On Trial

on trial

BY CRISTIAN ORDÓÑEZ

Although only residing in the USA for a short period, Toronto-based Chilean Photographer Cristian Ordóñez has spent a large-period of the previous decade revisiting the lower states creating works that explore the notion of memory, personal relationship, and encounters with the territory.

On Trial observes and plays witness to these encounters, a body of work that presents the social, economic, and geographic survey of the landscape traveled by Ordóñez. A survey, engaging with all things natural and foreign on even ground, seeking to question not only the observer but the role of the object within the frame.

Forthcoming previous published works, Notes 01, 02, and 03, the new chapter continues to visualise his approach and interest in the photographic process as a medium to explore the territory, own cultural diversity, and the connection between place and ethnicity.

Text by Rohan Hutchinson. Editor, acb press

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Cristian Ordóñez is a Chilean photographer based in Toronto. Ordóñez has exhibited his work in multiple group and solo exhibitions in Canada, Chile, the United Kingdom, Russia, Greece, the United States, and Netherlands. He has also participated in various art fairs in Santiago, Toronto, and Vancouver. Using the medium of photography he collects impressions of the world, gravitating towards the parallels between ideas, memory, and belonging. He observes time and space through human absence and presence, captures natural and urban vestiges, explores the vastness and intimacy of landscape, and focuses on blurring the lines between nature, urban structures, and portraiture. His work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Library & Archives, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria in Australia, and the San Telmo Museum in Spain.

Website


https://cristianordonez.com/works/on-trial/

Book


https://www.acb-press.com/publications/cristian-ordonez-on-trial-forth-coming

Devotional

Devotional

by Fernando Maselli

Devotional is a documentary project that explores the places, practices, and structures of popular religiosity in Argentina. It delves into the phenomenon of spontaneous canonizations of apocryphal saints and the collective acceptance of certain sites as sacred. This project serves as a catalog of dissident architectures and offerings, reflecting contemporary mestizo religiosity.

In Latin America, following European colonization, a unique religious syncretism emerged as a result of the blending of diverse cultures in these regions. In Argentina, this syncretism found particular significance in remote and marginalized areas of the northwest, where many indigenous cultures were decimated due to Spanish evangelization. This setting, combined with the influences of African religions and gaucho folklore, created fertile ground for the emergence of numerous popular cults.

These cults often revolve around real individuals who lived in these regions and, owing to circumstances related to their lives or deaths, have been elevated to the status of saints with the perceived ability to perform miracles.

While it's challenging to categorize these popular saints strictly, there are some common themes among these devotions. For instance, figures like Difunta Correa or Gilda, who met tragic ends, are seen as embodying sanctity through enduring suffering. Others, such as Miguel Ángel Gaitán and Pilarcita, who died prematurely, are revered as "little angels," while Gauchito Gil and Bailoretto represent defiance against established authority. These cults express their devotion in ways reminiscent of Christianity, including prayers, touching and kissing of images, pilgrimages to their burial sites, lighting candles, offering flowers, and making votive offerings or fulfilling promises.

The sanctuaries themselves, like the cults they represent, are characterized by their collective, heterodox, and mestizo nature. These structures are built through generous donations, often using recycled materials, and they differ significantly from institutional sacred geometry or standardized monumentality. These profane sanctuaries stand as intricate and multifaceted visual evidence of spontaneous religiosity, offering a genuine reflection of the customs and concerns of the people in these regions.

Votive offerings also hold significant importance in these devotions. Consequently, these communal architectures are adorned with a myriad of diverse objects, representing the heartfelt expressions of those who participate in these unique religious practices.

