Imágenes de la basura

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
Bogotá, Colombia

The photographs that were discarded and, for unknown reasons, ended up in my family’s recycling company, represent an evident paradox: the tension between memory and oblivion, between what was intended to be a testament of a historical moment in someone’s life and the inescapable materiality that makes it susceptible of being discarded and, with this, forgotten. This project was born the moment I found those photographs and I began to imagine his journey to reach me, from his conception to that which was intended to be his death, in a recycling company, reducing its value to the weight that adds up to hundreds of papers more between a sack. It is no longer a memory or testament, but an input for an industrial process. This is how the same object changes its meaning with the passage of time and, definitely, of space.

These photographs are not discarded because of their technical or formal aspects, but because the referent no longer exists, and apparently, neither do the links it had with the others. His existence is relegated to oblivion. The photograph is orphaned, fragile, without reference. Without my agency, it would have been recycled paper pulp.