Train to the future

 

Train to the future

BY KRISTINA SERGEEVA


Norilsk is the northernmost city in the world with a population of over 150,000. An artificially created industrial city during Stalin's repressions, Norilsk is popular for its various mineral resources and large mining operations. Norilsk is associated with permafrost, lack of light, depressing landscapes and a grim history.

I went on a photographic expedition to Norilsk with the aim of reflecting the identity of contemporary Russia through the mythologization of ruinized spaces. Train to the future is a journey into a future that has already arrived.

I see Norilsk as a place where the sense of time has been lost. As in all of Russia, the war has suspended the present. I am trying to find a suitable metaphor for the new time, the thin line between past and future. Wandering around the city, I imagine myself as a discoverer of a new land that is no longer with me. During the creation of the project, I was inspired by the stories of eyewitnesses about the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Kristina Sergeeva (1996) is a visual artist from St. Petersburg, Russia. She uses photography, book and print forms in her artistic practice. The field of study in Kristina's projects revolves around the exploration of themes of collective and individual memory and personal perception of the contemporary Russian context. In her work she focuses on reworking and making sense of history, searching for national identity through observation and exploration of the landscape of post-soviet space.

Website
https://kristina-sergeeva.ru

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/_tinaserg/

 

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl

 

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl

BY IOANNA SAKELLARAKI


This peripatetic inquiry is realized through a series of night walks across a wide range of Australian landscapes mapping out the transmutable body of nature as a meditative field. Occupying new meanings each time through the walking as a form of grounding thought while moving with it and making something out of it, its residue becomes what remains but empowers. Characterized by their own interruption, when zones of landscapes pause and rebegin by merging into a new form of totality, the fields of these walks are moving bodies themselves; a form of energy that is transferable to words, images, and sounds enabling them to become the toponyms of new constellations. From the west to the east coast, there is no crossing without encountering the desert as the connector in the in-between, the center of Australia; the interior of the continent, and the seventy percent of its entirety, a landscape that epitomizes a ‘before- us’ quality as a site of ancient myth, spiritual dimension, and cultural rebirth and which had, for centuries, been seen as a ‘’terra nullius’’ in the journals of masculine adventurers who tried to cross it. The desert, this ‘’hideous blank’’, as several of the early explorers had called it, is, for the purpose of this work, envisioned like an outdoor thinking room during my night walks; the site for ‘forming aporias’ on the physical space of my images. These forms are for me exploration devices of the unknown; they operate in their hiddenness and at the same time it is through hiding that they invite me to find them anew, fully and wholly.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She is a graduate of Journalism with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and an MA in Cultural Studies. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was the winner of a Sony World Photography Award in 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with recent solo shows in Tokyo, Melbourne, Belfast, Braga, Greece and Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, TIME, Aesthetica and Wallpaper and journals including The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle. She has been invited as a guest speaker in the Martin Parr Foundation and the London Institute of Photography amongst others. Her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Collection. Her monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by London- based publisher GOST Books.

Website


https://ioannasakellaraki.com/

 

On Trial

 

on trial

BY CRISTIAN ORDÓÑEZ


Although only residing in the USA for a short period, Toronto-based Chilean Photographer Cristian Ordóñez has spent a large-period of the previous decade revisiting the lower states creating works that explore the notion of memory, personal relationship, and encounters with the territory.

On Trial observes and plays witness to these encounters, a body of work that presents the social, economic, and geographic survey of the landscape traveled by Ordóñez. A survey, engaging with all things natural and foreign on even ground, seeking to question not only the observer but the role of the object within the frame.

Forthcoming previous published works, Notes 01, 02, and 03, the new chapter continues to visualise his approach and interest in the photographic process as a medium to explore the territory, own cultural diversity, and the connection between place and ethnicity.

Text by Rohan Hutchinson. Editor, acb press

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Cristian Ordóñez is a Chilean photographer based in Toronto. Ordóñez has exhibited his work in multiple group and solo exhibitions in Canada, Chile, the United Kingdom, Russia, Greece, the United States, and Netherlands. He has also participated in various art fairs in Santiago, Toronto, and Vancouver. Using the medium of photography he collects impressions of the world, gravitating towards the parallels between ideas, memory, and belonging. He observes time and space through human absence and presence, captures natural and urban vestiges, explores the vastness and intimacy of landscape, and focuses on blurring the lines between nature, urban structures, and portraiture. His work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Library & Archives, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria in Australia, and the San Telmo Museum in Spain.

