The work of this Chilean photographer takes a critical and discursive look at the hybrid and mixed-race future of Latin America. His mises-en-scène reveal the mechanisms of political, religious, and sociocultural control which have undergirded the foundations of the Latin American continent since the fifteenth century. This is a must-see exhibition in Sète, on view during the ImageSingulières Festival.
With his photographs, Mauricio Toro Goya invites us to interpret images as learning, archival, and documentary practices where historical representation and ideals vie for primacy. His ambrotypes take a symbolic stab at everyday reality through capriccios understood as exercises in spontaneity and inspiration that partake of the fantasy and delirium of our existence. These unruly images upturn our visual horizon. Deploying such visual resources as citations, cultural references, iconographic borrowings, and cross-references, they lay bare our similarities and our cultural spaces.
Toro Goya’s images lead us to examine the narratives and the events around us. They take hold of the context from which they have emerged so that we may view them and by so doing discover the mechanisms of their construction—mechanisms which highlight ingrained cultural habits and set a register for the re-evaluation and re-examination of History. One could call them commented images, since their temporality and framing, their spaces and references modified through the effects of accumulation or proximity afford us an immersion in our ways of being, existing, telling our stories, and understanding ourselves in transmodernity.
ImageSingulières Festival
May 8 to 27, 2018
Entrepôts Larosa
1978 Avenue Gilbert Martelli
34200 Sète
France
