José De Sancristóbal is an artist, photographer, and wannabe translator. He works with the entanglement of narrative and image-making processes. He uses photography, video, film, and installation to engage with people that dismiss a fixed or bureaucratic identity by assuming a shifting, erratic positionality. The portrayal of these engagements develops at the intersection of two seemingly contradictory conditions of the camera: its purported objectivity and its propensity for deceit. Informed by photography’s history as a tool to regulate citizens and their movement, his work muddles established systems of identification by incorporating inherently unreliable processes. Fiction, memory, translation, and magic realism hinder the devices that pretend to supervise notions of self and belonging, such as passport photographs, migration regulations, identification documents, or national borders.
FabricationsInkjet prints, ink drawings, wood, metal, glass, fishing line, caster wheels A recreation of a camera as remembered by one of its owners 40 years after using it Overall variable dimensions