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

 

Field by Jemima Yong

 
 

Field

BY JEMIMA YONG


_FIELD_ is a series of photographs of a single public green during the Covid-19 lockdown and made from my bedroom window. I began making the photographs as a way of creating in isolation. I continued as I wanted to chronicle how the public space was being shared, the physical impact of new social measures and the variety of activities that now take place outside.

Bio
Jemima Yong (b. 1990) is a Malaysian photographer and performancemaker, born in Singapore and currently residing in London. Experimentation, collaboration and time are central to her practice. Her recent work includes _Marathon_ with JAMS (Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018): a performance about fiction, memory and the hysteria of crowds, and _ROOM_: an improvised storytelling experience that takes place in the imagination of the audience. She is a member of Documentation Action Research Collective and an associate of Forest Fringe.
www.jemimayong.format.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

 

Of Dying and Living on by Daniel Chatard

 
 

Of Dying and Living on

BY DANIEL CHATARD

It‘s unusual for a story to begin with the death of a person. But with tissue donation, a process that can change another person‘s life from the ground up starts there. The German Society for Tissue Transplantation (DGFG) provides patients nationwide with corneas, amniotic tissue and heart valves, among other things - the DGFG maintains twelve tissue banks alone for this purpose. The photographs examine the complex system that makes the donation process possible and show the rooms in which tissue donation takes place. The selected photographs, taken in cooperation with the DGFG, explore tissue donation in Germany as a closed system within which the various locations photographed have different functions. They show rooms and still lifes that visualize important steps in the donation process - from the farewell room, where people see their deceased relatives one last time, to the surgery room, where the donations are used to heal the recipients.

Bio
Daniel Chatard (1996) is a Franco-German documentary and portrait photographer based in Hanover, Germany.In his work, Daniel has been mostly interested in the relationship between individuals and their societies, exploring how collective identities shape the human experience. He is available for assignments in Germany and worldwide.In 2015, Daniel started his studies of photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover. In 2017, he interned as a photographer at Weser-Kurier in Bremen. He did an exchange semester at the faculty of journalism at Tomsk State University (Russia) in 2018.

http://chatard.de/
instagram / @daniel_chatard

 

The State of the Region by Marvin Systermans

 
 

The State of the Region

BY MARVIN SYSTERMANS

The structural change that is coming with the end of the coal mining industry in Germany is noticeable throughout the Lausitz region. The immense quantities of earth that have been moved have not only brought forward new landscapes; With the end of lignite mining, the Lausitz region is also looking for a new identity. This process takes place in different ways in the urban space, the renatured lake landscapes and the surroundings of the still active coal mines. The photo series "The State of the Region" examines places where traditional and young structures coexist, old structures slowly vanish and something new is created. On the one hand, the work deals with problems and conflict issues such as the environmental impact of coal mining and urban vacancy, while at the same time reflecting stereotypical representations of the Lausitz region. It describes the gradual departure of the region from the era of the coal industry, as well as the emergence of Europe's largest lake landscape.

Bio
Marvin Systermans is a german photographer, photo editor and communication designer working on a variety of different projects. His photographic work mainly focuses on different approaches to reflect on urban spaces, structural changes, and the human habitat in general.

Exhibitions

2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galerie im Foyer, Bremen
2019 — Group Exhibition, the horizons Zingst, Environmental Photo Festival
2019 — Group Exhibition, Wendener Hütte, Wenden
2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galery Flut, Bremen
2018 — Group Exhibition, Münzenberg Forum, Berlin
2018 — Group Exhibition, Osthaus Museum, Hagen
2017 — Group Exhibition, Summerset House, London
2017 — Group Exhibition, Forum of Design, Magdeburg
2016 — Group Exhibition, 1st Design Biennale, Havanna
2015 — Group Exhibition, German Youth Photography Award, German History Museum

Awards

2019 — Shortlist Vonovia Photo Award
2019 — Shortlist Canon New Talent Award 2019/2
2019 — Scholarship from the BFF Neuer Förderpreis 2019
2018 — Münzenbergforum Photo Award, 4. Place
2017 — Shortlist Felix Schoeller Photography Award, Best Emerging Artist
2017 — Shortlist Sony World Photography Award, Professional Architecture
2015 — German Youth Photography Award

