Claude Bussac has been the director of the Festival PHotoEspaña since 2007.
What would you say are the highlights of this year’s festival?
I think that the highlights of this year’s festival will be found near the Circulo de Bellas Artes, by the La Fundacion Telefonica and the Academia Real de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where visitors will discover exhibitions by classic photographers like Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, but also an exhibition of 1970s feminist photographers. Also, at Telefonica, there is an exhibition featuring the work of the important Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat. Finally, there is the Mexican photographer Fernando Brito at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. Like every year, the festival offers a mix of classic selections with emerging talent.
The theme of the 2013 edition is the body, is it not?
That’s right: the body, eros and politics. Festival curator Gerard Mosquera speaks of the body as a battleground, where one finds both Eros and Ares, both love and war, a means of social representation and eroticism, but not only eroticism, hence the inclusion of artists like Shirin Neshat and Fernando Brito, whose work concerns murders in Mexico, which is about bodies, but about bodies that the Mexicans call “muertitos,” and that’s another way of working with the body… And then we have the work of feminists who protest through their bodies. Not to mention the eroticism present in the work of Weston and Callahan.
Read the full interview on the French version of Le Journal.
Lola Fabry
