Christine Mathieu

In my workshop, there are some anthological books about the relationship between humankind and mask design. It opens a world of silence and spirituality, which I use as a ground for thoughts and inspirations.

Since 2011 the use of materials such as wool, felt, ribbons, threads, strings and ground have allowed me to develop, perfect and collect almost sixty photographed masks.

Between puppet and human figure, photography and craft, those scenes attempt to outline the “figure” of the soul.

A symbolic quest for my share of silence. A personal need to get away from the superficial routine, to rise up against the overuse of the body shape in art.

My focus is on simplicity, to create a figure as primal as possible. Shaped as a ritual, my working process begins by gathering random materials and ends by photographing the created “figures”. In between, the evolu­tion is visible though the chronological use of materials. Each choice triggers a new cycle of atmospheres.

Designed as a small ritual, it begins by creating the ‘thing’ to photograph. Materials are deliberately chosen to be simple and well known. It finishes with the photograph and followed by digital editing.

Those successive stages allow me to create my photographed sculptures, half real, half fiction.

The manual work (embroidery, knitting, needle work, couture, beads) in each work takes a long time. The simplicity of those familiar and ancestral techniques links me to decades of modest craftsman.

Photography and digital creation complete the final object and also give a «magical» dimension of the unreal.

Cristina Fontsaré

Cristina Fontsaré’s work is closer to fantasy than to documentary. Here the footsteps of a present reality and those of a desire that has long been announced are brought together. The real and the imaginary live together in harmony among the shadows, from which disquieting presences emanate whether in a petrol station, by the side of the road, on a well-lit roundabout or facing a solitary building.

By causing that happy encounter between the experienced and the imagined, the artist intuitively introduces a characteristic element of her work: a narrative which proposes inconclusive visual tales rather than the usual mere snapshots. For this purpose, she adds sensations which do not belong to the real world but to the poetic transubstantiation that she carries out when she photographs those landscapes.

Her nocturnal «non-places» work as «spaces of temporary occupation» which refer us back to both the finding and the loss. The luminous halo which bathes these night-time scenes invokes the longings of the characters that live in them. But, when the landscape takes on the absolute leadership, it is the off-camera voice of the artist which makes itself heard over the territory. For that reason, many of the titles of her works take us back to a certain emotional state which transcends the landscape itself. The image arises here in an activating mechanism of affection, worries and desires. We might speak in reality of post-romantic landscapes. Because, rather than about abrupt nature, the emotions are thrown into architectures and geometrical constructions which destroy the experience of the wild landscape. The artist invariably photographs territories in which these artificial structures, without any aesthetic intention, make their way among the night-time shadows. We thus find advertising placards becoming light sculptures, petrol stations or roundabouts without any function, like luminous islands, of soulless territories.

Subjected to an effective geometrical economy, these places fight for space with nearby nature. They are at one and the same time spaces of light isolated and integrated in the middle of nowhere.

The nocturnal nature is thus a backdrop, a secondary element which frames and takes in the spectacle of desolation. The leading characters wander on the fringes of light and darkness. Their appearances occur in landscapes without identity, in residential areas on the edges of towns which vainly exhibit their false promises of freedom. But it is there, in the middle of this degraded landscape, that the artist carries out the simulation of the much-desired reunion while waiting for somebody to rescue her from an endless night.

José Gómez Isla

]]> https://archivo.fotonoviembre.org/2013/10/25/1491/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:17:33 +0000 http://fotonoviembre.org/?p=1491 23]
From November 8th de Noviembre to December 14th  2013
Ermita de San Miguel, Plaza del Adelantado La Laguna
Tel: 922 601 165/150 Horario: L-V de 11:00 a 14:00 h y de 17:00 a 20:00 h. S de 11:00 a 14:00 h

 Sarah Carp

Glendarragh, the Glen of the Oaks. It is there, 30 km south of Dublin, where I went in search of my roots. My grandmother, who died in 1999, was Irish and had lived there for a few years before emigrating to Switzerland. I owed her my passion for art, and it was quite naturally through photography that I would immerse myself in her story.

