de una mirada otra
solo exhibition
Arte Actual (Quito, Ecuador)
November 9th – December 15th 2023
The exhibition “de una mirada otra”, by Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, is composed of a series of works that revolve around the relationship between art, film and history. Combining original images with others drawn from a variety of sources (film heritage, art history, documents, personal archives), alternating between a poetic register and live capture, the resulting works are a coalition between bygone and present times that allows ghosts to inhabit the present, and the gaze – as the central element of this proposal – to extend through time. The gaze thus dwells between reality and fiction, dispossessed of the domain of its own, since it is made up of thousands of other images. It would seem that the artist’s proposal is not that “I create an image” but that images create images and, therefore, it is not that “I look” but that “I am looked at” and these looks give me back an image. In this circulation of gazes through ghostly bodies, the artist establishes links and bridges between her own gaze and that of the other, where places, stories and spectral characters intertwine.
Throughout this audiovisual installation, a series of filmic gestures reveal individual and collective presences, bringing them into existence or presenting them in a new light. The arrangement of the screens and their vibration – the only source that allows us to see in the dark room – creates six stations, flashes of surviving, discontinuous images, where times connect and become visible (Didi-Huberman, 2012). The visual elements re-used by the artist are plastic matter for creation; far from being preserved as museum objects out of time, the images are fragmented and reconstructed to make them appear in new narratives, to be returned for a moment to the world of the visible, reclaiming identity and, therefore, dignity. The work of those who work with images destined to disappear, reanimating a cancelled memory, is also presented in their most intimate gestures. Therefore, this exhibition is an invitation to delve through the photographic and filmic trace, the presence of those who were there, despite not being named, in an act of resistance and secret encounter with the other.
