José De Sancristóbal is an artist and wannabe translator. He works with the entanglement of narrative and image-making processes. Using photography, film, installation, and writing, he engages with practices of erratic positionality operating inside seemingly closed representation systems. The portrayal of these engagements often takes place at the intersection of the camera’s contradictory condition: between 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 modes of identification by considering them against unmeasurable forms: fiction, memory, translation, and magical realism hinder those devices tasked with supervising self and belonging—such as passport photographs, migration regulations, biographical information, or national borders.
(Unrevised Edition)
Notes on the translation of El Solitario (or Preface to the English edition)
Trial (the actors and the translator)
Evidence
Untitled translation exercise
Fabrications
Estudio Cinefotográfica Azteca
Birds dream of singing
Pond
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow
Or untitled
Memorama
Trial (the actors and the translator)4K video, blackout structure, translation drafts, light table, 4x5 film negatives, inkjet prints.
Three actors audition for the role of “José,” the semi-fictional protagonist of El Solitario,
a novel in process of translation (later addressed at length in Notes on the translation...)
Overall variable dimensions