Les traces énigmatiques des autres

 

Les traces énigmatiques des autres

BY FIONA SEGADÃES DA SILVA


In «les traces énigmatiques des autres» a semi-contemplative approach is taken to maintain our conflicting relationship with the gradual destruction of the living things. This ongoing project, like a bad omen, emphasize our helplessness and uncertainty when it comes to the living world that we have dissociated from. An underlying tension among the images is created by impending catastrophe and palpable chaos, while silent phenomena form a wavering atmosphere. By captu- ring living landscapes, a deeper reflection on our vulnerability as individuals occurs. Could the photographic act channel the emotional tension of a vulnerable living body? We must develop the ability to sense a profound connection with the natural and organic world that surrounds us and perhaps images contribute to this intention. Everything is based on observations of decontextualized places that transports us to a dimension that is both tense and mysterious.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Fiona Segadães Da Silva (b.1995) is a photographer and an image book publisher. She currently lives and works in Le Havre (France). Her practice is built by a sensitive and tangible approach to the images. She is particularly interested in our ways of haunting bodies and spaces, our relationships with the living things and mental health. Her photographic work focuses on sensory perceptions and non-verbal projections. Freshly graduated with honors in 2022, since then her work was published in international group publications and part of some collective exhibitions.

Website
https://fionasegadaesdasilva.fr/

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

 

Fill line

 

Fill line

BY KATYA YANOVA


It's said that the universe always makes a sound, but we cannot hear it because we are born in it.

I was born in the year when my country ceased to exist and became another country. Just as my dad taught our dog to bark his last name syllable by syllable, so did my country learn to be called a different name and live in a new way. I was simply learning to live in the place where I was born. 
These days I think more and more about what my parents and teachers put into defining me as "good" or "bad." How much of "me" was in a snowflake costume at a New Year's Eve party in the kindergarten or at the church service with my grandmother. How much "me" was at school assembly in a brown dress with a white apron, how much was at the seasonal potato harvest down in the country, how much was at the family holiday with the chimes announcing the beginning of a new year, how much "me" are there in each step of the bright green entrance hall of our five-story condo? 
More often I think about what are the actor of my statements and the true agents of intentions? Thoughts are dependent on a system of linguistic, cultural and social rules. To feel means to manifest true experiences and unconsciously transmit meanings. Who is the author of signs, symbols, codes, precise structures, templates?  Just a flickering portrait of the motives and reasons accumulated by memory and consciousness to do one way and not the other. Perhaps I am only a part of a collective formed by time, where it is no longer possible to define the boundaries of personal contribution and highlight one's own "I".

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

The key themes of my artistic practice are related to issues of agency, problems of communication and the human impact of traumatic events. I work with long-term photographic projects, combining with installation form, sculpture, performative video and sound. I am interested in the image of the contemporary person experiencing emotional instability, transitional states between stages of personal and social development. Using and rethinking my lived experience, exploring the elements of my personal archive, as if being an indicator, I emphasize the problems and crises of my generation.

Website
www.yanovakatya.com

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

 

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/

 

Anomie

 

ANOMIE

BY QUINTIN H. O’CONNELL


Anomie, the title of this series, refers to a concept rooted in Durkheimian sociology. It denotes a state characterized by weakened normative bonds between individuals and the broader community, leading to moral ambiguity and alienation.

Émile Durkheim's exploration of anomie in the context of suicide rates revealed a critical connection between social integration and normative regulation. Anomie represented a void where social norms conflicted with the internal motives of individuals, causing discontent and ennui. In fact, the modern world is plagued by unheard of rates of depression and suicide.

In this series, O’Connell focuses on his own anomic sentiments. Namely, the disconnect experienced as one embedded within a culture which normalizes behaviors that harm the global ecosystem and thwart personal growth and flourishing; a culture which privileges consumption over poise and meaning.

Yet, amidst the sense of anomie, the series aims to unravel a veiled beauty concealed within solitary and quiet moments. It contemplates the mysterious allure of nature, inviting viewers to reflect on a delicate harmony that still exists within the unsettling dissonance of our modern world.

