Big Time in Lorena del Pilar art
On 20/2 Gran Tiempo had a new presentation with a vernissage flavor. The Lorena del Pilar art gallery invited me to talk about Gran Tiempo during an event that the art spaces at the Larreta Gallery are doing simultaneously.
The proposal was to talk about the creative process of the book and, in particular, about the platinum palladium technique. I also talked about my works exhibited there. Ezequiel Díaz Ortiz accompanied me in the talk with his questions and his impressions about the photobook.
It is always said that the reader/viewer completes the work, and this maxim becomes very palpable on occasions like this, when I can interact with the people who came by. I really enjoy hearing them tell me how they received the book - if they have read it - or what questions it generates before reading it. Sometimes it even works as a Socratic method, in which the audience's questions allow me to elaborate concepts. Because there is a lot of that in art: taking something out of oneself in order to see it better.
Presentation of Gran Tiempo/ Big Time
On December 11th, I presented my long-awaited Gran Tiempo in a place that has captured my imagination since I was a child: Darwinion. This art deco building with Masonic elements and pre-Columbian figures is in Acassuso, Buenos Aires, and has been, since its inauguration in 1936, a Botany Institute. Today it operates under the CONICET sphere, and in its particular history and architecture the flame ignited by its creator, Dr. Cristóbal Hicken, remains alive.
The presentation took place in the beautiful Darwinion library, the largest botanical library in Latin America. I was accompanied there by Ezequiel Díaz Ortiz and Damasia Bohtlingk, from Díaz Ortiz Ediciones, during an intimate and warm interview conducted by the incomparable Agos Falduti.
Gran Tiempo, and its English version Big Time, is a photobook with attention to detail that attempts to convey the wonder and perplexity that our planet and its natural history generate in me. Through texts and images developed in platinum palladium, with a binding that mimics the notebooks of the first explorers, the book focuses on small milestones in the history of the Earth. Those corners where science and poetry look into each other's eyes.
More information about Gran Tiempo in the Books section
Opening of
Lorena del Pilar Art
at Naum Knop Museum
PintaBaPhoto 2024
Mimbi jaguar
IPA 2024 FINALIST!
I am very happy to have been nominated as a finalist for the International Photography Awards 2024 for this image of a jaguar that is very special to me. Cheers!
P8 with Francisca Kweitel
The last Saturday of April was the closing of P8, a program on creativity in which I participated for two months. It was intense, moving, at times I felt lost, but in the end it made enormous sense. This is the work I presented: Disquieting Forest. In the process I found a definition of forest that showed me the way:
🍃Disordered abundance of something, confusion, intricate matter.
I worked from nature - my starting point always - with color, with intervention, with framing, with camera, with scanner, with archive, with montages to arrive at this mosaic. It is a song for the Earth made of tiny fragments, a sample of the Earth.
Work led me to experiment and figure out how to create with the resources I had at the time. I went to the fish market, the scanner, the condiments, the archive, the inks, the germinations, the freezer, the flower shop.
I feel immense gratitude towards Fran for her clarity, her demands, her humour, her honesty and, above all, her commitment and dedication. I also feel grateful towards my colleagues Laura, Sole, Teo and Inés who always provided a loving and sincere perspective. I really enjoyed seeing each of their unique and rich processes. Thanks to Mercedes for opening her home for the closing of P8 and giving us conscious, focused and creative feedback.
I leave with a freer view of what I do, with a heightened sensitivity and with the satisfaction of having found something true.
🌎🎶
Exhibition at Rolf Art
🗝️ On 12/15/23, the collective exhibition in which I participated opened. Together with very talented colleagues and with the guidance of Vivian Galbán, we invited everyone to explore the possibilities of that which is not so explicit. We are happy with the setting of this exhibition, the Rolf Art gallery, the epicenter of Argentine photography.
For the first time I am exhibiting images developed in platinum palladium, a technique from the late 19th century with which I fell in love at first sight and had many headaches. I will tell you more about platinum palladium at the exhibition, all invited!
🗝️ The exhibition remains on display at Rolf until 12/29/23.
First Prize in Pilar Style!
Narrative Workshop in La Babuch, France
I've been working on a photobook with images and texts about questions related to Natural History for a little over a year now. This book could be a sort of identity document for me: it gathers my constellation of interests and passions. For every question I ask myself, there's a research effort in search of answers, there's a translation into a lyrical language, there are images that tell the story of the Earth.
The invitation from Israel Ariño to participate in the Narrative Workshop at La Babuch, Mérigny (France), couldn't have come at a better time, one of those synchronicities that are hard to believe. I was at the point where I had all the material and needed to make a lot of decisions regarding the selection and sequencing of images, layout, size, where to place the texts, materials, colours, cover, typography... and the list goes on.
Participating in the photobook-focused workshop was an immersive experience that guided me to, by the end of the week, create the mockup of my photobook. Each comment from Israel, Clara Gassull, Chiara Capodici, and Enric Montes made me rethink my work and turned it into the genuine and refined realization of my idea. Living alongside the workshop participants also added perspective to this project and those to come, in addition to new friends.
Back in Buenos Aires, I continue to work on this project to share it soon with everyone.
August 2023
Thrilled with the news!
Thank you very much Royal Photographic Society Women in Science Group for choosing my work on stromatolites in the Puna Salteña.
#WomanSciencePoTY #womeninphotography
About stromatolites
Every day, every minute, every second, in every remote place on the planet, a living being takes a small sip of oxygen. A lizard, an ant, a narwhal, a sturgeon takes oxygen from the air or water. That sip follows a handcrafted path made of membranes, cartilage and mucus and reaches a foyer where it has intimate relations with another liquid tissue that will make it circulate, this time, through every remote place in the organism. That sip will have traveled the vast space of the world and, then, another endless path to enter the machinery of life of each cell.
Where does this crush between oxygen and living beings come from? Who was the first creature to fall in love with oxygen? The first to say I want to devour this blue gas?
In the extreme Puna, in the Andes of Salta, at about four thousand meters above sea level, one breathes a primeval air of unbridled geology, overwhelming sun, desert and thirst. It is the memory of the beginnings of life on Earth: salt, UV radiation, cold and little oxygen. A choreography that repeats over and over again what is written in the logbook of the planet. There, in pools of blue water that long for the sea, live the stromatolites: communities of cyanobacteria that group together in sedimentary formations. Living rocks. Two billion years ago, when the Earth had no atmosphere, they invented something: photosynthesis. And so, in one of the longest periods in natural history, the planet was filled with the oxygen that these bacteria produced. No one was oblivious to the novelty, to that silent and brutal landing: those who did not adapt to oxygen died, those who died gave rise to new forms and the new forms felt vulnerable and powerful. Oxygen damaged DNA: they wrapped it in a membrane to protect it, to repair it. They became addicted to oxygen: they loved it, they were enraged, full of energy to put every little thing inside them to work. So much so that they invented sex; they invented it to get rid of the aggressiveness of oxygen on DNA, but also for the simple fact of being able to do it, out of pure whim. After sex, as we know, nothing was the same.
About its discoverer
In 2009, Argentine biologist Ma. Eugenia Farías discovered living stromatolites in the salt flats of the Puna region of Salta, where conditions are very extreme.