Liza Ambrossio (1993, MX-FR)
Is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works mainly between Spain, France, and Mexico. She began her artistic practice at the age of sixteen when she asked a ancient maid from her mother’s house to steal the photographs from the family albums looking for traces of a dark past for which there seemed to be no evidence. At the same time in her native Mexico City, Ambrossio portrayed her transition from adolescence to adulthood looking for ways to survive from a distance during a chaotic and stormy process of emancipation from her family. After the suicide of her roommate and best friend from adolescence, she inherited his job as a “nota roja” photographer (police press), covering murders, accidents and torture by drug traffickers at dawn for a local newspaper. Ambrossio goes on a journey of psychic and physical discovery flooded with disturbances, magic, trauma, dreams, and visions. In these moments, she discovers that the hell inside contains the same hell that explodes outside.
After concluding her university studies at the Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales in the UNAM, Mexico City, specializing in political journalism and film at U.T (USA), she received multiple scholarships in the United States and Europe, among them; the Descubrimientos scholarship for the Master in Photography and artistic projects at the PIC. A school awarded by the PHotoEspaña festival and the editorial house La Fabrica in Madrid, Spain.
Her universe breathes a real attempt to understand the powers and weaknesses of the mind as a way to scrutinize the human experience, which goes through the past, present, and future time. Ambrossio is incorporating symbols alluding to witchcraft, eroguru, mythology, memories, and legends that she mixes with her written narrative, photographs, objects, installations, sounds, performance, and videos that she unites by free association, schemes promoted by her own theories related to psychological manipulation and its influence on the continuation or rupture of the power professed by the different social structures. Their approaches have an intense but anarchic relationship with chance and instinct and imply the destabilization of female canons that threaten the possibility of exceeding ethnic, sexual, moral, religious, and political limits.
She is the author of “The rage of devotion_La ira de la devoción” considered by the British Journal of Photography and El País as one of the most exalted and risky photo books of the year 2018, her work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, South Korea, and Mexico. Including sites such as the Somerset House in the UK, the Palazzo Palmieri in Italy, the Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACQ) in Mexico, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb (msu) in Croatia, and the Museum National of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ), in Greece also international fairs such as Art Basel, JustMad, Photo London and UNSEEN. Ambrossio’s imaginary has been reviewed by The British Journal of Photography, The Magnum Foundation, El País, El Mundo, Der Greif, GUP, Unseen magazine, Vogue Italy, L’Officiel, Fire-cracker and Lens Culture. She has received the FNAC Nuevo Talento award in Spain, Voies Off in Arles, France the same year 2018, the Flash Forward in Canada, the PhEST in Italy, and the PHmuseum New Generation Grant in the United Kingdom during 2019, In 2020 she was awarded by the annual photography residence from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in París, France. Ambrossio is currently a member of the Académie française, also she was recently nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet in Switzerland and works in her second photo book “Blood Orange_Naranja de Sangre” with the German publishing house Kehrer Verlag.