From the Sculptural to the Archival

Magnolia de la Garza
● Fototeca Nuevo León

This survey of the 16th Photography Biennale centers on two points of discourse, the sculptural and the archival. The exhibition is articulated around two prize-winning entries, María María Acha-Kutscher's Womankind and Fabiola Menchelli's Constructions, as well as around three projects that received the jury's honorable mention. Menchelli's and Acha-Kutscher's works are at opposite ends of the show's main axis, which takes us on a journey from the relationship between photography and sculpture to the photographic use of archives.

The exhibition features several of the photography and video projects selected by the jury of the Biennale; it also includes certain works that were eliminated in the final selection, as well as one guest project. All of these works guide us and lead us to pose questions on the road from the sculptural to the archival in photography.

The association between photography, sculpture and archives is nothing new. Beginning in the 1920s and over the rest of his career, sculptor Constantin Brancusi photographed his own work in order to ensure its broader circulation and to have his own archive of images. A decade after Brancusi began taking photographs, Brassaï published his Involuntary Sculptures, a series of pictures where, controlling both depth of field and field of view, he turned small everyday objects into sculptures after they had undergone practically accidental manipulations.

Bernd and Hilla Becher's Anonymous Sculptures, which they began documenting in 1959, are perhaps the best-known example of the association between photography, sculpture and the archive. The Bechers documented industrial architectural structures, creating comparisons between different types of buildings. The representations of these structures, separated from their function and without human figures to provide context, evinced the architecture's formal values while making the buildings seem like monuments to a wave of industrialization in its death throes. By classifying these photographs into typologies, the Bechers not only created a comparative network but also an archive of industrial architecture.

In a gesture similar to the Bechers', Ramiro Chaves compiled a digital archive that documents the use of the letter X in Mexican architecture. The images he captures reveal this element from a more sculptural (rather than merely structural) point of view. The archive becomes the device within which these sculptures are displayed.

But the archive is also the construct that leads us to reconsider the photographic image, its uses and circulation. Everything from the recovery of public archives, or of private ones such as family albums, to their appropriation and manipulation implies that we reexamine our memories, while all this also establishes a new association with the past and leads to the creation of small monuments.