Biography
She was born in Buenos Aires, in 1969.
She first exhibited her photographic work in 1989, at the Parakultural center, together with Guadalupe Fernández (with whom she also was part of Casa de Arañas, a music group), and has since then been part of several exhibitions.
She studies cinema and animation at the Avellaneda Cinematographic Arts Institute.
She works as a photographer for printed media since 1992.
She attended Alberto Goldenstein’s photographic vision workshop (1990-1992) y and Fabiana Barreda’s conteporary art workshop (1999-2002).
She was a grant holder of the Rojas/Kuitca 2003-2005 Program for the Visual Arts, in which she published “Season” [Temporada], a book with portraits of the program’s participants. She was part of the Intercampos II program (2006), at the Telefónica Foundation. In 2007 she was part of RIAA, International Residence of Artists in Argentina, and was selected in the arteBA- Petrobrás 07 award, with the Interview [Entrevista] project.
-Individual exhibitions: A Woman under an Influence [Una mujer bajo influencia] (2007-Catena Gallery), The voice of the provinces [La voz del Interior] (2001- former English Tower), Parking lots [Estacionamientos] (2000- Rojas Cultural Center’s Photo Gallery).
-Collaborative projects: Poland [Polonia] (2005-2008, with Cecilia Szalkowicz), Mysteries of Meat [Misterios de la Carne] (1995- Recoleta Cultural Center, with Balbuena, Ghersa, Cippolini, Paredes, Lindner, among others), Ultraviolet [Ultravioleta] (1994, with Marino Balbuena, Juana Ghersa and Rafael Cippolini), Creaking Light [Luz Crujiendo] (1993- Contemporary Language Hall at the Palais de Glace, with Silvia Paredes), Asperges (1989- with Marula Di Como, Guadalupe Fernández, Lisa Kerner, among others), Production 89 [Producción 89] (1989- Parakultural Center, with Guadalupe Fernández and El lado salvaje.)
-Collective exhibitions (selection): Artists by artists [Artistas por artistas] ( 2006-Palatina Gallery, curated by Mario Gradowczyk), Real Life [Vida Real] (2005- Malba 12th Contemporary Exhibition, curated by Alberto Goldenstein), Collection of MAMBA II-Photography (2004- MAMBA), Panorama (2002- Light Festival- Recoleta Cultural Center, curated by Juan Travnik and Sonia Becce), U Turn (2000- Arte x Arte Gallery, curated by Valeria González and Santiago García Navarro.)
Vision of art
1. Choose a work that represents you, describe it in relation to its format and materiality, its relation with time and space, its style and theme; detail its production process.
I’ll choose a recent photo, not so much because of what it may say about my work, but because of what it says to my work. The photo is titled “Vicente”, and is a portrait of an artist (Vicente Grondona, with his back to the camera, jumping in front of one of his paintings at his workshop at the La Boca neighborhood, heading a football that cannot be seen, as it has left the frame.) Whenever I’m developing a photographic project, there is a hinge-image that works as a gate for what’s coming next. I don’t realize this when shooting, but some time afterwards, when the new work has taken shape and, when looking backwards, I discover its “seed” in a specific photo. These gate-images also articulate aspects of different series I have worked on, as if they were “knots” of highways, where several directions meet. In that sense, they are all representative. In the case of the photo I chose, it includes my initial interest in spaces-stages (Parking Lots series), followed by anonymous presences in them (Crossroads series), and static portraits of artists (Season series). Thus, in this photo’s stage, the figure of an artist, simultaneously anonymous and photographed, giving his back to the camera, barges in. The jump heralds a dynamic universe of relations. This is the path I want to tread on.
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I’m interested in my work’s being like a reversible dress, which can be worn on two sides (even better if it has more than two sides.) This idea may be a consequence of the times in which photography produced for magazines and newspapers clashed from photography coming from the plastic arts, and from my need for my work to be readable from different perspectives.
3. In reference to your work and your position in the national and international art fields, what tradition do you recognize yourself in? Who are your contemporary referents? What artists of previous generations are of interest to you?
I try to be familiar with every author who uses photography exclusively. As role models, I think of my main influences, all of them classics by now, as they were quite famous when I was starting: they hit me before others and, thus, harder than others. Approximately in order of appearance (the list is not limited to those who used only photographic language): Diane Arbus, Man Ray, August Sander, Andy Warhol, Jeanloup Sieff, Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Weegee, Grete Stern, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Ana Mendieta, Sophie Calle, Cartier Bresson, Eugene Smith, Lee Miller, James Nachtwey, Gilbert & George , David Hockney, Wiliam Eggleston, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Philip-Lorca Di Corcia, Noboyushi Araki, Rineke Dijkstra, Madame Yevonde, Gabriel Orozco, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall… I could go on, but these were responsible for my “literacy”. Speaking of initial impacts, I must also mention Antonin Artaud, Surrealism and German Expressionism in cinema, Herman Hesse, Lovecraft, the fantastic genre, Iris Scacheri, Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt, Alphaville, the punk music festival with Los Corrosivos, Valió La Pena and Todos Tus Muertos at the Verdi Hall, in La Boca, and El Lado Salvaje. Another great influence has been and continues to be my group of friends related to art, as talking to them stimulates my production, besides my liking their work: Guadalupe Fernández, Marula Di Como, Mariscos en tu Calipso, Luis Albornoz, Silvia Paredes, Marino Balbuena, Rafael Cippolini, Esteban Pastorino, Nacho Iasparra, Pablo Zicarello, Florencia Blanco, Miguel Mitlag, Cecilia Szalkowicz, Gastón Pérsico, Eübel, Diego Bianchi, Máximo Pedraza, Leopoldo Estol, Pablo Accinelli, Juliana Iriart, Vicente Grondona, Fabián Burgos, Osías Yanov, Jorge Miño. And those who taught me: Alberto Goldenstein, Fabiana Barreda, Guillermo Kuitca.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I think of exhibitions that proved revealing to me, and one comes to mind: “Harte, Pombo, Suarez II” at the Recoleta Cultural Center, in 1990. Even though it was a long time ago, I still remember almost everything. It was the first time I had to photograph an exhibition. I was more than a beginner. I arrived at the hall and realized I’d need a filter I didn’t have, so I left one of the artists waiting, went to buy it and ran back to the place. I guess I didn’t really know what I was about to see, but as I focused my attention in each work, in order to capture it, my eyes would open more and more, amazed. I was standing between three very different simultaneous registers which shaped the universe: Harte’s macrocosm, Pombo’s microworld, and Suárez’s raw reality. It reminds me of an animated short film I saw: it starts with a bucolic scene of a lake surrounded by mountains, with a fixed camera. Far away, we see a boy fishing from a boat. We can hear the birds chirping. The camera starts zooming in on the boat, we see the boy in more detail, the close up becomes a macro shot of the boy’s hand. There’s a fly on it. The camera continues to zoom in and goes through the epidermis, the sound is now very dense, and the landscape grows ever more microscopic. After reaching a point of no-return, the camera starts zooming out. We see the fly on the hand again, the boat, the landscape, but the zooming out goes on, and we see the Earth, the Universe, and the telescopic vision becomes as abstract as the microscopic one. We then return to the initial scene, as if nothing had happened. The birds continue to chirp. This impression of three-forked trip through the universe is what moved me then, and which I felt again in every reunion of the trio. I was also impressed by Kuitca’s and Grippo’s exhibitions at the Malba, because of the power of retrospectives, which is like that of a deep journey.