The images, produced through several journeys, are about absence and memory. I took photographs during the winter period so the colours and atmosphere would chime with contemplation and self-reflection. This intimate contemplation of my immediate surroundings offers a subjective and emotional journey in a world fated to disappear. This movement back to the land explores the mutations of a life that transforms and renews itself in full simple slowness.

In this rural Ireland, life’s rhythm depends on the temper of the elements. The characters, who seem straight out of a tale, are members of my family or people living in Glendarragh. The places are inhabited by strange objects. Interiors and landscapes all tell the memories of the place. The surrounding nature, savage and mystical, seems to hold life’s secrets.

These images were realised between 2003 and2012. The project’s meaning and coherence emerged through time. The images are set in relation subjectively, so as to offer a form of narration that allows each spectator to make up her own story. My own narration, just as our constantly transforming memory, is continuously composed and recomposed. A subjective puzzle of colours, of sensations and of emotions.

This exhibition was sponsored by the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (Switzerland).

Simona Rota

Ost [ˈɔst], German, noun                    east
Algos [álɡos], ancient Greek, noun        pain

Ostalgia is a series of photographs which I developed in the course of over two years and which arose from a work of documentation for the Architectural Museum in Vienna: under the name of  Soviet Modernism, a team from the Museum made itself responsible for locating, rescuing and studying the files related with the architecture promoted by the old Soviet Union in its fifteen republics between the 1960s and 1990s. The series is a kind of subjective catalogue of monumental buildings which seem to bear witness to the heroic intentions of the past but which reach the present distilling a certain eroded optimism and disillusion. Built to be icons of triumph and progress, they were the accomplices of the political propaganda within the legitimating dynamics of a totalitarian regime: the Socialist Pioneers Cultural Centres, the Workers’ Palaces, the Palaces of Lenin, circuses, sports centres, museums and mausoleums. All of them respond to a formal and programmatic modernity and all of them had to tell a story of triumph; today they stand out like absurd giants, great dreams invalidated by history immersed in the decadent atmosphere which is everywhere in the ex-Soviet republics and which generates a physical and virtual space onto which it is easy to project myths and nostalgia. On the other hand, the enormous dimensions of these buildings in relation to the human scale mark the position of the individual, his merely decorative role, within an authoritarian society in a significant manner. In Soviet squares, individuals come and go in a furtive way; small and squashed, they do not stop to talk, to debate, to call things into question.

Ostalgia (the “pain of the east”, if the word must be literally translated) began in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. If it had existed earlier, it would not have been given a name until the moment at which the old German Democratic Republic (DDR, from its German abbreviation) – which was then facing the rapid changes necessary for integration with the western half of Germany — began to feel nostalgia for its old identity in the process of liquidation. This desire, together with a certain sentimentalism in the West towards the East, ended up creating a new mythology on the old DDR and, by extension, on the old Soviet block. Ostalgia is a linguistic alloy that is as strange as the desire itself to reconstruct something which might never have existed.

Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

SoJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8 mm film footage shot in Korean neighbourhoods, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions and stereotypes of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture.

The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba of Where’s Officer Tuba (1986) and an actress taken from Happy Ghost 3(1986).  Although they still never meet, Chun casts these two figures as potentially star-crossed lovers searching for each other at the same moment in cities thousands of miles apart.  Through a labour intensive process, Chun has removed these figures from their original time and space to engage with the present and the Asian diaspora in the Americas.

Officer Tuba Meets the Happy Ghost presents viewers with an alternate method for engaging in representation and time through the construction of a cinema within the gallery.  The displacement of characters from the contexts and times of the original films allow the artist to rupture the seamless flow of cinematic narrative creating a new space from the incomplete film reels.  Chun extends this new narrative by maintaining the space for the cinema, complete with single screen, seating and movie poster outside the entrance.  This creation of a black box within the white cube asserts a collective experience and cinematic form that allows the source to speak within its formal language while narrative communication is ruptured.