Isolation

ISOLATION is a series of referential self-portraits about getting sick from the COVID-19 virus, isolation, the body as internal territory and its relationship with the house as a conditioning spatiality. Self-Portraits from Laura Sánchez 

10 photographs correspond to each of the days of mandatory isolation. Through the photomontage technique, the images reveal the dierent states that the photographer and illuminator LAURA SÁNCHEZ (pseudonym ULA) went through after catching COVID, recently arrived in Switzerland. The connement, the loneliness, the space that with the passing of the days became limiting, the lack of oxygen, the loss of smell and taste, fever, body fatigue and the subconscious states that the virus awakens were conjugated with the “Fear of” and the overinformation regarding the pandemic that we have accumulated since its appearance.

FUNDAMENT

As an illuminator and photographer, she chose light as a tool for artistic creation, seeking to broaden her gaze to other settings. That is why she investigated the ways to expand the technique towards a gap between art, the social and the sustainable.

Why photograph (me) with covid? Since the pandemic began, there has been so much talk but very little about what it means to have the covid and to have to isolate yourself. For some it has been just another u something stronger. But for people at risk, fear, death and survival dialogue between a limited period of time and various symptoms.

How is my body today? How I feel? In solitude oraccompanied? What if I infect someone else? Where do you get the virus? What do I do if I don’t have medical coverage? How do I get used to during those days? Between doors, rooms, light and night, wakefulness and sheets, silence and stillness (because breathing is slower), noise and movement (due to all the over-information that I accumulated directly or indirectly from the pandemic). Where is there stillness? In the photography. Because it allows to express all that internal chaos and to resiliate an experience through the creative process interweaving spatialities, temporalities and psychophysical states. In a world of connement, the camera became the only observer: an extension of my own gaze.

TECHNIQUE USED

ISOLATION it is a dialectic about the relationship between body – internal / external territory expressed by the self-portrait. How to expand the technique by exploring photography with other languages? These are some of the concerns that these photographs seek.

A Canon reex camera, 50mm and 24mm lenses and natural light were the work tools. Using the least essential is part of his conception at the time of photographing. Photomontage and black and white as aesthetic resources to focus the image on the contrast between immobile external space (the house) and internal space in movement (body). Other times, the movement is achieved with repetitions of the same frame but dierent poses, combined in a grid. The series plays with various formats, sometimes suocating the image and other times accentuating the vertical and horizontal directions with overexposures and panoramas.

Laura Sánchez, Argentinian, 35 years old, photographer and illuminator. She was trained in Scenography, Lighting and Photography (UNCuyo-Mendoza), in Combined Artistic Languages (postgraduate at UNA-Buenos Aires), in dance and music. Her work takes light as an expressive tool creating projects and works under the pseudonym ULA Producciones. She is a lighting and lighting technician. She is a teacher at Tramoya in the EMAD Scenery career (Buenos Aires). He won the Creation grant from the National Arts Fund to make the documentary CUYA Illuminating Territories (Phase I), the Circulation grant to carry out the 1st Encontro de Mulheres Fotogradas (São Paulo, Brazil 2019) and the Improvement grant with the INT for his postgraduate degree (Buenos Aires, 2015). She self-manages in independent productions, she produces seminars between photography and other languages, such as IMBRICADOS (Mendoza) and CMWF (Brazil). She presented her presentation on Acoustics and Scenography in the framework of the 1st Scenography Congress (Tandil, Argentina). She participated as a volunteer lming the Retiro do Ano Novo (Uniluz-Brasil 2018), the 11th
Cigogo Music Festival (Tanzania 2019) and the 10th Retiro Musica do Circulo (Brazil). She was a production assistant at Origen Festival Cultural (Riom, Switzerland) and at the Photo Basel 2021 photography fair (Basel, Switzerland). Her current work focuses on ethnographic documentary lmmaking, ecofeminism, sustainability, expanded photography, and the production of Cruce de Lenguaje Artísticos works.