“I want to become an image and transform surface into presence.”
I chose Photography as a medium because I consider myself an observer, I love analyzing and questioning… my biggest problem is how I observe…
I would like to alter the role of the photographer in my society and dispute the myth of photographic transparency and objectivity. The photographer has the right to speak on the behalf of the photographed… and this is my dilemma.
I don’t believe photography is telling the truth… is telling stories.
As an artist using photography, my biggest preoccupation is to be superficial.
As an image maker I have to train my eye every day as I do for every other muscle of my body.
Making an image for me is equal to build a connection with a viewer; we are both looking at the same thing.
I discover photography through working in a darkroom. I matured an intimate connection with the image, the magic, the chemistry, the mystical, the image and not the photograph. I learned how to use the light, how to use my hands to alter and manipulate an image.
While printing I was projecting my fantasies and my fascination.
When I take a picture I have the feeling of transforming reality.
To photograph for me is equal to give light: I want to use the camera as a light torch and wonder around the darkest places of my imagination.
Like a dancer I’m continually trying to move between genres of photography, choreography, sculpture, video and text, renewing and expanding the boundaries of each form or each process.
For me photography is the excuse for an intimate relationship with my collaborator on the other side of the camera.
The source of my artwork is my desire. My desire is lack. My desire is generated by the sense of frustration to achieve in reality what I desire in fantasy… I desire to create a real alteration of the world.
I think that choreography and photography are Art form of relation and correspondence. During their creation the dancer and the photographer are sensitive and sometime connected to the surrounding, to the signals, which trigger their impulses.
In my opinion performance images are full extension of the live performance.
Rosalind Krauss suggested:
‘ The performance needs photography to attest to its existence; the photograph needs the performance as anchor for its own indiciality’.
(Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 1999, Vol 25, No 2. p. 290).
Most of the time I have experienced performances through images created before, during and after the live event. These images for me functioned as references and stimulus for my mind to recreate all the missing information as well as inspiration to interpret meaning and messages.
Images proffer and defer a promise of meaning; they trigger our desire for signification as result they appear incomplete and fragmented, which imply the need to be deciphered or interpreted.
Photography of performance constitutes an intermediary space between the performer and the viewer, the artist body and the viewer body.
The photograph becomes an access point to the performance.
Photography transforms everything into an object of memory.
We can consider Still_Movil a sort of conversation between two artforms and as such a provisional exchange that is not subject to closure.
The images of Still_Movil are real performances as they have never been rehearsed.
Still_Movil images function as a window and a mirror to the artists/collaborators practice.
These images function as surface as an extra skin over the artist presence…
I see most of these images to represent questions. These questions are looking for emotional responses.
Each photograph is an encounter with an artist’s practice, a message, a photographer’s interpretation, a complex narrative to be examined and reconstructed by the viewer.
I believe that the conscious activity and construction of these images works against the objectification of the bodies of my collaborators.
In Still_Movil the images are like hieroglyphs, a sort of rebus to be interpreted.
Still_Movil images are messages addressed to a viewer with the intention of influencing his/her beliefs or modify his/her behavior.
One of Still_Movil condition is its pluralism, the recognition of difference its interchangeability. For every collaboration, we have allocated a new set of rules or tasks or scores and this is why the resultant images are so diverse.
Still_Movil is a process of transformation from movement to stillness.
In opposition to the natural movement stillness is artificial is imposed and constructed, stillness is like language.
In a photograph the movement is always imagined.
While externally a still body seems completely motionless, internally, organs, fluids and energy are in constant movement. In the same way, inside an image we can imagine a number of symbols, signs, meaning and interpretations in constant movement, which constitute the organs of the image.
Lacan says: ‘There is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture”… That something for me is “Presence”.
(Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psych-Analysis, ed. Jaque-Allain Miller, W.W.Norton & Co., N.Y.1973).
I’m not sure the viewer will feel my presence watching these images but I’m pretty sure they will feel my gaze.
To view an image is equal to interpret.
To interpret is equal to attribute meaning.
To attribute meaning is equal to substitute.
To substitute is equal to create symbols.
To create symbols is equal to represent absence.
To represent absence is equal to experience presence.
I would like to dedicate Still_Movil to all those choreographers and performance artists of South America which I didn’t have the honor/joy to collaborate with.
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