Agustina Puricelli

My work explores the tensions and impossibilities inherent to the plane of inscription and the inevitable failure of all representation. I am interested in how processes, accidents, and errors interfere with this correspondence.
Through analog processes photographic film, motion-picture film, and photographic paper I investigate the memory of materials and the sensitive ways in which an image can emerge, fail, or transform. At times, I intervene directly in these materials: I oxidize a negative of my own portrait with my sweat, or construct image-capturing devices through which my blood circulates. At other times, I relinquish control in order to co-produce my work with nature. I bury latent film for months so that bacteria in the soil can affect the recording of the place where I grew up, or I build cameras from elements of nature so that nature can photograph itself.
In both cases, the image ceases to be a stable record and becomes an exposed body, traversed by everything that produces it, alters it, or makes it disappear. I am driven by the desire to dismantle photography in order to reveal its internal operations and latent possibilities.
I seek this same displacement in the relationship with those who observe my work. I use supports that create confusion and compel the viewer to move closer or farther away; I am interested in the moment when the one who looks discovers that they, in turn, are being looked at. I conceive of my work as a network of relationships in which the process, the device, and the support hold the same status as the resulting image. Each element conditions the others, and none operates autonomously.