FIFV 2024

The Valparaíso International Photography Festival celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2024 and Casa Espacio Buenos Aires opens a new meeting, exchange and dissemination point for the printed photographic image.

Overview

This FIFV is asking itself an unsettling question as it turns 15 years old: When does a photograph lose its memory?

It has left childhood and is moving towards adulthood. In this adolescent transit, it interrogates its own memory. In the assembly of our memory, we select some mental photographs and discard others, influenced more by emotion than by reason. Some scenes appear intensely colored and others blurred or totally absent. Memory shares a laboratory with the processing of emotions and sexual instincts, which are housed in the same area of the brain. Neuroscience has already said it: the events and experiences that we record are the ones that carry the greatest emotional charge for us. Memory, then, is a combinatorial art: it records elements of experience but selects and recombines them into a story. This record does not obey linear time nor does it order the elements in a rigorous way. Memory is as fragile and opaque as our subjectivity. Its composition is complex and tangled: it admits crossings, contradictions, gaps, errors, repetitions, anachronisms and imaginations. Images juxtapose, associate or confront each other, and generate new meanings as they relate to each other.

There are also deeper layers of memory and others that are more accessible; there are memories lurking in the subconscious and others that haunt us day by day. A cumbersome but crucial process. In no way should its complexity and randomness lead us to consider that memory is an “invention”. Disregarding the political, ethical and aesthetic value of memory is a dehumanizing and violent act, and is what totalitarian regimes have done time and again to impose “their narrative” as the only valid one. We need to respect personal and collective memory in order to live together with others; to defend its testimonial value and its capacity to “account” for the facts. Without memory we would live in an even more delirious world, we would be left without culture and language, our identity would be erased. Memory sustains us, gives us meaning, allows us to communicate with others. Forgetting the name of a friend is something of a betrayal. Photography has the force of proof. As the bearer of a moment, each photographic image is a declaration that “this has been”.

The best way to prove that something exists or has existed is to show a photograph. Photography is, therefore, the guardian of memory. The juxtaposition of times generates a dialectic in which past and present affect each other. An image of the past comes to reactivate the present, to transform it and, vice versa, a present image casts another light on the past. The past, in this way, does not come to the present as a souvenir or as a patrimonial fetish, but as the intrusion of the other, of a difference capable of interfering in the present.

For its 15th edition, the festival will be joined by French photographer Stéphane Lavoué, cultural manager, curator and researcher Johan Trujillo, Uruguayan photographer and visual artist Federico Estol, and Chilean filmmaker and documentary filmmaker Tiziana Panizza. They will guide the creative process of Workshops and Viewing of Photographic Projects.

In addition, the FIFV Publishing Fair will take place on 1, 2 and 3 November at the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso as part of the festival's fifteenth edition. The transition from image to ink, from photography to paper, is perhaps one of the noblest destinies of the photographic image. With that intuition, the Valparaiso International Photography Festival has traced its navigation route that began in 2010. This 2024, when the creative encounter turns 15, Casa Espacio Buenos Aires 824 opens a new meeting and exchange point for the printed image: the FIFV Editorial Fair.

Presenting photobooks, fanzines, self-publications and magazines, among other formats, the event aims to generate a space open to the public for the dissemination and exchange of publications as a way of promoting the publishing world.