Bio

Born in Buenos Aires, Fernando Maselli initially pursued Fine Arts and later relocated to Madrid, where he currently resides. His work has earned numerous accolades and has been showcased on the global stage, including exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the Copenhagen Photo Festival (Denmark), Guernsey Photography Festival (UK), PHotoESPAÑA (Madrid), International Biennial of Photography Fotonoviembre (Spain), Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos (Mexico), PhotoImagen Photography Festival (Dominican Republic), W-CA Contemporary Landscape Photography Open (UK), NordArt (Germany), SCAN Tarragona International Photography Festival (Spain), Lima International Book Fair (Peru), Youth Arts Award Complutense University (Madrid), ITAÚ Fine Arts Award (Argentina), University of Navarra Museum (Spain), and Contemporary Art Museum of Coruña (Spain). Additionally, he has authored two books, one of which is part of the esteemed Kursala collection at the University of Cádiz.

In recent years, the core focus of Fernando Maselli's artistic practice has centered on extensive research into diverse interpretations of landscapes across various cultures and historical eras. For Maselli, the act of photography is both an action and an immersive, emotional experience. Through journeys to remote locales, he translates his fascination with notions of "nature" into dynamic interpretations that encompass themes of beauty, the sublime, human architectural interaction, and the sacred. Throughout his career, he has drawn inspiration from classical painting, literature, Western aesthetics, and philosophy.

Website: https://www.fernandomaselli.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fernando.maselli/

Far Away From The Place Where You Are

Far Away From The Place Where You Are

by David egan

This work is a response to my own personal anxieties and desires to be alone. It is about a search and struggle to find a safe space. It is about home, it is about my love of nature and want to be in it, it is about connecting to something, it is about loss, it is about repetition, it is calm, it is about life and death, it is about a destination.

Over time I have come to realize that the area that I have chosen to return to and photograph represents those feelings for not just me but many people. All of the photographs from this series were made in and around the Salton Sea, in Southern California. Once a bustling vacation destination of the 1960’s and 1970’s, it has slowly become a place that is struggling to survive. The sea itself is evaporating and filled with dead fish and birds. There is a smell in the air. There are unruly people that want to be left alone. There are homes and structures that have been abandoned. It is occupied by a lot of people looking to avoid societal norms as well as those who just can’t afford to live anywhere else. It is one of the hottest places in the country. It is an unstable desert landscape. It is beautiful.

Bio

David Egan is an American photographer raised in the Washington metropolitan area now residing in Los Angeles, California. He creates long-term bodies of work focusing on the changing American landscape. Egan is primarily known for his large format long exposure color night landscape work in the state of Nevada. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States.

Website: https://www.egandavid.com/

Instagram: http://instagram.com/baronegan

The mooring island

The mooring island

by Bartolomeo Rossi

I traveled to Iceland driven by a force that carried me north to try to understand why in a landscape completely foreign to me, I felt at home, protected by the walls of an imaginary refuge. Without giving me answers, I realized that this land has managed to ignite the sparks of memory in me, stimulating my unconscious to recognize places and objects as familiar even though I met them for the first time on my journey. So traces have become signs, objects have become childhood memories and an unknown land has become home.

This is the story of my relationship with the island; land of "ancient solitude" as Manganelli defines it on his book Isola Pianeta, it is this feeling of solitude, not sought but somehow necessary, that carried me along the endless coasts of the west fjords.

The path I trace guides me inside this refuge made of land and sea, finally aware that home has never been so close.

Bio

Bartolomeo Rossi (1993) is an Italian photographer. From 2017 to 2019 he attended the master's degree in contemporary image at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, which ended with the acquisition of his diploma project Camera Mia by the foundation’ collection. In 2015 he meets Iceland and his landscapes, which lead him to return to the island for the following five years. The project The mooring island develops from these trips.

His research has always been centered on the landscape and on the intimate and private perception of it, with a particular interest in the roots that bind an individual to his imaginary.

Website: https://www.bartolomeorossi.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bartolomeeo/

Eure

Eure

by Ben Osborne

Eure is an ongoing project that has grown out of a number of visits to the department of Eure in Normandy in Northwestern France. The project focuses on the landscape and rural villages within the department.

Bio

Ben Osborne is a photographer who lives in East Sussex, England. 

