Affected (2021)

“All you touch
You change.
All you change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is change.
God is change.”
Octavia Butler


The role of images in shaping the future and representing the present asserts itself against an ongoing crisis of imagination. Navigating a historical moment where fatalistic narratives of destruction and apocalypse strengthen amid the tensions of visible collapse and shredding of many realities as we once knew them, dreaming of paths to the future can sometimes sound like naivety.

The series “Affected”, shot at the height of the pandemic, has, over the past years, come to signify my attempt as an artist to affirm my commitment to creating images as a way to make the infinite possibilities that imagination offers accessible to a sensitive experience. By choosing to prioritize photographic-time in its spiral form, photographing and interpreting reality cease to be merely representative practices of a documentary and historical nature, becoming instead tools that allow for the audacity of building something other than what seems to be the only way forward. Making images becomes an active exercise of faith, intertwined with the "beautiful decency” that Paulo Freire describes as integral to critical thinking.

The photographs in this series were taken on 35mm film that was intensely affected by fungi, rendering any predictability about the results obsolete. Like the future, laboratory and experimental processes in photography train us to work within the realm of the impossible. The fungi, in turn, affect films and photographic papers due to the organic composition of the material, intervening as living elements in the latent potential of the image and affirming their participation and co-creation.

It is the nature of all living things to affect one another. Becoming aware of this and insisting in the sensitive contact enabled by artistic practice is a tool for claiming power. Experiences of connection and affection sustain the resilience necessary for imagination to persist as a catalyst for change and a proposer of other stories to inhabit the impossible mystery of what we cannot ever plan for, but can engage with.