2020
Collage on Museo Max Archival 250 gr Archival 250 gr
10 cm x 12 cm

I have named Penumbra the uncertain but potent zone at the margins of a photographic image. During my research process, I examined hundreds of images illustrating the various volumes of the Latin American Encyclopedia El Tesoro de la Juventud. I then realized that the foreground, where the primary element is almost always centered, focused, and illuminated, has been a crucial representational strategy in the aesthetic canon.

Therefore, I considered exploring the opposite: the blur, the margin, the element that appears by necessity, the shadow, the surplus, the “error,” the border: the penumbra. There, I began to find millimetric characters, subjects, and bodies that inhabit the everyday spaces in those images. Little by little, more and more appeared before me, and with this multiplication, what also emerged was the possibility of imagining a specific fiction: to build a series of sequences of shared gestures, something like a collective choreography where to link the commonality of these characters despite the difference of time and space they inhabit.

The concept/method of looking at the penumbra is an allegorical way of interrogating History and its triumphant Western patriarchal epistemologies that have established a mechanistic and authoritarian gaze that continues to normalize a hierarchical order of value in seeing certain bodies over others. I heard the researcher-activist Diego Sztulwark saying that the sun has been the symbol of monarchy and that it was worthwhile, as a political action, to give space to the penumbra because it is there the space of creation, among many other things, for the heterogeneous.