Head On Photo Fest Sydney  «En Escena»  Exhibition

Where We Belong explores themes of belonging, femininity, and escapism through the portrayal of the Jane Austen Pineapple Appreciation Society, a group of passionate «Janeites» celebrating the author’s legacy. The society fosters a sense of support, sisterhood, and empowerment, strengthening members’ identities through intense relationships. The work uses physical and psychological closeness to represent these connections and the existential need for belonging. It also examines the blurred line between fiction and reality, challenging viewers to question where performance ends and imagination begins, blending past and present through a shared literary devotion.

Soy adolescente, ¿y qué más? (I am a teenager, so what else?) is a collective project exploring adolescent self-definition through a book, short film, exhibition, and educational workshop. Led by photographer Angélica Dass, known for her project Humanae, the project delves into the transitional period of adolescence, reflecting the hopes and challenges of young people. Working with Madrid students for over a year, Dass created a generational portrait that resonates globally. The project encourages collective thought and creativity, decentralizes culture, and fills gaps in official discourses, offering a fresh narrative about the power and reality of the new generation.

Clara de Tezanos’ work is an introspective exploration, reflecting countless nuances through imagery that evokes dreams and poetry. Light plays a central role in her work, symbolizing time, spirituality, and the human experience. In her series El regreso de Saturno (The Return of Saturn), the prism becomes a metaphor for life, personal transformation, and the mysteries of the universe. Her photographs invite viewers to imagine how time manifests as light, connecting us to the sacred. De Tezanos’ images reveal the spiritual, allowing viewers to experience this connection viscerally, through ethereal, dream-like visuals that stir the soul.

El Paraíso Come Carne (Paradise Eats Flesh) explores death from the perspective of the corpse (what we consider real) and the myths and beliefs about post-mortem hope (what we deem fictitious). It questions whether these contrasting views might both hold truth, considering scientific advances and quantum physics. The concept of immortality relates to energy, heaven to the Big Bang, paradise to the dispersion of atoms, rebirth to Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, the soul’s survival to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, and other lives to the Many-Worlds hypothesis. Existence, as part of an interconnected Whole, reveals death as a transformation understood through both science and mysticism.

Retratos de familia (Family Portraits) is a photography project by Estela de Castro that challenges traditional notions of family by featuring over sixty portraits of humans and animals. The series portrays multi-species family units, questioning the conventional single-species model typically accepted in society. As part of de Castro’s advocacy for animal rights, explored in previous works like Zoocosis, The Animals, and Persona, this project seeks to dignify animals and call for their recognition. Developed over two years, it blends de Castro’s portraiture expertise with art history’s group representation tradition, promoting the value of animals in a society that often objectifies them.

In Roman law, ownership was defined as absolute, perpetual, and exclusive enjoyment of an object. USUS allowed use, FRUCTUS granted the right to its fruits, and ABUSUS permitted modification, sale, or destruction. Gloria Oyarzabal’s work USUS FRUCTUS ABUSUS critiques how museums, originating over 300 years ago, have shaped identity and nation-building while perpetuating colonial legacies. These institutions often reinforce exoticism and supremacist discourses, creating conflicts around narrative, memory, and knowledge. Oyarzabal also addresses the risky portrayal of black women in Western art, particularly the stereotyped depictions of sexuality and servitude. Her work questions whether returning plundered objects and identities is an urgent, universal, and feasible challenge for all societies.

Ingrid Weyland has travelled from southern Argentina to Greenland’s ice sheet, seeking untouched, surreal landscapes that evoke a sense of solitude and immensity. In these moments of intimate connection with nature, she realized its vulnerability. Upon returning home, she devised a strategy to honour and raise awareness of the environmental degradation affecting these emotional sanctuaries. Through her art, she manipulates printed images of pristine landscapes, highlighting the violence inflicted on them. The crumpling of paper, like nature, leaves an irreversible trace, questioning our relationship with the natural world and the permanent damage we cause.

Our existence unfolds in a constant state of unease, driven by a viscous and slippery future. SUSPENSION suggests the idea that circumstances unfold in an undefined state, without a final resolution.

Amid this chaos, this project seeks to suspend premature judgement and delve into a form of deep contemplation, aiming to discover the beauty that exists within doubt itself.

SUSPENSION is an opening to the abyss, embracing and accepting uncertainty as the only certainty.

Linarejos Moreno grew up surrounded by industrial warehouses and factories that transformed as Spain’s economy shifted, only to be left abandoned during the crisis. These forgotten «widows of the living» were later collected to create a monument, with the marks from the remains enlarged and photographed, becoming part of the sculpture in a speculative process. Her series Tejiendo los restos del naufragio (Weaving the Remains of the Shipwreck) blends photography with sculpture, using thread to create perspectives and build architectural forms from the ruins. Her work, rooted in destruction, expresses survival and inhabits spaces lost to time and economic cycles.

