Florencia Gonzalez Alzaga

 

 

interview with Josefina Ayerza

 

To resume again...

Profane Illuminations
J
- A MILLER

Detached Pieces
J
- A MILLER

Drawing
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Formulas of the Real
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Question of Democracy
A
LAIN BADIOU

The Sound of Silence:
Wagner with Stalin
R
EX BUTLER
SCOTT STEPHENS

A Letter Which Did Arrive
at its Destination
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

Jean Claude Abreu
A
DRIAN DANNATT

Florencia Gonzalez Alzaga
J
OSEFINA AYERZA



Josefina Ayerza: What makes you point to the certain image you will make into a photo, rather than focusing on some other one?

Florencia Gonzalez Alzaga: When I shoot a photograph what I want is to transmit an emotion.

JA: This emotion-the one you want to transmit-does it strike you together with coming upon the actual image?

FGA: The case is to feel all what the image bestows. It doesn't matter that what you are photographing moves you, neither that it concerns you with the actual aesthetics. When I take the photograph it is because I feel "something" is going on.

JA: So the act of taking the photo reveals something that is going on outside of you?

FGA: The photographs present themselves to me. I never prepare a photo and I never change the light-I don't bring in artificial light, I use what there is or what happens to be there. Something came to be with the elements that happen to be there. I've tried to take photos with another light, different than the one that's there, with artificial lights, it never works, they won't transmit the same emotion I am feeling.

JA: What you feel has a name, apart from emotion?

FGA: I feel something that well can be disgust, aversion, joy, fear... or enchantment, pleasure, tenderness, pain... the enchantment is in the feeling itself, in the certain bunch of things that makes me feel before I even know what I am feeling. I shoot the photograph before knowing what I am feeling.

JA: And what happens later...when the photograph appears in front of your eyes?

FGA: Afterwards, when I see the actual photograph, another bunch of sensations appear. Now the photo wants that you do not finish looking at it. Not that you saw it and that's it, but rather that you keep looking, searching, and continue to find new things. Yet there are the photographs I take that, at a first approach, you don't want to look at...you come back nevertheless, you give a quick look, you see a little piece, again, a bigger piece, until you dare... till you are finally looking at it.

JA: What you describe doesn't sound like peaceful images, right?

FGA: Some images are not peaceful. In frank opposition there is the photograph of the bird which emanates peace, will to fly, it exhales softness, of soft texture-the bird is a moment of quietness, of total freedom.

JA: Is it that the peaceful doesn't involve you? After all the bird's peace is symbolic, that is, you won't be able to fly like the bird. Again, a bird's flight is something you may only conceive of in dreams, I would say.

FGA: The photograph of the horse makes you look, as it takes you right inside the horse's life. To a point that you fear that what's going on may happen to you, the sight of these photographs is quite disturbing.

JA: And if the case was people?

FGA: I would never make a photograph of two people doing what the horses are doing. This is as far as I can go. I can photograph horses in the act of copulation-and this is what I can do in 2006.



Art: Florencia Gonzalez Alzaga
Instinto - C-print, 2006
La espera - C-print, 2006
courtesy Zavaleta Lab.


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