look the empty spaces
look the empty spaces is an exploration of how familial identities are constructed through absences, sentimental oral narratives, and fetishized objects passed down through generations. These foundational myths shape our perception, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and become deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness.
Drawing on Susan Sontag's idea that photographs actively promote nostalgia and immortalize moments, the project delves into the archival materials as a starting point. Our family mythology becomes an extension and reconfiguration of this archive, embodying both what we were told we should be and what was left unsaid.
The work poses questions about how we relate to these absences and the impact of these voids on our present. It examines memory and its construction, aiming not to provide definitive answers but to open a dialogue through a network of memories, reflections, and sensations. This journey encompasses fears, tenderness, and joy, forming a memory and creation device.
By combining images, videos, sounds, texts, and voids, Family Mythologies*invites participants to integrate their personal myths, making each experience unique. The project seeks to evoke a state of mind and sensitivity, generating unpredictable effects on the viewer, focusing on transmitting sensations rather than delivering a specific message.
In exploring these empty spaces, we confront the absences and recognize ourselves within them—within the images that might have been and those that no longer exist. The project engages with the foundational myths, questioning what they establish and whether their evolution can be foreseen. Through a poetic approach, it accesses realms beyond narrative reach, intertwining times and experiences, while the nostalgia for what is absent strikes deeply, like a punctum.
Bibliography:
- FONTCUBERTA: El beso de Judas. Fotografía y Verdad.
- SONTAG: On Photography.
- BARTHES: Camera Lucida.
- AGAMBEN: What is an Apparatus?
- FALCO: Poetry and Experimental Cinema: Tensions and Relations in the Formation of a Language.