POETICS OF GESTURE, POLITICS OF THE DOCUMENT. BARBARA BRÄNDLI PHotoESPAÑA 2024

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POETICS OF GESTURE, POLITICS OF THE DOCUMENT. BARBARA BRÄNDLI
PHotoESPAÑA 2024

A project by PHotoESPAÑA, Colección C&FE and CentroCentro
Curated by: Alejandro León Cannock

Barbara Brändli was born in Switzerland (Schaffhausen, 1932) but became a photographer in Venezuela, where she lived and worked until her disappearance (Caracas, 2011). Over the course of five decades, artists, musicians, actors, dancers, craftspeople, models, politicians and businessmen from Venezuelan society posed before her camera. Even though Brändli is known internationally for her book Sistema nervioso (1975), which Martin Perr included in his selection of the best photography books (Fenómeno fotolibro, 2017), her legacy contains photographic (and non-photographic) materials that are priceless for Latin American historical memory.

The value of Brändli’s works is not limited to their prominence as ‘historical documents’ but also lies in the way she approached documentary photography. The fact that she had been an amateur dancer and had worked as a model for magazines and designers before becoming a photographer enabled her to understand the importance of gesture and pose. At the same time, it led her to experiment in her own flesh with the process of alienation that the photographed ‘subject’ is subjected to when turned into an ‘object’ of representation.

Probably to overcome this position, Brändli used a working methodology and a life ethics that encourage us to glimpse in her projects the foundations of a redefinition of the documentary activity: from the photographer as hunter to the photographer as weaver of Probably to overcome… Brändli’s documentary projects, like Los hijos de la luna (1974), Los páramos se van quedando solos (1981) and Así con las manos (1979), are the outcome of many years of work in which the author coexisted with those who became not the objects of her photographs but the subjects of their stories.

This exhibitions shows for the first time a selection of photographs and documents from her archive – which currently belomgs to the C&FE Collection – that demonstrate her intimate commitment to photography as a tool to build human bonds.

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