Technique: cyanotype on fabric

Dimensions: 105 x 210 cm

​

For decades, thousands of people have lost their lives every year in the waters that separate Africa from Europe. This project proposes a discussion on the seas as border territories and alludes to the bodies that disappear in their waters, driven by socio-economic crisis, geopolitical conflicts and the growing environmental instability.

​

In a context that is aggravated by the tightening of migration laws, the evolution of this conflict has been articulated through media and political discourses that promote the dehumanisation and criminalisation of migrants. This has resulted in a context where increasingly restrictive policies are justified and established narratives of exclusion and rejection are perpetuated.

 

Located on different beaches that form part of the migratory routes of Southern Europe or North Africa, Blueprints takes shape through a series of collaborative actions that I carry out on the seashore and that are recorded in the form of cyanotypes. Anatomical maps on a scale of 1:1, made through direct contact between our bodies and photosensitive tissue, exposed to the sun and revealed in the same seas that witness these disappearances.

 

In the context of engineering and architecture, the term ‘blueprint’ or cyanotype is commonly used to refer to any kind of draft or detailed graphic representation. In this broad sense, ‘blueprint’ refers to any technical image containing specific details about an object or structure.

 

These photographic records are traces conceived beyond gender, race or ideology, in an exercise that explores the relationship between our bodies and their representation. Blueprints tries to strain some of our conceptions inscribed in the cultural codes of the portrait genre as a reflection linked to individuality, proposing a re-reading where the particular dissolves into the collective and the body becomes a symbol of resistance and vulnerability at the same time.