Website: https://www.benjaminosborne.co/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/b.e.n.osborne/

Walk by day because night is ours

Walk by day because night is ours

by Alejandra Vacuii

Galicia, a Spanish region in the Northwest, is a territory of myths and superstitions that go back to the night of time. One of these legends is La Santa Compaña, a procession of souls led by a living person with a cross who goes out every night through the woods announcing death. There is only one way to get rid of their curse: meet another living person and give them the cross. In the sepulchral silence that occurs as it appears, it can only be heard from time to time some soul screaming "walk by day because the night is ours!".

Today, pessimism and hopelessness seem to have settled in Western societies as a response to the economic, health, ecological and moral crises that we have been chaining for years. As hauntology predicted, there is a general feeling that the future has been cancelled: we can no longer imagine a better future, the idea of progress has disappeared, and instead of feeling that the world is improving it seems that we are headed towards disaster without warning. The fear floats in the air as if something terrible is going to happen, is the end of the world near?

Walk by day because the night is ours tells the metaphorical story of this omen. Through the legend of La Santa Compaña, which has been a warning that death was near when the Galician people still believed in the supernatural, this project tells us about this pessimistic hunch that is contaminating our current feeling. Something dark, mournful and terrible is about to happen. Like the people who were with La Santa Compaña in the middle of a dark and silent forest, we are being warned of the arrival of death. 

Bio

Alejandra Vacuii (1987) is a Spanish visual artist based in A Coruña (Spain). She is graduated in Artistic Photography and has completed her MA in Photographic Creation at Escuela Lens where she was awarded with a scholarship in 2021. In her work, she's looking for a poetic space where she can express herself through dense and mysterious images. Her projects revolve around abstract sensations and emotions such as loss, melancholy, nostalgia or anxiety. 

She has participated in multiple exhibitions in Europe since 2009 (Istanbul, Berlin, Madrid). Her work has been reviewed in numerous digital media (Fisheye Magazine, Phroom Platform, C41 Magazine, Sola Journal). She has been selected to participate in photo festivals such as Getxophoto, Descubrimientos PHotoESPAÑA, SCAN Tarragona or Imaginària. She has publish her work in different collective publications and recently her project La Mala Fortuna was published by UFCA Collective (2023) as a printed work in the fanzine Fotofobia. 

Website: https://www.alejandravacuii.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lamalafortuna/

Our Hidden Room

Our Hidden Room

by Mohamed Hassan

"Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness." 

Caruth, C.

Our Hidden Room.

As an artist with dual nationality, this project explores my identity as part of an ever-expanding diasporic community based in Wales.  I draw inspiration from the memory of my complex yet loving relationship with my father. I reflect on his own personal struggle with bipolar disorder, made clear to me by his erratic, reclusive, behaviour and his obsession with the small dark room, hidden within our family home.

Through my lens, I seek to explore the complexity of the human experience and the legacy of a traumatic and uncertain childhood, of living within a fragile environment and the desire to escape memories. My personal conflict about belonging is represented through the people I meet and the lands that I explore, both in Egypt and Wales. The constant feeling of displacement and questions of identity are forever present.

Bio

Originally from Alexandria, I have been living and working in Pembrokeshire, in west Wales in the UK since 2007, graduating with a 1st class honours degree in Photography from Carmarthen School of Art in 2016. I have been shortlisted for several awards and competitions and my work has been exhibited at the prestigious Mission Gallery, the Waterfront National Museum in Wales the Trajectory Showcase Competition Exhibition in Shoreditch, London, Nova Cymru 2018 and had a portrait included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait exhibition 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

More recently I am exhibiting 4 images in 'Facing Britain', curated by Ralph Goertz at Kunsthalle Darmstadt Museum Goch - touring to Koslar and Krakow in 2022. In Wales, the Many Voices, One Nation 2' supported by the Senedd and exhibiting at Ffotogallery included 11 of my images and 5 images at Oriel Davies in the Responding to Rembrandt exhibition.

