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/

 

Caveat

 

Caveat

BY ANDREA MARTINO


Caveat: a Latin word that sounds like a warning, “beware”. It is the title of a photographic series that explores the caves of Vallone di San Rocco in Naples, a hidden and endangered treasure, a challenge for the eye and the memory. The caves are ancient cavities dug in the yellow tuff, the volcanic material that formed after an eruption of the Campi Flegrei about 12,000 years ago. From these caves Naples grew, which used the tuff for its constructions, but which also gave the caves other uses: shelter, workplace, storage, landfill. Today these caves are covered by an urban jungle that hosts an extraordinary biodiversity, but that leaves an open wound in the rock and in history. The photographic series tries to return a historical and formal “portrait” of these caves, showing their architectural, landscape, environmental, social value. The Caves of Vallone present themselves as urban rooms, where space is a void, where air is closed by matter that traces its boundary. A system that has its own logic, its own geometry, its own aesthetics, but that has remained invisible and inaccessible for a long time, and that now proposes itself to discovery and enhancement. This investigation aims to demonstrate that these quarries are an integral part of Naples’ history and culture, but they are also at risk of degradation and oblivion. The quarries are a dormant giant waiting to be awakened with care and respect, not only as geological heritage but also as a custodian of Neapolitan cultural memory.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Born in Naples in 1996, my hometown shaped my worldview, teaching me to observe space and understand the intricate relationships that are created with it. During my university studies in architecture, I developed a parallel interest in photography, using it as a tool for research and documentation. The photographic language became my main means to explore and narrate what I see through the lens, investigating the physical environment that surrounds us, scrutinizing not only the architectural elements, but also the human relationships that interact with space. Each shot represents an attempt to absorb the atmosphere of the place, allowing the context to suggest its stories. Photography thus becomes a form of visual narration that seeks to capture the essence of places and human connections in a delicate balance between art and documentation.

Website


https://andreamartino.com/

 

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