Death and life and the possibilities of an animal form

Gelatin silver prints, 2023 – ongoing

«It is a word, the animal, that humans have granted themselves the right to give. These humans have found themselves by giving that word, but as if they had inherited it. They have given themselves the word to enclose a multitude of living beings under a single concept. The Animal, they say. And in doing so, they have bestowed this word upon themselves, in order to reserve it for themselves.» Jacques Derrida

A study of the animal figure, a photographic bestiary that takes as its references the numerous, yet often undervalued, pictorial and photographic representations of it. The animal and its figure are presented here not as a single overarching concept, but from the multiform and polysemic individualism that truly defines them, allowing each divergence and multiplicity to reveal a form, a structure, and a circumstance that act as catalysts for a narrative.

Referencing as well the work of artists such as Peter Hujar, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the animals portrayed here claim a leading role, they are the central subject around which the image is constructed, and they confront the viewer through their uniqueness and presence: How does one inhabit a world dominated by others? How does one navigate an existence subjugated to the human being? How does one both exist and not exist at the same time?

Through these studies of the plasticity of the animal form and the representational qualities of photography, each animal figure raises visual and narrative dichotomies; a simultaneous being and non-being is produced, a bidirectional and ambiguous passage between the living and the dead, the natural and the artificial, the real and its imitation. Between being object and subject at once, being beautiful and grotesque at the same time. Between existence itself and its representation.