Residency

2019 — BangaloResidency Goethe Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan.
In collaboration with Raisa Galofre, photographer

https://www.marvinsystermans.com/
instagram / @marvin.systermans

 

Future Rust, Future Dust by Loïc Vendrame

 
 

Future Rust, Future Dust

BY LOÏC VENDRAME

This long-term documentary project across several countries around the world aims to analyze the urban and architectural impact of the last world financial crisis and the burst of the real estate bubble.
Through a "concrete tsunami" exploration of ghost cities, aborted tourism projects, unused infrastructures, or roads leading to nowhere, this project plunges us into a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, vestige of this modern age mixing economic failures, corrupt elected officials, megalomaniac investors and dreams of home-ownership.
Witnesses of this big waste of – often public – money, these modern ruins hide human and ecological tragedies: indebted and defrauded people, homes finished but abandoned when so many people can’t find a place to live, and Nature disfigured for nothing, even in areas protected by law.

In a documentation process of showing the persistence of abandonment and incompleteness of these ‘non-places’ many years after the crisis, the visual approach combines aestheticism and graphism, while retaining these unfinished constructions in their surroundings landscape to reinforce the absurdity of these concrete skeletons, frozen in time, while Nature begins to slowly return back at its place.


‘The Spanish Sahara, the place that you'd wanna
Forget the horror here
Forget the horror here
Leave it all down here
It's future rust and it's future dust
I'm the fury in your head
I'm the fury in your bed
I'm the ghost in the back of your head’

Foals - Spanish Sahara (2010)

Bio
Geographer, now working in humanitarian NGO, and self-taught photographer, Loïc passion's for urban photography was born in 2012. Firstly attracted by contemporary architecture, he explored metropolises to find colorful and graphics architectural subjects, seeking to sublimate volumes and perspectives.

Since 2016, his photographic work shifted towards the study of the dynamics and changes of urban and peri-urban landscapes, through a monographic photo study documenting abandoned, stopped or under-utilized modern spaces throughout the world caused by the financial and real estate crisis.

www.loicvendramephotography.com
instagram / @loic_vendrame_photography

 

Predator/Protector by Nicholas Constant

 
 

Predator/Protector

BY NICHOLAS CONSTANT

Exploring the evolution of the battlefield and various forms of distance, Predator/Protector contemplates particular developments that may change the future of warfare (UAV/drone warfare) and what this means not just for the victim but the perpetrators as well. Using Sontag’s ideas of how war imagery on TV and internet distance us further from the actual happenings, as we relate these scenes to the cinematic, Predator/Protector attempts to combat this by showing that these issues materialise and take action from our space and in our time. Reflecting a stereotypical view of pastoral Britain, the land in these images challenge the idea of perception we have towards a modern day battlefield where the land would be completely different, yet the sky would be the same.

Adopting a similar aesthetic to that of British landscape painters then directing the camera towards the romanticised landscape, the project aims to contrast these idealistic and unintrusive views with the reality of what is taking place in these locations to show that they are part of the ever-expanding ‘battlespace’ in the information age. Romanticism derived from a time where the industrial revolution emerged, artists were drawn to look back to natural, idyllic settings in order to contrast and question their current political climate. Here, the images speak about our current time as a pivotal moment for the future of warfare. The interruptions in the landscape hint to how technological advances have meant that the battlefield could be considered to be here just as much as ‘there’ with soldiers technically commuting to and from the battlefield each day.

These images are combined with representations of aspects which cannot be seen from the public eye (the drones themselves and the operating rooms) this uncovers interesting parallels that would not be achievable photographing the actual subjects under investigation. Objects that have particular links to classical meanings are recontextualised to contrast names or places that are in use in the UAV programs. Such as the statue of Hermes, which is the name, the Israeli company ‘Elbit’ named one of its drones used in the 2014 Gaza attacks. The god Hermes is known for being a trickster and a traveller as well as escorting the dead to the river Styx. The fact they named an unmanned vehicle after an omnipresent being says a lot about the perception of the weapon.

Predator/Protector is the name of the new British drone where the name is being changed from Predator to Protector.