Website


https://cristianordonez.com/works/on-trial/

Book


https://www.acb-press.com/publications/cristian-ordonez-on-trial-forth-coming

 

Hythloday by Norberto Fernández Soriano

 
 

Hythloday by Norberto Fernández Soriano


Hythloday is a body of work that draws from one community’s fight against fracking, and presents their experience and beliefs through a visual interpretation of what is positioned between fact and fiction. In the United Kingdom, the trial site for hydraulic fracture-fracking for shale gas – and its potential for national rollout and future commercial exploitation - is located in the countryside between the cities of Preston and Blackpool. A mile down the road from this site, a group of activists - known to the local community as ‘The Protectors’ - set up camp, where they lived and fought to stop this fracking trial.

In what might be described as a “photographic novella”, Hythloday transforms this physical place into an imagined post-fracking scenario, in which the activities, causes, fears, effects and thoughts situated in this place constitute a potential future landscape. Hythloday draws its titled from the name of the sailor in Thomas Moore’s Utopia, which is used as a means to explore and understand the place itself, as well as ‘The Protectors’ fight. Hythloday combines the characters and elements on the ground with the mood to create a journey through an unknown and strange place that reveals the tension between those protrayed and the land they inhabit.


Bio
Norberto Fernández Soriano (1988, Spain) is a visual storyteller and book-maker. He uses photography to explore and interpret the world he inhabits, creating a common ground between contemporary social issues and his own life questions.

Having previously studied Chemical Engineering, his scientific background and self-taught approach to photography has led him to investigate the narrative possibilities of the medium. He is currently studying for a Masters in Photography at University of West of England (UWE Bristol) - his work has materialised in the form of the artist-book, Hythloday, and will be exhibited at the Martin Parr Foundation in 2020.

www.norbertofernandezsoriano.com

 

Pandemic Preparation Techniques: 1- Quarantine by Sergio Camplone

 
 

Pandemic Preparation Techniques:
1- Quarantine

BY SERGIO CAMPLONE

Now more than ever, we are experiencing such a strong time dilation.Quarantine is difficult, but facts, places and characters of this story have helped me to reflect.I produced the first chapter of the CoVid 19 trilogy following one of the most divisive debates in this pandemic: How the coronavirus travels through the air?Suddenly, daily mundanities seem to demand a military strategy, forcing us to overthink things they never used to think about at all.Can you go outside? What if you’re walking downwind of another person? Is it irrational to hold your breath?Everything seems to be contaminated. Personal Protection Equipment, have become unobtainable luxury objects and so, viral tutorials on the self-production of PPE are spread on the network without considering that they have precise methods of use and disposal.WHO has released some good instructional videos about using PPE and on correct individual behavior. Moreover, the same quarantine, in its simplest form, is the creation of a hygienic border between two or more things, in order to protect both. In this spatial containment strategy, the work follows and conceptualizes some WHO tutorials on the correct use of Personal Protective Equipment.

Bio

He was born in Pescara, he studied photography at R. Bauer in Milan. He teaches photography in various institutions working on the perception and visual representation of new social and urban landscapes.Professionally he deals with architectural photography while his research is focused on on the evolution of the contemporary landscape, on architecture and man.

The fate of the shadows by Raquel Lagoa

 

The fate of the shadows

BY RAQUEL LAGOA

PT | EN

The visual narrative ‘The fate of the shadows‘ translates in photography the speech resulting from the overlapping of meanings – when the spiritual world intersects the physical world. The photographic sequence makes visible the path through the domestic space that is imperceptible in real life, and, at the same time, filters the contemporary gaze, increasingly superficial and acritical. From this dynamic, surfaces the pertinence of this project like a conversation (author/observer) that stimulates a critical and reflexive attitude towards what, currently, confines us in space - in our home.

The objects that physically inhabit the (real) interior space appear in the photographs printed in the projection of its respective shadows, its materiality is never revealed and these remain undefined accentuating the misticity if the very space where they remain. The monotony of the everyday, accentuated in the period of isolation, enables, consciously or uncounsciously, the reflection through these four walls that limits (our presence in) the space. This being said, the intention to decode and immobilize in images, the signs of passage of time in the intimate space surfaces, unveiling, in silence, an exterior increasingly closer and distant at the same time

Each photograph is a perspective of the interior that reveals an invasion of light in the intimate space, illuminating the surfaces and obscuring the objects, denouncing a clear overlapping of the immaterial world over the material world. The objects get lost in its insignificance and the images reflect a third dimension that foregoes these to exist.

Equally projected – the city – that, antagonically, paints the colors of neutral surfaces of the house and adds a complex pattern without hiding what is overlaps, like a translucid diluted wallpaper between the black stamp of shadows. The photographic narrative comprises a game of collages that highlight the inevitable confrontation between the house and the city, the interior and the exterior, the individual and the collective, the shadow and the light – the fiction and the real. Deep down, if the pandemic forced the isolaton, the isolation reinforced the importance of (knowledge of) inhabiting, with the body and with the gaze, the visible and the invisible.

