Tener un Cuerpo (To Have a Body)

I reflect on the human body in variations of perspectives, layers and craft, carnality and connection with ourselves and others.

Tener un Cuerpo (To have a Body)

Series of 35 images (ongoing 2024) 

My artistic practice has become my holding space for expanding what the body knows, physical textures and presence to color, mass and form. I’ve learned that my body (and photography) can go places that my mind might not have imagined. In a world that is ever still physical and tangible, I explore around the very idea of being and existing as a human, parting from an accidental succession of steps (or errors) evolving from e.g. algae or amino acids*. I reflect on the human body in variations of perspectives, layers and craft, carnality and connection with ourselves and others.

 I depict the human body as a container of emotions, ideas, stories but also bones and the skin. I place an image of human physique or part of a body as a measuring stick within a set of humble materials such as painted pine wood slats, scans, cardboard or printed paper. I set it in variations of perspective and scale, firstly to trick the eye and explore the limits of perception, and secondly to investigate how we fit our bodies into structures that can be physical and, overall, mental. Our body as the last bastion of existential being.

The constructed installation functions as an ephemeral collage that I immediately disassemble after the shot, leaving the photographic medium the responsibility of registering its existence, a moment that will never exist again.

 

* The Oparin-Haldane hypothesis suggests that life arose gradually from inorganic molecules, with “building blocks” like amino acids forming first and then combining to make complex polymers.

*According to a study led by researcher Jochen Brocks and Amber Jarrett, the secret of the origin of life on Earth lies in an expansion of algae that occurred 650 million years ago.