Holding the encounter, unpacking gestures
2024
According to Didi Huberman, gestures have an ancient history that we often forget. In other words, the gestures we make have been shaped by structures and modes of production. We experience this antiquity of gestures each time we physically respond to intense situations of desire, fear, pain, or despair. Aby Warburg pointed out that the meaning of gestures lies not in what they represent, but in their repetition. This repetition reveals layers of meaning accumulated over time.
Thus, the gesture does not merely represent an action; it is also an opening towards the possible and the unexpected. For Marie Bardet, bodies express and communicate through movements that do not always have an evident meaning or a functional purpose. In this photographic series, I propose an accumulation of gestures that confront various situations. In this way, the gesture of photographing is not a relationship of a subject over an object, but a reciprocal relationship. At the same time that a photograph is taken, the image forces us to think. Holding the encounter, unpacking gestures suggests that even the simplest images, or those less loaded with action, can be swollen with fiction
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Commissioned work for Chiquilla Te Quiero, under the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC).
Chiquilla Te Quiero is a magazine dedicated to exploring contemporary art as a practice, along with its components in Mexico and Latin America. It features a biannual printed edition and a more agile digital version. The magazine’s name reflects its three core principles: a rejection of divisions between high and low culture, a prioritization of affective connections over other interests, and the coexistence of the playful and humorous with the serious and depth of critical thought.