«Instituto», Vera Martín Zelich

This project revolves around the portrait, linking two elements: a space that defines and delimits a context, and an age group, that also defines and delimits the type of subject.

This work, developed in serial format, although not exclusively so in formal terms, is based on the study of some of the essential tools in the genre of portraiture: the face, as an expression of the individual, the look, as a means of communication, and the pose, as an affirmation.

The space chosen is the high school, a point of reference that establishes the age group on which the series hinges: the transition between adolescence and youth, the stage of the formation and affirmation of the individual. High school is one of the places where people at this age spend most of their time, and also where they interact, are educated and develop. It has been selected, therefore, as a familiar context in which those featured develop, the spaces that they use and experience. Look and pose, as components of expression, within surroundings that are familiar to them at that age, and complex and rich in connotations for the viewer of these images. The work is not only a portrait of individuals but of a space too, the high school. At the same time, it is not only a portrait of an isolated group of individuals but of a generational group linked by a relationship with a space common to them all. Furthermore, this series was completed entirely in the same high school, and all of those featured are the same students in the time prior to the end of the period.

The work seeks to challenge double portraiture of this group of high school students, the individual and the group, with those stereotypes and archetypes that usually develop in this age group.

«Raiponce», Marie Maurel de Maillé

“The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.”
Walter Benjamin

The tales have a symbolic and deep impact; they teach us advice, forgotten and unconscious knowledge passed down from generation to generation.This project, Raiponce, refers to the homonym tale of the brothers Grimm.I tried to revisit it through the prism of the filiation, because it turns out that the time of its realization coincided with my first pregnancy.I always had an interest for the idea of transmission but this interest took in this specific case a particular and concrete content.

All my work is taken in a fictional imagination. Most of these photos were taken in museums where most of the time it reactivates a memory (Casa Museo Picasso, Castle of Pau, Museum of the Romanticism of Madrid). In these places of monstration, where an imaginary reconstructs, the public participates in the fiction. I hope to pass this narrative load of the tale by blowing in my images this tension between their apparently documentary aspect and the evocation of an atmosphere staged until the tense silence of the disappearance, without specifying in the image if it comes from a set or from an already constituted representation.

«The Mass is ended», Andrea Di Martino

The Mass is ended

What fascinates me in the photography of architecture, which is often static, inanimate and devoid of human presence, is the ability for me to imagine life. In this sense, deconsecrated churches are richly evocative places: they recall sacred life, rebirth and profane life. In Italy there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of deconsecrated churches scattered all over the country. Many are neglected and often forgotten. In recent years, however, there has been an increasingly common policy for the recovery and renovation of formerly consecrated churches, putting them to new use. What is surprising is the wide variety of reuses, the most diverse and unthinkable. My project started from here: to document these places in their new identity and their new life.

For five years, from 2008 to 2013, I travelled across the country looking for deconsecrated and transformed churches. I explored every Italian region to find the most interesting and surprising new uses, searching for innovative architectural solutions as well as the most practical adaptations for people who, for example, just needed a place to work. Along the way I discovered stories that revealed Italy in many facets: refined and superficial, trendy and popular, rule-breaking and believing. I photographed more than 70 churches. I chose to have the same point of view, the same perspective, the same square format. Just one photograph for each church to show the contrast between the different lives of these special places.

Alby Álamo

In November 2012, my friend Franchoinvited me to «The Cult», as he himself once called it. The Cult was a Brazilian evangelical mass in Berlin at which a pastor was to be ordained. The first thing I asked Franchowas if I would be able to bring my camera, to which he replied that I could. I did not know what to expect and had no idea if the invitation would lead to any material for a video.

The camera acted as a shield and helped me keep a distance from events, but I realised straight away that there were many things going round in my head there. One of them was the importance of images in such small communities, and the role they played and how they worked. Although in a mass like this one, the images themselves were not physically present, but appeared in many other ways through rituals, gestures and the setting itself.

When I started to edit all the material, I realised that the story would need to be told throughwords. It made sense to me that a rite based on sacred texts should also be similarly described. The narrative thus acquired a central role in the video in the form of my voice in first person, but I wanted that voice to raise questions separately from the figure of the all-knowing narrator. This is how the first person became a fictional character, calling for the viewer’s belief in the story, and sometimes even asking them to form the images for themselves that I was unable to record.

In the video, therefore, we see a fictionalized documentary (and which are not?) where the viewer’s relationship with the story told is rather like that of a believer with a sacred text.

De esta forma en el video asistimos a una documental ficcionalizado (¿acaso no lo son todos?) en el que la relación del espectador con la historia contada se asemeja en gran medida a la del creyente con los textos sagrados.

Matías Costa «Zonians»

In this exhibition, Matias Costa returns to an interest in territory, identity and memory, all of which are recurring themes in his photographic work. This body of work is akin to anthropological research into a community on the point of extinction.

For almost a hundred years, thousands of Americans lived comfortably in tranquil, tropical communities on the banks of the Panama Canal. They were known as Zonians, and they were responsible for the maintenance of one of the greatest feats of engineering in the world, until its return to Panama in 1999. Since then, they have met annually in Florida to remember their lost paradise, and they know that when they disappear their community will be extinguished forever.

In the middle of the Panamanian jungle, a handful of Americans thought they had found the promised land. The Zonians were stripped of their privileges in 1999, when the Panama Canal ceased to be US territory. And thus ended nearly a century of colonial life in a territory where the Zonians lived in a bubble of self-sufficiency, under a kind of socialism sustained by the world´s greatest capitalist government.

After helping Panama to gain independence from Colombia early in the twentieth century, the US government assured the rights in perpetuity to a strip of land 16 km wide, called the Panama Canal Zone. Thus began the construction of one of the most ambitious engineering projects in history, turning the region into a strategic area for US interventionist policy in Latin America.

Since their departure, the Panama Canal Society organises an annual convention in Florida for the former inhabitants of the area so that they may recall the nostalgia of their lost paradise.

Today some young Zonians are returning to their childhood home in Panama, a century after the construction of the artery linking two oceans.

This series was made between 2011 and 2013 at the Panama Canal and in Orlando, and follows the footsteps of the Zonians and the last moments of their existence as a community.

Matias Costa has undertaken a creative work that is not intended to define, but to evoke, investigating doubts and uncertainties, concerns on issues which, intentionally or not, always recur: the uprooting, cultural transhumance, migration, the impossibility of a final destination or unmistakeable belonging, identity built on the fragmentary and the dispersed, re-adaptation and strangeness are issues that make Costa´s work a kind of archaeology of the memory.

He is a member of the British agency Panos Pictures and is represented by the Freijo gallery. He collaborates with media publications including The New Yorker and El País Semanal. He is a lecturer in Art Documentary Photography at the EFTI, TAI and LENS schools Madrid.