Serving as both a visual and philosophical exploration, Anomie offers a pensive journey into the transformative power of photography as not only a means of escape, but also self-overcoming and valuation.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Quintin H. O’Connell developed the Anomie series in 2023 alongside his undergraduate studies at the University of Florida, where he obtained his BA in Sociology and Philosophy. Born in 1998, O’Connell is a budding American artist working in photography. His images attempt to reach into the complexities of the human condition, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and the timeless human pursuit of a meaningful life.

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

 

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

 

The Things We Must Face by Matt Milligan

 
 
 

The Things We Must Face

by Matt Milligan

PT | EN

When news of the shutdowns started to make the rounds, I was at the office—three floors of an eerie and quiet building occupied by me and, occasionally, the cleaning guy. It had been that way for a week or so. Everyone who had the means was leaving or preparing to leave the city, and my office was no exception. 

The flight of those who could afford to leave was the first division. And it was this apparent class separation that would, at least for me, expose the rest of what was to come as a series of interlopers—unwanted visitors that keep showing up at the doorstep of America. This reminded me of something James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

Despite what we frequently see in the media, there is nothing unprecedented about 2020. We are experiencing problems that have been with us for generations, problems that stem from divisions. And those divisions are rooted in money, politics, religion, race, and other things one should not talk about in polite company. But these social taboos are the very things we must talk about—and face—as Mr. Baldwin also said, or they will keep splitting us in two over and over again.

A couple of weeks after the stay-at-home order had gone into effect, the half of us who remained in the city had to navigate a familiar but unknown landscape. My neighborhood had become as empty and quiet as my office had been. When I went on walks or the occasional errand, I photographed the changes I saw. I also turned my camera inside (because we were inside all the time!); it seemed an instinctive response to the confinement. I began to see repeated images and symbols, sometimes subtle and sometimes overt. I realized that if I was sensitive to them, they could bolster the symbols of the past that Baldwin talked about and help me navigate what I was encountering and feeling. As Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk, said, "the true symbol does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself." 

Making these photographs is a cathartic experience for me. It brings to the fore my human "constant preoccupation with pleasure and pain... our pursuit of this happiness," as fourteenth-century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenkō says. It also—thankfully—brings Merton's new awareness that, without his and Baldwin's help, I would not have found. This process and these writers have taught me that before I say anything about the problems I see out in the world, I must first look inside and face myself.




Bio

Matt Milligan is an American artist based in New York City working with digital and film photography. He uses photography and prose to explore personal experiences and how they are shaped by our surroundings, relationships, and the indirect symbols we encounter every day. He layers his visual imagery with interiors and exteriors—both physical and mental—that give nuance and subtle emotional complexity to his work.

Milligan's latest project, The Things We Must Face, is a personal reflection on life in New York City during the pandemic and how James Baldwin, Thomas Merton, and fourteenth-century Japanese writer Yoshida Kenkō influenced his experience and understanding.



 

InConcret Realities by Fadia Mufarrej

 
 
 

InConcret Realities

BY FADIA MUFARREJ

PT | EN

How one lives during quarantine in Brazil?

The social isolation in Brazil is not a rule, it is a privilege. Unfortunately because not everyone has the same social conditions, self isolation is not taken as serious. The Brazilian government has not made quarantine an essential, actually the President elected create excuses about breaking health measures, suggested by the World Helth Organization, and mocks social isolation together with the pandemic e ects in the world. Excuses such as “it’s just a little flu” and “so what?” are used by the President when referring to the pandemic.e social-political and health scenario in the country is the most cruel since the period of the military dictatorship in the 70s. From home we have been experiencing the fall of our democratic system simply by keeping up with the news. Scandals such as ministers asking for resignation, judges being disrespected by members of the government, the head of state being involveld in nepotism, press being persecuted, and so on.In such a chaotic situation I find myself in a relatively medium- -sized city located in Amazon, Belém. The city has been negatively a ected in many ways, reported with thousands of deaths due to Covid-19, local authorities involved in corruption scandals and the health and funeral state systems collapsed. From the inside of my “privilege island” I observe all this helplessly, the agony of not knowing what the future holds is a constant, and the wait is timeless, life as we knew it, now became an utopia.e following photographic series portrays a little bit of a middle class family daily life in Brazil, who has the privilege to properly exercise self-isolation due to Covid-19 world pandemic.