Website: https://www.mohamedhassanphotography.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mohamed_hassan.photo/

AFAR

AFAR

by Büşra Kuzu

A child who tried to start over every time but couldn't break away from the past as she kept trying to recall all of it, all over again. Despite her poor memory, she is always on the lookout for the best capture she can memorize. She is a distant watcher; seeking, tracking, and observing from afar.

Bio

Büşra Kuzu is a 25-year-old photographer who also likes to call herself a "visual experiencer". Not like any other people, she takes pleasure in delving into the past, making real stories out of it with what she photographs today. She's been also writing about mental imagery - mental representation and how these are related to photographic images, which she hopes one day she can turn into a comprehensive work. 

Website: https://busrakuzu.net/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/busrakuzuu/

Wavering

Wavering

by Josef Kovac

Oscillating between real and surreal, fighting with loneliness and longing for deeper human connection. Moments of epiphany get rarer and searching for them becomes an obsession, that rush of happiness and satisfaction that floods the brain for a moment is addictive and becomes another emotional longing. The constant remnants of unpleasant personality traits from the past, those that you thought had disappeared with maturity. Up and down, up and down like a rollercoaster seeming to move forward towards the void of a future but feeling caught in an unbreakable repetitive loop.

Artist statement

Bio

Josef Kovac (*1982, former Czechoslovakia) is a photographer and artist currently situated in Gothenburg, Sweden. He pursued his photography education at the Institute of Technology in Dublin, Ireland, as well as at the HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, Sweden. Kovac’s artistic focus lies in exploring the dynamic between photographic images and fiction. He achieves this by transforming everyday objects and spaces into new narratives, thereby prompting a reevaluation of how these elements interact. Through his work, Kovac challenges our perceptions of the relationship between photographs and fictional storytelling, using ordinary subjects to create new imaginative contexts.

Website: https://josefkovac.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/josef_kovac/

Kenneth Frampton - Reflections on the predicament of architecture: seven points in retrospect

Robert Maxwell Memorial Lectures
Kenneth Frampton - Reflections on the predicament of architecture: seven points in retrospect

Thursday 22 April 2021 6pm BST (1pmEDT)

Introduction

Soumyen Bandyopadhyay (University of Liverpool)

Mark Swenarton (University of Liverpool)

Lecture

Kenneth Frampton (Columbia University)

Conclusion

Marco Iuliano (University of Liverpool)

KennethFrampton’s presentation will advance a critique of the current malaise in architectural education and of the equally debilitating state of contemporary practice. These aspects are evident in the current postmodern tendency to reduce architecture either to design of spectacular sculpture at a gargantuan scale or to the application of Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology in order to favour the maximization of profit. Both of these Neoliberal impulses have deprived modern architecture of its former ameliorative character, namely, the formulation of the building task in a socio-ethical and spatially innovative manner. The lecture will attempt to trace the subtle ideological shifts and the changes in nomenclature that have accompanied our currently unsustainable degradation of the megalopolitan environment.

The event will take place via Zoom

Registration required: please click here to reserve a place

University of Liverpool School of Architecture

Open Space, Landscape in Reverse by Xavier Delory

OPEN SPACE, LANDSCAPE IN REVERSE

BY XAVIER DELORY

A renewed dialogue between ruin and landscape.
From a modernist office tower of the Glorious Thirty in a state of transient decay, Open space reverses the "classic" ruin / nature representation that can be observed in Flemish landscape painting from the 17th century. Unlike the "composed veduta" by painters from the north where you can see ruins of ancient Rome surrounded by an Arcadian landscape where nature and culture unite harmoniously, here the landscape no longer welcomes ruin, it makes part of the ruin. The mountainous landscape used, refers to the aesthetics of the sublime, giving a tone of confrontation between man and the forces of nature.
By introducing a landscape “freely” into this brutalist setting, Open space also plays with the relationship with nature, materials and landscapes, especially with the spatial continuity from inside to outside which was at the center of the concerns of the first modernist architects who wanted to put man back at the heart of "Creation" thanks to technique.

