║ Julieta Sans ║

© Julieta Sans, Mumi – me encantaria que gustes de mi, Dalia Rosetti, from the series Well read, 2008

© Julieta Sans, German – body of a woman, Pablo Neruda, from the series Well read, 2008

“Well Read” is a series of staged portraits of characters from a fictional book chosen by each model, be it a novel, a poem or a children’s story. The idea is not to illustrate the book but to leave the story up to the spectators’ imaginations, giving place to myriad possible interpretations.

These staged portraits invite to reflect on issues of identity and the possibilities of representation of the photographic portrait. These are images of real people in a gently directed but controlled performance: but why have these people chosen these characters and what is the story behind the image? How many facets and traits of a person is it possible to read in a portrait  let alone a staged one?

The project explores the notion that there are as many interpretations of a portrait as there are spectators, as there are of a book by its different readers. In the words of Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author: “there is one place where this multiplicity [of a text] is focused and that place is the reader, not the author.”

As we overlay our own experiences and identities with the narrative, a multiplicity of new stories are thrown into existence, and the same can be said of the ways in which we “read” a photographic portrait: Well Read celebrates fiction and the impossibility of an accurate representation in photography, the difference between the image someone thinks they project and the images we construct of one another.

Statement

More of Julieta’s work here

║ Mika Rottenberg ║

© Mika Rottenberg, Performance Still (PJ & Cheryl), from the series Performance Stills, 2008

© Mika Rottenberg, Performance Still (Raqui on Pete), from the series Performance Stills, 2008 

© Mika Rottenberg, Performance Still (Kat legs & Torso), from the series Performance Stills, 2008

“Bodies, at once repulsive and sensual, larger-than-life and ever-so-ordinary, are vital to factories: their products appropriated; their shapes subsumed; their excretions packaged; their quirks put to work. Here is where the freakshow meets the sweatshop. Factories take on the features of cages and kitchens, their technology at once whimsical and industrial. A pinwheel spins. Dough rises. A bicycle chain ferries fingernails. Sweat is shrink-wrapped. Virginity is conveyed along belts. An allergic reaction becomes a force of production.
There is materialism and anti-materialism. On the one hand, factories are designed to the minute specification of material substance: dough is subject to entropy and gravity, yeast is subject to oxygen and heat, value is subject to demand and supply, and bodies are subject to growth and decay. While on the other hand, causal processes violate expectations of space and time: sweat drips too slowly to collect in that quantity; dough is too thick to stretch that far; bodies are too fragile to sit so stooped; life is too short to labor that long.
There is at once a contraction and expansion of human capability. Persons, though full-blooded and able bodied, have their degrees of freedom constrained to a single plane. Twist, pull, peddle, shove. Squeeze, blow, wipe, crinkle. Yet, their seemingly useless properties are finally utilized; their seemingly monstrous attributes are finally actualized. A sneeze is harnessed. Double-joints are wielded. Gender becomes a motive force. Gigantism is yoked. Obesity is deployed. Ethnicity provides traction.
In an economic climate evermore set on circulation-based theories of value, Mika Rottenberg’s videos and drawings emphasizes the centrality of labor. In a political climate evermore set on delocalization, these works brings otherwise disparate processes into a single frame of view. And in a social climate evermore set on fragmentation and depersonalization, Rottenberg’s work emphasizes whole persons and unique personalities.”
Paul Kockelman

A behind-the-scnenes movie from the series can be seen here