09.10.2018 - 09.11.2018
Galerie Umcebo and Periferia Projects are pleased to present Les faits bruts / Brute Facts featuring two emerging photographers: Teresa Bracamonte and Alexa Torre. This exhibition centers on the notions that people rationalise their experience by creating models for social behaviour, sharing and reifying these models through language. The body of works by these artists examine universal consensus through visual language. Torre focuses on gender whilst Bracamonte reflects about the repurpose of edifications and sites, the two questioning what is defined by society to be reality. People organise and construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without language and social structures to validate those concepts. Both Torre and Bracamonte invite the spectator to open up and look at objects and places differently, beyond social conventions, beyond Brute Facts.
Curated by Lassla Esquivel & Beatriz Forti
Galerie UMCEBO, 102 Boulevard Diderot, Paris.
Opening Tuesday 09.10.2018 at 19h
Pisco Sour party during FIAC + conversation between curator & artist: 18.10.2018 at 19h
In this series Bracamonte captures diverse landscapes in Lima, which were once crucial either for economic, social or cultural development but today are abandoned. A place is determined by its material and symbolic purpose. And becomes relevant as it is transited and occupied. Although, what happens when personal stories or even History comes in the way of a site’s function? Welcoming visitors in the window display of the gallery, there is an image of what was known as Hacienda Santa Barbara. The once prominent Seventeenth Century sugar factory building was expropriated in 1968 and eventually deserted along the potential development of its surrounding area. The next set of photographies depicts the view of what commuters and travellers can see on kilometer 118 of the Panamericana Sur highway: the French and Italian Riviera remnants. This site once envisioned a high-end residential development and today lies a ghost town, and a symbol of forsaken dreams lost with Pisco 2007 earthquake.
Unfinished structures, broken architecture or the promise of a magnificent building reduced to merely forgotten foundations is what Teresa reveals in her images. She unveils evidence of social failure, political irregularities or the irrefutable lack of economic success, highlighting the strength of these ruins through their aesthetic. Bracamonte merges desolation with aspiration, memories and plans. She explores contradictions and dualities pushing boundaries, reviewing preconceptions and prejudices of first impressions while proposing alternatives and provoking the spectator. The artist’s gaze offers endless possibilities to consider a future for these vestiges.
For this exhibition, Alexa Torre portrays objects selected with the only criteria of being marked by any sort of pink shade. The moment these are taken out of context and placed as part of a new group of things all tinted in pink, their meaning change. Objects that normally will serve a purpose, like a truck or a chair, get its features enhanced and become a ‘somebody’ with distinctive personality, a taxi could easily be called ‘Caroline’ and an old building ‘Edith’. Torre shifts the nature of what she photographs: with a snapshot her object becomes a subject, a sign becomes a symbol. The general association of classic cars masculine identity is thus transferred into the feminine domain.
Through her series Zona Rosa, the artist twists words and play games using irony and satire as tools to investigate her surroundings. The artist confronts the spectator with stereotypes and shared assumptions about reality with humour, appealing to memory and social conventions. Torre studies colour and light to transform what seems familiar into something new. The fragments of the world she depicts into her compositions creates an illusion that questions what exists and what is staged, what is the message that was intended to be communicated rather than what gets through. Her images invite viewers to look again and consider new conversations about what is known and what can be learned when seen from a different perspective.
Thank you to Valeria MacDowall, part of our curatorial team, always there to support Periferia Projects #todosomosperiferia
Thank you to Galerie Umcebo for another collaboration together.