Bio
Xavier Delory, born in Liège (Belgium) in 1973, studied interior architecture and photography. His work is on the frontiers of art and architecture, questioning the characteristics of digital photography in its relationship to reality and to the construction of an image. The artist uses digital photomontages to create fictional architectures.

https://www.xavierdelory.com/

Of Dying and Living on by Daniel Chatard

Of Dying and Living on

BY DANIEL CHATARD

It‘s unusual for a story to begin with the death of a person. But with tissue donation, a process that can change another person‘s life from the ground up starts there. The German Society for Tissue Transplantation (DGFG) provides patients nationwide with corneas, amniotic tissue and heart valves, among other things - the DGFG maintains twelve tissue banks alone for this purpose. The photographs examine the complex system that makes the donation process possible and show the rooms in which tissue donation takes place. The selected photographs, taken in cooperation with the DGFG, explore tissue donation in Germany as a closed system within which the various locations photographed have different functions. They show rooms and still lifes that visualize important steps in the donation process - from the farewell room, where people see their deceased relatives one last time, to the surgery room, where the donations are used to heal the recipients.

Bio
Daniel Chatard (1996) is a Franco-German documentary and portrait photographer based in Hanover, Germany.In his work, Daniel has been mostly interested in the relationship between individuals and their societies, exploring how collective identities shape the human experience. He is available for assignments in Germany and worldwide.In 2015, Daniel started his studies of photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover. In 2017, he interned as a photographer at Weser-Kurier in Bremen. He did an exchange semester at the faculty of journalism at Tomsk State University (Russia) in 2018.

http://chatard.de/
instagram / @daniel_chatard

The State of the Region by Marvin Systermans

The State of the Region

BY MARVIN SYSTERMANS

The structural change that is coming with the end of the coal mining industry in Germany is noticeable throughout the Lausitz region. The immense quantities of earth that have been moved have not only brought forward new landscapes; With the end of lignite mining, the Lausitz region is also looking for a new identity. This process takes place in different ways in the urban space, the renatured lake landscapes and the surroundings of the still active coal mines. The photo series "The State of the Region" examines places where traditional and young structures coexist, old structures slowly vanish and something new is created. On the one hand, the work deals with problems and conflict issues such as the environmental impact of coal mining and urban vacancy, while at the same time reflecting stereotypical representations of the Lausitz region. It describes the gradual departure of the region from the era of the coal industry, as well as the emergence of Europe's largest lake landscape.

Bio
Marvin Systermans is a german photographer, photo editor and communication designer working on a variety of different projects. His photographic work mainly focuses on different approaches to reflect on urban spaces, structural changes, and the human habitat in general.

Exhibitions

2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galerie im Foyer, Bremen
2019 — Group Exhibition, the horizons Zingst, Environmental Photo Festival
2019 — Group Exhibition, Wendener Hütte, Wenden
2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galery Flut, Bremen
2018 — Group Exhibition, Münzenberg Forum, Berlin
2018 — Group Exhibition, Osthaus Museum, Hagen
2017 — Group Exhibition, Summerset House, London
2017 — Group Exhibition, Forum of Design, Magdeburg
2016 — Group Exhibition, 1st Design Biennale, Havanna
2015 — Group Exhibition, German Youth Photography Award, German History Museum

Awards

2019 — Shortlist Vonovia Photo Award
2019 — Shortlist Canon New Talent Award 2019/2
2019 — Scholarship from the BFF Neuer Förderpreis 2019
2018 — Münzenbergforum Photo Award, 4. Place
2017 — Shortlist Felix Schoeller Photography Award, Best Emerging Artist
2017 — Shortlist Sony World Photography Award, Professional Architecture
2015 — German Youth Photography Award