Bio
Internationally raised, London based artist with an interest in the spectacle of modern warfare. I explore spaces in which conflict occur particularly interested in the indirect effects on war; how they surface in the everyday and how these issues are dealt with in absence of mainstream media. Using a simple, unintrusive approach to many of the projects, I attempt to make invisible subjects visible through the use of landscape and context. Photographing in a slow and quiet manor, I try to force the viewer to study the image to extract the most information they can to then be reinforced by their own contextual knowledge and personal views. Consciously realising my place as a western spectator of modern conflict issues, I try to make work which aims to resonate with the western viewer in a non-confrontational way, believing empathy is most effective when the viewer pieces the puzzle together for themselves.

Instagram: @nicholas_constant
http://www.nicholasconstant.com/

 

Pairidaeza by Leonardo Magrelli

 
 

Pairidaeza

BY LEONARDO MAGRELLI

Paradise - from ancient Persian Pairidaeza (Pairi - around, Daeza - wall) a place surrounded by walls.

Iran has recently been included in Trump’s Muslim Ban list. This already mostly unknown land will now be even less accessible. This reason alone would suffice to motivate the choice of photographing the country under a different, detached and less propagandistic light. Other issues though emerge in the encounter with this region of the world. 

This series of photographs was taken while roaming the Iranian central desert and the cities within. So many different populations, religions and empires have followed one other for millennia, inhabiting these lands, reaching peaks of astonishing balance with their surroundings. Mithraic temples, Zoroastrian villages, Persian cities, they all were conceived and built in a perfect symbiosis with the land.

And yet today there seems to be a kind of ambiguous struggle to fit in these territories. A latent friction emerge between the human presence and the environment. Things seems to be out of place: ambiguous objects, unfinished buildings, indefinite traces of the mankind are left behind, lying isolated and scattered on the ground. It’s “the mutual interference between the landscape and those who live it” as Baltz wrote in his Review of the “The New West”. 

It may seems outdated nowadays to still talk about the issues raised by the new topographers more than forty years ago. But it must be kept in mind that Iran hasn’t yet started to develop a proper sensibility to the ecological and aesthetical problems of the landscape. The way people live the territory and live inside the territory no longer relies on the fusion with the surroundings, but rather on the separation from it. A separation that becomes quite paradoxical and absurd in many cases. The vast expanses of the uplands are now littered with industrial structures, commercial areas and various buildings. Most of them are surrounded with walls along their outer perimeter. Who are they keeping out? What are they keeping out, in these completely empty and uninhabited territories? Only the landscape is cut out, only the desert, the mountains and their extensive space. One could wonder if this derives from the ancient Persian gardens, however, the paradise is not anymore within these walls, but outside them, hidden from the view.

Bio
Born in Rome in 1989, holds a BA in Design and Architecture from “La Sapienza” university in Rome. While still studying, starts working with the photographer Marco Delogu, director of Fotografia – International Rome’s Photography Festival, and chief editor of the publishing house Punctum Press. Aside from collaborating with the organization of the festival, Leonardo also designed many of the books published by Punctum. Later starts working on his own, to focus more on his photography. In the last years his works has been published in several printed and online photography magazines, and has been displayed in collective exhibitions and festivals.

http://www.leonardomagrelli.com

 

Beyond The Ordinary & Updated Landscape by Guillaume Hebert

 
 

Beyond The Ordinary & Updated Landscape

BY GUILLAUME HEBERT

These series are a hybrid genre that combine pieces of modern landscapes with, in the background, landscapes that come from old and famous paintings. The name of this series is a notion that tells us about the changes created by urbanisation in our modern societies. These works invite us to compare the vision of an ancient painter with the vision of a modern photographer, in order to remodel our perception of the environment in an aesthetic dimension.

Bio
Guillaume Hebert, also called Guillelmus Paulus Julianus, is a French visual artist more focus on photography born in 1969 in Normandy. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Caen (DNSEP : National Superior Diploma of Plastic Arts). He started truly photography in Taiwan in the year 2012. He stays there for 6 years and goes regularly to mainland China. He currently collaborates with a Shanghai Gallery: M Art Center and participates in many festivals and art fair. After his pilgrimage he returned to Europe and settled in Berlin for one year. Back in France, he currently lives and works in the Papal city, Avignon.

www.guillaumehebert.com