon action with contact prints? I tied this photograph to the terrible arsons devastating Amazonia, and more recently Australia, echoing with the disastrous impacts of global changes on the fragile balance of Earth life.

The Kind Master is Petting Puppies - Transmutation of the Simplified Populist Rhetoric into Instagram Photography

The communication power of the social network Instagram is important to address due to its relaxed nature of presenting details from the ordinary lives of individuals. A comparison of the manners in which influencers and politicians represent themselves brings to front a changed dynamic of social power, as it is available online to anyone who can persuade followers to identify with them or to wish to do so in the future. Two ways of identification with an influencer are assumed, namely increasing and decreasing of distance between them and their followers. The text focuses on the latter, where politicians approach the people by showing the banality of their everyday lives. After reviewing the profiles of two Slovenian politicians, a noticeable pattern is that they most often do so with photographs of puppies and kittens. Keywords: populists’ rhetoric, master, Instagram, politics, pets, selfie

Picturing the Peasant in Orlando Fals Borda’s Work 1950s-1970s

Orlando Fals Borda, a renowned Colombian sociologist, who worked for both the academia and the government from the 1950s to 90s, wrote two works on Colombian peasantry and its relation with big landowners that were published with a selection of photographs of peasants, landowners, and grassroots movements. These works and their images have had an impact on the construction of peasant- and landowner visual icons in recent Colombian history, as they have been used in books, primers, and exhibitions since their creation, and they had a crucial influence on the visual propaganda of the Agrarian Reform project in Colombia. As a result of Fals’s fieldwork, there are two photograph collections kept at two institutions in Colombia that have organized and catalogued the images: The Central Bank in Montería and the National University in Bogotá. These institutions are prime creators of the visual memory of rural Colombia and I analyze Fals’s fieldwork as part of a jigsaw puzzle in which peasants, landowners, and intellectuals, like Fals, both consumed and created visual icons of land, rurality, and peasantry in Colombia’s recent history. Keywords: Agrarian Reform, Colombia, landowners, Orlando Fals Borda, peasants, photography.

Taxidermy as a Cultural Object: Notes on Preservation, Death and Art

This essay, based on academic research on the representation of death, grief and science, deals with the new resurgence of taxidermy in New York City, where a new generation of artists and artisans explore the aesthetic and ethical limits of this practice. As taxidermy deals with lifeless bodies of animals it becomes a delicate issue for many, in which the central element of debate would be around the legitimacy of using the corpse of an animal and the need for preserving or exhibiting it. Different perspectives of this practice are analysed by means of classical taxidermy, the anthropomorphic style or contemporary art based on taxidermy practises, in order to address questions such as: Is ethical taxidermy possible? Is commemorative taxidermy of a beloved pet acceptable? Why does taxidermy appeal or disgust? Is taxidermy controversial just because it questions the limits of life, death and decay? What is the contribution of the new generation of taxidermists? Keywords: art, death, New York City, preservation, taxidermy

The Archive is Present: Performing a Story of Dictatorship Through the Family Album

This essay describes an investigation into a family photographic archive that belonged to my grandparents and represent a period in Portugal’s past (1940–1975) scarred by one of the longest dictatorships in history. The research carries out an ‘iconographic’ analysis of the photographs in the family albums and on how these were influenced by the consistent and highly visual propaganda of the New State regime (1933–1974). It demonstrates how the iconography of this visual propaganda embedded itself into the family album, specifically regarding its propaganda strategy and its ideology and politics towards women. Later these findings were explored through performance photography, creating a photographic body of work. Focusing mostly on the figure of my grandmother and exploring pose and gesture, which were subsequently re-performed for the camera. The information contained within the archive images is re-written within the performance images. Keywords: photography and performative, visual propaganda, dictatorship, archive, visualization of the role of women

Tigre en Papier

I started Tigre en Papier to set a small business, but it gradually became more of an artistic project in the period when hand-made products spread. Soon, I learned that I did not have the nature for that kind of job as I am rather liable to experiment and changes. The name of the project was picked haphazardly and means “seemingly dangerous”; the origin of the expression is supposedly Chinese, but I preferred the stylish vibration of its French translation. From fashion to installation, Tigre en Papier traverses a multitude of mediums, through which it expresses ideas such as ephemerality, identity, or deception. In many of my pictures, I arrange juxtapositions, reinterpretations of pretty well-known subjects, and various intersections.

Magic in the Dark

Throughout its history, photography has been viewed as something imbued with magical qualities, able to detect the supernatural, or capturing a part of the identity of those it depicts. Even in more enlightened times, these beliefs linger, and security personnel and police officers often ascribe to photography an ability to capture and record dangerous levels of detail. In response to a series of encounters with such personnel, I began to travel to locations around the city of London equipped with a camera obscura, which I would then use to draw highly sensitive locations in meticulous detail, inviting a response. The aim was to draw these same security personnel and police officers into a discussion about their fears about photography, and to illustrate that the abilities we often associate with photography are not at all unique to it. Keywords: camera obscura, drawing, security, counterterrorism, public space

Who’s Afraid of Photography?

In contemporary horror, the photographic image is often used as the object of horror or even represents the main antagonist of the story. We can trace the origin of such depictions to the very invention of the technique of photography in the 19th century, which was also the heyday of spiritualist theories about photography making the soul of the deceased visible to the human eye using chemical compounds. A notorious example is the case of photographer William Mumler who offered well-off relatives of recently deceased people in the States to make portraits with the ghosts of their loved ones. There are also reports of some peoples that allegedly also consider the soul to be closely bound to photography and in consequence abhor photography, as the film is supposedly capable of capturing and depriving the photographed person of their soul. Films like The Ring, The Others, Peeping Tom, and The Invisible Man demonstrate how frequently uncanny photography appears in the horror film genre and open questions about the reasons of such depictions. While the theory of horror claims that horror uses specific iconography of fear to reflect the common fears of the time (e.g. an invasion of giant insects and carnivorous plants in the 50s as a consequence of American fear of a communist invasion), the article explores the issue of photography as the main antagonist in the horror genre of the 21st century and whether this means that it appears as the universal fear of digital identity, surveillance, and identity theft.