La conversión de la huella

2020-2018 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5iXyE2G0I The project La Conversion de la huella (Spanish for The Conversion of the Trace) transmutes the tangible perception of nature by intervening analog photographic images, altering the essential chemical components of the support in morphological and formal aspects. The destruction and mutation of its materials distance it from its traditional role of representation, thus creating a thinner line between photography and painting, which have been compared in modern and contemporary art history. The process of La conversion de la huella begins with chromogenic copy photographs intervened with bleach. This liquid exerts a removing power, which fortuitously releases the chemical components of its support. Then, pigments replace these blank spaces or washes. Bleach, composed of alkaline salts and chlorine, is corrosive and transparent; it is destructive and silent in the photographic image. Bleach disinfects, erases stains, removes traces, and thus starts white. With the visual void it generates, it is possible to create a new opportunity for the landscape, where the images of La conversion de la huella emerge surreal, fantastical, magical, and simultaneously sinister. The work takes the process of photographic intervention as an analogy to climate change, where humans have altered the materiality of the planet in a corrosive way since the Anthropocene, changing the Earth’s surface. On the other hand, the work also seeks to test the resistance of the photographic medium as an artistic entity associated with values related to the literal representation of forms; in the case of La conversion de la huella, expectation before perception from the landscape.