Submission: Media Solitude

Despite the fact that my family was reunited by the pandemic during 2020, I realized that my home felt a quiet atmosphere. My grandmother was the first person to isolate herself in our house due to her age. Starting all this, I came to believe that with the confinement we would share more with my entire family, especially with her due to her Alzheimer's disease. However, as time went by, the focus of our eyes turned to digital media. As my grandmother has never had a cell phone of her own, she was relegated to her own loneliness. The rest of us were submerged in a solitary bubble produced by the use of our electronic devices. Based on the above, Soledad media is about the transformation of relationships and behaviors that I have been able to observe in my family during isolation. In the images I show how the intensive use of electronic devices has enhanced the feeling of loneliness and isolation in our lives. The scenes were built with the help of my whole family. They are long exposure captures that required a committed body work. The above, due to the contrast between the low power of the cold light from cell phones and the warm lighting of the house or outside it. The work consists of an installation of ten light boxes that together are a portrait of my family. The images are arranged in space in such a way that each of the members appears lonely and isolated in space. Each island is made up of a portrait and a still life where objects that allude to the loneliness of my relatives are represented. The portraits tend to be warm, while the still lifes are cold, evidencing the absence of human contact that the device itself brings. All the boxes are interconnected by multiple electrical wiring that alludes to both the electrical networks that feed the house and the different electronic devices that are used daily, how, to the different digital connections and social networks that have replaced our physical communications. In the installation my grandmother appears at the beginning and at the end of the tour. In the first photograph she is entertained connected to television. All the images are electrically connected to this one, except for the last one, where she is seen asleep during the day due to media loneliness. This is the only photograph taken under natural lighting and is not electrically connected to any of the other images.