Everything unfolds as if the liquid world is gradually overtaking the solid, with the melting of the poles becoming a symbol of the uncertainty of our time. The image of rising waters is unsettling, evoking a primal fear of growth, overflow, and the ever-present threat of flooding. Water’s power lies in its ability to disorient and dissolve the boundaries by which we define territory, identity, and control. Yet, unlike fire, water does not destroy completely; it absorbs and blends with everything it touches, creating unity. This process strips away excess, leaving only the essential components, scattered or dissolved, yet still present in their most fundamental forms. Through this integration, we are left with a landscape where all things coexist in their raw, germinal state.

In Eclipse, Lurdes R. Basolí assembles a collection of Maasai portraits taken by white men like John Hinde in the 19th and 20th centuries, promoting the «noble savage» stereotype and colonial discourse. Basolí identifies the photographers and uses their portraits to cover the faces of the Maasai they photographed, creating an eclipse-like effect where one image obscures another. This gesture protects the subjects who were used to perpetuate stereotypes, while exposing the powerful, often invisible, role of the photographers. Eclipse seeks to restore balance and establish a less unequal relationship between subject and observer.

(Rewriting of a critical text by Alexandra Laudo)

La clave de las cosas (The Key to Things) is a series of images that highlights talent through evocative visuals, exploring culture, research, and sports. Fragmented elements, representing a larger whole, aim to reinterpret the inner worlds of creators, scientists, and athletes who strive for excellence. The series underscores that success is never the product of one person or factor. Platero’s carefully crafted images combine intentionality with the spontaneity of documentary photography, frequently addressing themes of randomness, uncertainty, unstable balance, and the interplay between the planned and the improvised in her work.

Minerva no es una diosa romana (Minerva is not a Roman goddess) delves into vulnerability and beauty, exploring the difficulty of embracing one’s own fragility amidst a constant need for protection. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the series focuses on the artist’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Minerva, capturing the delicate stage of adolescence, spatial limitations, and a mother’s love. Curiosidad sobre la vida de los vecinos (Curiosity about the neighbours’ life) explores suppressed emotions, the need for vulnerability, and the realization that human connection defines us. It reflects how identifying with others helps alleviate the sense of isolation, portraying humans as fragile beings searching for connection.

Tule Baleeje is a small series of three images, resembling a triptych, that combines landscape intervention and photography. The title, meaning «black dunes» in Peule, a language spoken in Mauritania, reflects the setting where the series was created. The surface of the desert dunes is «painted» with natural black pigment, creating dark stains that flow along the sand’s slopes, altering the landscape. In this transformed scene, a lone acacia tree stands, though its presence may be artificial, blurring the line between reality and fiction. The series constructs an imagined landscape, merging the real and the surreal.

Paraísos vulnerables (Vulnerable Paradises) is a photographic series documenting ephemeral performances staged in the transient, anonymous space of a hotel room. Using only elements found within the suite, the artist constructs unstable sculptures or totems of comfort that are then dismantled, leaving the photographs as the sole evidence of their existence. The series reflects on the impersonality of hotel life, where, despite inhabiting the space for a night, it never feels like home. This exploration of temporary environments highlights the tension between ownership and disconnection. Part of a broader body of work, it delves into the concept of “home building” from a female perspective, addressing themes of identity, belonging, and transience.

In her series El bosque habitado (The Inhabited Forest), Rosa Muñoz transforms everyday objects by placing them within natural landscapes, creating captivating visual contrasts. Furniture and domestic elements, removed from their usual contexts, take on new identities and become central figures in the outdoor setting. This blend of reality and imagination prompts reflection on the spaces we inhabit and how they shape our emotions and memories. Each composition establishes a poetic connection between the ordinary and extraordinary, evoking ideas of belonging, memory, and transformation, and encouraging us to reconsider the relationship between the everyday and the natural world.

Silvestre Segarra Bonig, a shoe manufacturer, built his empire through a personal friendship with Franco. This pair of shoes, along with the socks embroidered by Carmen Polo with Franco’s initials, belonged to the dictator. The photographs in Sombra de lo que fuimos (Shadow of What We Were) depict objects that have lost their practical use but gained new significance, revealing more about their owners than their faces ever could. These objects, frozen in time, serve as portraits of a turbulent era in Spain’s history, capturing the astonishment and euphoria of those years and reflecting the roots of our present.

Trilogía del alma (Trilogy of the Soul) explores the human condition and the poetics of the landscape through an initiatory journey into the soul’s deserts. Inspired by sacred rituals, the works pose existential questions, with the body as a central element. Using poetic language, Córdoba integrates the female body into the desert, portraying a recurring female character who represents women through personal and collective experiences. These women guide us through states of the soul, connecting the emotional and physical by using natural elements in rituals that lead to transcendence, purification, and rebirth, symbolizing strength and resilience.

Toya Legido’s work presents an imaginary field notebook where plant materials construct new realities, inspired by 16th- and 17th-century cabinets of curiosities. This journey to an unknown place blurs the line between reality and fiction, questioning the objectivity of photography and its reliability as a documentary medium. By exploring the medium’s creative potential, Legido merges science and art, constructing scientific fantasies. Her homage to the Voynich Manuscript, Codex Seraphinianus, and Joan Fontcuberta’s Herbarium uses historical aesthetics to represent contemporary specimens. In ART DECÓ, she draws on modernist illustrations, emphasizing the symmetry of zygomorphic flowers, challenging natural forms with canonized certainties.