Artist
Laura San Segundo
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.
The circular enclosure
In Jorge Luis Borges’ story, The Circular Ruins, a man arrives at the ruins of a temple in the jungle – the circular enclosure – with a supernatural purpose to create another man, piece by piece. Later, he realises that he is himself the product of someone else’s dream. As in Borges’ story, dreams and reality overlap in my project. It’s a series of images where time has somehow been suspended, and where what remains is confusing; as if what we see isn’t real, but unconscious. These images work as sediments with no spatial or temporal connection. They meet in another place – or accumulate in a crevice – after being carried by the same river.
Fascinated by the mind’s ability to create images without a conscious or rational intervention – especially when we toss and turn, or we’re absent-minded and absorbed – I’ve tried to represent the idiosyncrasy of those unconscious thoughts through my editing process. The effect is enhanced by the use of particular codes they operate with: fragmentation, repetition, loops, time skips, images as echoes of other images, stairs that go nowhere, landscapes as mental places, and elements that disappear and reappear – transformed into another thing.
The resulting series – formed of photographs I took in Iceland, old images I found in antique shops, and photographs I took more recently – works as a set of hidden clues to be deciphered or unravelled. Ultimately, it presents a dialogue on how both photographic editing and our unconscious mental processes can disrupt the inherent significance of an image.
Similarly, the five contemporary photographers PHotoESPAÑA is nominating for FUTURES this year are developing work that stands out on today’s scene, offering five different yet complementary perspectives that provide an overview of contemporary practices, ranging from documentary (Umberto Diecinove) to a type of expanded photography that incorporates performance (Monica Egido), to work with the photobook format (Irene Zottola) and conceptual photography (Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa). In 2022, PHotoESPAÑA closely tracked these artists’ progress.
In her project Ícaro, published as a photo book in 2022, Irene Zottola uses photography to offer a mystical fable as a metaphor of the contemporary world. In FOMO, also from 2022, Mónica Egido uses a performative duel to represent the need to stop and observe ourselves silently for an extended period of time. In The Circular Enclosure, a project currently underway and started in 2023, Laura San Segundo resolves a succession of landscapes as mental sites where the dialogue takes place between photography and the subconscious and is capable of transcending the inherent meaning of an image or element. In Anatomy of an Oyster, started in 2018 and still underway, Rita Puig-Serra Costa uses the photographic image to formulate a first-person journey into the past, in an attempt to tell a story of violence and abuse silenced by time. Finally, in the ongoing project INSCTS, Umberto Dicienove sets out to document the potential change we can achieve with insects, providing a global view with a special focus on people working on this change and those who will benefit from it.
Mónica Egido and Umberto Diecinove developed their projects as part of our MA in photography and artistic projects – the festival’s training programme. Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa stood out within the set of projects submitted to the Discoveries viewing programme. And the Irene Zóttola’s photobook Ícaro was chosen for the 2022 PHotoESPAÑA award for Best Photography Book of the Year.