Ancestras, maestras

Rocio Bueno Royo

Spain

Ancestras es un proyecto de investigación y creación que recupera y visibiliza a mujeres creadoras del siglo XX relegadas por la historia. A partir de más de 130 retratos rescatados de archivos y colecciones, la obra construye una genealogía femenina que cuestiona la ausencia de referentes y propone una reparación simbólica desde una mirada feminista. Las fotografías son intervenidas manualmente con hojas, flores y ramas, que funcionan como metáfora del tiempo, la memoria y el legado. Así, el archivo se transforma en cuerpo, materia y presencia, reuniendo en cada imagen lo histórico y lo poético. La exposición, concebida como una constelación modulable, incorpora luz, sonido y una disposición variable de las piezas para generar una experiencia inmersiva. El proyecto se expande además en una publicación en formato de juego de cartas, que activa la memoria colectiva desde la participación.

Mirrored Territories

Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ogarrio

Mexico

Territories escape our ability to possess them, contain them, or carry them with us. Only through their representation can we share the experience of seeing them. They are illusions of the ungraspable, framed to symbolize our desires. In them we project freedom, spirituality, the impulse to travel, and, in recent times, our debt to the planet. Through images of territory, we come to know what is distant, even that which we may never experience with our own eyes. These images replace direct experience and evoke a spiritual dimension. They inspire both calm and longing. We use them to promote travel, denounce environmental degradation, or express the identity and origin of what we consume. Ultimately, they are reflections of what we cannot fully possess.

Digigrams

Tommy Goguely

France

Technical media are, most of the time, transparent, and only reveal their true nature through failures or when disturbances occur. Based on this principle, this series seeks to foreground the intrinsic materiality of digital photography. To do so, digital camera sensors were deliberately damaged through direct physical actions such as scratches, punctures, and other interventions on the photosensitive electronic surface. As the sensor records the traces of its progressive destruction, the photographs produced by the camera become self-referential, capturing only the process of their own creation. The digital photosensitive surface, usually just a receptacle for images, thus becomes photographic matter in itself, whose alterations reveal its substance.

THIN NOT BEAUTIFUL

Irina Cheremisina

Ukraine

This exhibition confronts the paradoxical and often cruel standards imposed on women’s bodies, especially those perceived as “too thin.” Through a series of images, the work draws on real phrases received over the years, unsolicited comments that turn the body into an object of judgment, suspicion, and correction. It is not only about thinness, but about the experience of being watched, misunderstood, and shamed for existing in a body that others believe they have the right to comment on. By bringing these words from memory into the visual plane, the work sheds light on a form of body shaming that is rarely acknowledged. The exhibition thus invites viewers to question toxic narratives around beauty and to reclaim the voice, identity, and singular truth of every body.

Huellas

Yinna Higuera

Ecuador - Colombia

This exhibition explores the ancestral bond between rural Ecuadorian women and the land they inhabit, cultivate, and protect. Through portraits printed with plant-based photosensitivity on banana, cacao, coffee, herb, and vegetable leaves taken from their own gardens, the work brings together photography and organic matter in a gesture of resistance, reverence, and memory. Each support, with its texture, color, and shape, transforms the image into a unique, ephemeral, and living object, where the skin of the leaf and that of the face enter into dialogue. The process, slow, handmade, and sensitive to time and environment, questions mechanical reproduction and restores to photography a ritual and intimate dimension. The exhibition honors women’s knowledge, invisible labor, and the relationship with natural cycles, inviting us to think of the image as a form of ecological, affective, and political listening.

Memory Simulacra

Nic Ma

Hong Kong

Memory Simulacra examines the intersection of memory, technology, and hyperreality in the digital era. Through the use of 3D scanning with an iPhone, it rethinks the way we capture and remember experiences in a world increasingly mediated by devices, unlike traditional photography, which is tied to time, framing, and a linear narrative. Through fragmented and abstracted simulations, the work reflects the emotional and discontinuous nature of memory, questioning how technology shapes reality, perception, and experience within a hyperreal landscape.

