Santiago Porter

Santiago Porter has worked stubbornly through photography and painting on the deep and sensitive relationship between the aspect of things and their history. From his images, the vestiges (personal and private, public and collective) show that nothing and nobody disappears completely, nothing and nobody can become in total absence. From the investigation, turned into silent observation, Porter records the imprint of existence that is forever impregnated in materialities, he reflects on condensed memory, time and the history of peoples as a community. The individual stories and the social frameworks. In “Bruma” (2007-2017) Porter has portrayed public buildings, monuments and landscapes, in his search to make the message they carry readable. In a task that has a lot of historical investigation, field work and critical thinking, he has worked with technical mastery in large formats, to demonstrate the ability of these objects and these places to account for what has happened to them. He points out that in appearances there is something that emanates related with our history, with the things that happened to them and happened to us, until we reach this present where a specific meaning is also encrypted. "The absence” (2001-2002) is a work related to the attack that destroyed the building of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) and killed 85 people. Porter gathers portraits and objects: photographs of the relatives of the victims of the attack with objects that the victims had with them at the time of the explosion. Ritual, affection, introspection, homage, work challenges and questions us: when, before the image of an object, do we stop seeing the presence of a thing to perceive instead, the outline of an absence? Work as a vital visual archive of what resists, defying oblivion, creating memory.

Submitted by ROLF ART