Residency

2019 — BangaloResidency Goethe Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan.
In collaboration with Raisa Galofre, photographer

https://www.marvinsystermans.com/
instagram / @marvin.systermans

Places of disquiet by Ricardo Nunes

Places of disquiet

BY RICARDO NUNES

In 2016 and 2017 I travelled several times through Portugal, following old memories of places I might have been. Since I was born, I had to visit the land of my parents to spend time with distant relatives, who lived in commuter towns on the outskirts of city centers. Many images of my past are formed by rushing through unknown cities or small villages around the center of Portugal. For a long time, I couldn’t relate to the attractive stories I had come to hear about the country from others. At the age of 21, I explored for myself the historically overwhelming center of Lisbon for the first time. The images of a »Portuguese city« though, still arose from my former memories of places like Barreiro, Queluz or Guarda.​The urbanization of Portugal was accelerated after the fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in 1974. The following and abrupt de-colonialization of African and Asian countries brought many immigrants to Portugal. Housing shortage and accession to the European Union in 1986 consider­ably speeded up the modernization process and strongly shaped the appearance of Portuguese cities. The ongoing financial crisis with rising poverty and criminality, as well as ghettoization, heightens the tense atmosphere. As news of forest fires and police raids were reported, I was told that the crisis and the heat are driving people crazy. It became important to decipher and describe this discomfort towards Portugal. A country with a formerly glorious past. Seemingly empty cities. A state of continuous melancholy. A fear of being spoken to. A fear of revealing that I am a foreigner. The light isn´t warm, it scorches skin, trees and landscapes. This journey to Portugal is an exploration of the feeling I carry — a simultaneity of foreignness and familiarity. The photographs are a portrait of a country I am choicelessly connected to. The loneliness that overcomes me in Portugal still has no release.​

Bio
Ricardo Alves Ferreira Nunes

*1986, Germany

2014 — 2017 Master, HFK Bremen, Germany
2010 — 2014 Bachelor, FH Dortmund, Germany
2012 Srishti, Bangalore, India

www.ricardonunes.de
instagram / @afnunes_

Future Rust, Future Dust by Loïc Vendrame

Future Rust, Future Dust

BY LOÏC VENDRAME

This long-term documentary project across several countries around the world aims to analyze the urban and architectural impact of the last world financial crisis and the burst of the real estate bubble.
Through a "concrete tsunami" exploration of ghost cities, aborted tourism projects, unused infrastructures, or roads leading to nowhere, this project plunges us into a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, vestige of this modern age mixing economic failures, corrupt elected officials, megalomaniac investors and dreams of home-ownership.
Witnesses of this big waste of – often public – money, these modern ruins hide human and ecological tragedies: indebted and defrauded people, homes finished but abandoned when so many people can’t find a place to live, and Nature disfigured for nothing, even in areas protected by law.

In a documentation process of showing the persistence of abandonment and incompleteness of these ‘non-places’ many years after the crisis, the visual approach combines aestheticism and graphism, while retaining these unfinished constructions in their surroundings landscape to reinforce the absurdity of these concrete skeletons, frozen in time, while Nature begins to slowly return back at its place.


‘The Spanish Sahara, the place that you'd wanna
Forget the horror here
Forget the horror here
Leave it all down here
It's future rust and it's future dust
I'm the fury in your head
I'm the fury in your bed
I'm the ghost in the back of your head’

Foals - Spanish Sahara (2010)

Bio
Geographer, now working in humanitarian NGO, and self-taught photographer, Loïc passion's for urban photography was born in 2012. Firstly attracted by contemporary architecture, he explored metropolises to find colorful and graphics architectural subjects, seeking to sublimate volumes and perspectives.

Since 2016, his photographic work shifted towards the study of the dynamics and changes of urban and peri-urban landscapes, through a monographic photo study documenting abandoned, stopped or under-utilized modern spaces throughout the world caused by the financial and real estate crisis.

www.loicvendramephotography.com
instagram / @loic_vendrame_photography