“... A building is like a soap bubble. is bubble is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. e exterior is the result of an interior.”
Le Corbusier, 1927 apud Colin Rowe e Fred Koetter, Collage city (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1978).

Bio

Raquel Lagoa (Figueira da Foz, 1996), student at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto (2014 - 2020) with an academic path divided between art, science, literature and photography, architecture emerges as a synthesis of those worlds. The disquiet is the state of mind in permanent confrontation with the unpredictability of the current world.

 

Margem Sul by Luís Aniceto

 
 

Margem Sul by Luís Aniceto


Margem Sul is about my home town territory on the south bank of the Tagus river, just in front of Lisbon. Unlike the capital city, where its political and economic prominence is also built upon its symbolic space, the territories on the south bank lack this sovereign, historical and self-referential value in their urbanity. Suburbs were the most used adjective that pointed to a sub-value of its patrimonial reference.

It was this set of places, common in their status but differentiated in their morphology, a-historical and outside the spaces of power and desire, with which I felt affinity and attraction. Places where constructions, made at the taste of the times, heterogeneous, dispersed and diversified, generated in the landscape a strange hybridity, in everything far from the aseptic and rational standardization. Spaces in which the anonymous and indifferent buildings reign by the vulgar omnipresence of its facades and where cars, victims of accident and abandonment, pose mute as useless statuary. But also places that, between the pavement, the asphalt and the beaten path, have not yet been or are no longer, that seem suspended, unfinished and therefore renewedly liberating.

Margem Sul is a project developed over the years, in which I decided to concentrate my work in the search for an imaginary landscape. An imaginary, where the dryness of the soil is paired with the roughness of the facades and objects, in which the constant aggression of sunlight reflects the visible wear and tear of time and transformation. It is in this open field, under an endless blue sky where matter is cut into the void, that I roam through the territory and find a suspension of everyday life in which only my presence seems to inhabit.  


Bio
Luís Aniceto is a Portuguese photographer and educator currently working between Italy and Portugal. After working in Lisbon as a photo reporter for daily newspapers, he moved to Italy to join the collective of photographers Cesura, where he also had the opportunity to work with Alex Majoli. He co-founded ZONA Magazine, a photographic publication born from the interest in thinking and observing the territory of his hometown. He taught at the Portuguese Institute of Photography, where he was also responsible for the cultural program.

instagram: @luis__aniceto
www.luisaniceto.pt

 

Open Space, Landscape in Reverse by Xavier Delory

 
 

OPEN SPACE, LANDSCAPE IN REVERSE

BY XAVIER DELORY

A renewed dialogue between ruin and landscape.
From a modernist office tower of the Glorious Thirty in a state of transient decay, Open space reverses the "classic" ruin / nature representation that can be observed in Flemish landscape painting from the 17th century. Unlike the "composed veduta" by painters from the north where you can see ruins of ancient Rome surrounded by an Arcadian landscape where nature and culture unite harmoniously, here the landscape no longer welcomes ruin, it makes part of the ruin. The mountainous landscape used, refers to the aesthetics of the sublime, giving a tone of confrontation between man and the forces of nature.
By introducing a landscape “freely” into this brutalist setting, Open space also plays with the relationship with nature, materials and landscapes, especially with the spatial continuity from inside to outside which was at the center of the concerns of the first modernist architects who wanted to put man back at the heart of "Creation" thanks to technique.

Bio
Xavier Delory, born in Liège (Belgium) in 1973, studied interior architecture and photography. His work is on the frontiers of art and architecture, questioning the characteristics of digital photography in its relationship to reality and to the construction of an image. The artist uses digital photomontages to create fictional architectures.

https://www.xavierdelory.com/

 

Rays of Hope by Diego Duenhas

 
 

Rays of Hope

BY DIEGO DUENHAS

PT | EN

After nearly twenty days in quarantine, following the sad news that still haven’t ceased, I began reflecting about some projects/dreams of traveling to photograph that I’ve been continuously postponing. The question that persisted: “Will I survive to make those trips?“, “Will the future world be open to receive me?“, “How extensive and deep are the damages?“. Following this line of thought I began searching videos of some places in the world and I felt the need to photograph them in my own way. I opted to make artistic cuts using the long exposure technique from the standpoint of the mechanical eye of static photographic cameras fixed in moving vehicles. The result is this small series that I’ve titled “Rays of Hope“ in a wordplay between the visual effects obtained and the emotion that all mankind should share in this sad times we are living.

Bio

A designer and photographer since 1999, Diego Duenhas works in web development, UI focused projects, digital media advertising, social media and printed editorial work. He fuses in his design practice his skills in photography and audiovisual media. He graduated in Internet Systems Technology from the IFSP/S.J. in 2017 and he’s currently working as a freelancer.

instagram / @dduenhas