Bio

Female artist and producer from Pará, who graduated in medias and communication at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), São Paulo Brazil, in 2015. I started my career with photo and video documentation.

In 2013 I had my first contact with professional photography through an inter- nship at the International Photography Festival Paraty em Foco (RJ-BR) a er this experience, I’ve worked as a television producer in Brazil. My first authorial art project initiated when I was living in London in 2016 where I studied documentary lmmaking at the Met Film School, I nished my course with a short documentary about a Lebanese mother, the Learning to Fly, when I returned to Brazil I took a workshop at the Fotoativa association (PA-BR), with the visual artist as a tutor Ana Lira, who changed my perspective as an artist in many ways, the tools of producing an art object had expanded. We ended this course with a collective exhi- bition of the students creative processes in the association, my result was a project about a ective memory by a photographic series and an installation about the oldest warehouse still in operation in my hometown, Casa Salomão.

In 2017, I joined at a Master in Art and Design for the public space at Porto Fine Art faculty, during the course I developed the project In translation, narratives between the two sides of the Atlantic, which consists in a photographic research about public space by the analysis of homonymous cities between Brazil and Portugal. The similarities and dissonances assimilated in this project were presented through the construction of a photobook which the narrative invites the observer to immerse himself in the imaginary of these six cities, Óbidos, Santarém and Salvaterra, both in Brazil and Portugal, and to get lost among them without knowing in which country they are by the observation of the images, inviting to re ect on these experience by the observation of public space and also on the past and the present.

In addition to the photobook, I’ve participated in a collective exhibition of the finalists on the Master degree in Art and Design for the public space (2017/2019) on the Fine Arts faculty gallery of the U.Porto, where I presented the same project by photographs, screen printing on fabric and a small installation. In 2020 I participated of an individual exhibition for new artists promoted by Canto Co-working (Belém / PA-BR) with the same project. Themes such as memory, colonialism, urban flows and geographic maps are frequently addressed in my projects.

 

Breathing Zone by Gionatan Tecle

 
 
 

Breathing Zone

BY GIONATAN TECLE

PT | EN

“Breathing Zone” Initially started from a curiosity into the way in which my partner and I occupied our one-bedroom apartment, this body of work explores the idea of social distancing amidst today's situation. I was moved by the 3 to 6 feet rule which states that if I stand within 3 to 6 feet of someone, you may inhale some of what I exhale. The rule made me think of the space we inhabit as a bubble that is used as a measure of caution in public settings and how this thought is and can be subconsciously carried in a private domestic space. The practice of distancing as a necessity in both private and public spaces. The lack of exchange between people forced by the possibility of inhaling some of what I exhale.


Bio

Born in Ostia Antica, Rome, Gionatan Tecle is an Italian Eritrean visual artist currently based in Los Angeles. His work explores the limits in which an image can evoke emotion while asserting it's sense seamlessly within the material being presented. His cerebral methods of creating an image involve exploring the content and unearthing a cinematic expression embedded within the written words.

His latest works, Fixed Water and World were recently chosen for Official Selection at Palm Springs International Film Festival. He has received several awards for artistic merit including the Myrl Schreibman Fellowship, Motion Picture Association American Award, and the Steve Lawrence and Eddie Gorme Scholarship.

In 2012, he completed his BFA from the University of Maryland Baltimore County undergraduate program in Cinematic Art. He also holds a Master in Fine Arts from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television in Cinematography.

https://www.gionatantecle.com/
Instagram @gionatan.tecle

 

Isolation With Dementia by Amber Franks

 
 
 

Isolation With Dementia

BY AMBER FRANKS

I am an artist based in Sussex, UK - during Lockdown in the UK, I cared for my 89 year old Grandmother who has Vascular Dementia. For the first 40 days, I documented her daily life throughout being isolated in my home.

Bio

In her practice the artist Amber Franks investigates personal trauma and loss in relation to “casual” sexism and its causes and contexts.Her work poses challenging questions that push and question conventional boundaries between artist and viewer. Franks considers the spectators’ space and progression within her exhibits, devising a narrative that invokes the viewer to reflect upon the self. This consideration exemplifies how various experiences of trauma can be dissected into separate narratives, but inherently still coincide with one another.

https://www.amberfranks.co.uk
Instagram @amberrfranks