The Room of the Museum of Forgetting

Dasha Podoltseva & Alexey Shmurak

Ukraine

Audiovisual installation
Memory, remembrance, reminders: important concepts for both social communication and personal experience. In their work, Alexey and Dasha focus on the opposite concept: forgetting.
The overall generic framework of the installation is that of a museum or thematic archive. The artists create a room in the non-existent Museum of Forgetting, dedicated to the forgetting of dreams.

Light abstractions

Maarten Rots

Netherlands

The series 'Light Abstractions' grew from Rots' hands-on experiments with old slide projectors and pieces of stained glass—materials chosen for their ability to fragment and refract light in unexpected ways. By projecting coloured light from multiple directions, he created temporary, three-dimensional spaces within his studio. These weren't carefully planned setups but rather environments for discovery, where patient observation and subtle adjustments yielded surprising compositions. The work is fundamentally about process and play: moving the projectors incrementally, repositioning the glass, walking his camera through the shifting light to find moments that felt visually alive. As Rots moved through the projected light with his camera, he wasn't simply documenting a fixed scene but actively reshaping how we perceive it, putting an emphasis on perspective as something fluid and changeable. By deliberately shifting his position and moving through the light, he captured vibrant, graphic imagery that exists only in these photographs—compositions that document not just light and colour, but the artist's own journey of discovery within it.

Boys of Swiftcurrent Lake

Barbara Justice

United States

This immersive exhibition brings together between 8 and 12 handmade photographic books, created using cyanotype and other alternative processes such as Van Dyke and photographic screen printing. Each piece explores the relationship between photography, object, and sculptural form through different binding techniques, such as accordion, Coptic, and star structures. The exhibition combines the language of the artist’s book with photographic experimentation, focusing on the diversity of formats, materials, and display methods. The books shown function as examples of a broader edition currently in development, and anticipate an installation in which each work proposes a singular way of looking at, moving through, and inhabiting the image. The exhibition thus invites the public to enter a universe where photography unfolds beyond the wall and finds in the book an expanded space for creativity and experience.

Family Glitch

Kümei Kirschmann

Argentina

This exhibition brings together works that explore the limits of analog and experimental photography through old family photographs that have been scanned and deliberately distorted. What begins as an act of preservation becomes a process of transformation, in which the scanner ceases to be a tool of reproduction and instead acts as a device of alteration. Through glitches, movements, and digital accidents, the images lose their recognizable form and become hybrid figures between body and data, memory and glitch. The works exist between the intimate and the uncanny, revealing the fragility of the family archive as a living, mutable, and vulnerable organism. Rather than reconstructing a truth of the past, the exhibition focuses on what persists after distortion: its emotional residue. Experimentation and error thus open up a reflection on the image, imperfection, and its poetic potential.

A Matter of Perspective

Erik Johansson

Sweden

In the narrow, centuries-old stone corridors of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, the boundaries of reality begin to soften. This exhibition presents a series of large-scale "architectural portals" designed to punctuate the heavy, vertical walls of St. Simplici Street. Erik Johansson utilizes his signature blend of meticulous perspective and surreal construction to transform these physical surfaces into windows. Where the viewer expects solid stone, they instead find a portal into another world. By placing these domestic and architectural displacements within the rigid, historical context of the Pati Llimona, Johansson invites the passerby to look past the physical limitations of the city. The exhibition acts as a structural "leak" in the urban fabric, suggesting that even the most solid foundations are merely a matter of perspective.

Collective of Processes

International Residency of Experimentatio EXP-IEFC-UB

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During this year’s residency, each resident will have one day to develop a theoretical-practical workshop in which they will share an experimental technique with the rest of the group. The proposal maintains its focus as a horizontal community of collaborative learning, where the exchange of knowledge, collective experimentation, and peer-to-peer transmission occupy a central place, above the individual development of personal projects. Throughout the residency, different experimental techniques will be explored through a logic of coexistence, testing, and shared learning. The residency will conclude with a collective exhibition focused on making visible the research and learning processes activated during those days, rather than on presenting finished results, and it will be shown on the ground floor of the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, within the framework of the Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona.

Coordinator: Célica Veliz

Artists: Cara Coombe (Australia), Christopher Palm (Ecuador), Dietlinde DuPlessis (United States), Estefanía Montenegro (Ecuador), John Steck Jr. (United States), Maike Brautmeier (Germany), Ryder Booth (United States), and Ute Friederike Schernau (Germany).