My work in photography and video interrogates societal constructs that shape and reinforce the role of the body. I use familiar media images to reflect on the ways society molds beliefs and ideas about itself and different cultures. My research explores how these images shape people’s identities and promote superficial judgments about the "other."
From using documentary photography in El Sureño Americano to creating meticulous staged tableaux in I want to live in America and self-portraits based on media stereotypes, my artistic practice raises questions on representation, race, and gender. I focus on the dominated, incomplete, and manipulated body, presenting itself as a third-world body. The Latin American body, misrepresented, persecuted, and excluded by dominant cultures. In Mexican-American Gothic, I reinsert this body to reconfigure images of immediate recognition. This displacement occurs across territories, borders, and within the history of art and common imaginaries, where figures like mine have been similarly distorted.
My self-portraiture investigates the political disputes generated by the lack of neutrality of my body, particularly in relation to fabricated, fetishized, and media-distributed bodies. In Action Heroes, I question the depiction of my figure—a body historically used and abused in art and literature, assigned fantasy roles, and distorted until it becomes "abnormal." I address masculinity by portraying myself in roles I would never inhabit in real life due to my physical characteristics—a body exiled from conventional narratives of what is considered to be a man.
When researching the body through photography, scale and its connection with architecture and objects are evident. In Cell-Portraits, I used a cellphone to explore the "selfie" genre and the scale of public restrooms. Typology of Chairs examines the relationship between different institutional chairs and my body. The self-portraits show how I remain unstable and always in an awkward position, revealing how these objects implicitly reference certain body types, excluding bodies like mine.
In my self-portraits, I explore my body and its relationship to others. Story About Friends continues my series Story About Gnomes, where I made self-portraits and portraits of my niece at age three. For Story About Friends, we collaborated on her tenth birthday, creating photographs during family reunions, improvising narratives about friendship. Documenting her growth as her body surpassed my own, these images juxtapose our different gendered bodies, blurring the lines between childhood and adulthood. They explore duality, transformation, and transition, highlighting our essential differences.
Recently, my artistic practice has expanded to filmmaking. Eclipses explores the body's representation through moving images, sound, and time. Using eclipses as a metaphor, the film examines the influence bodies exert on each other, highlighting physical and suggestive connections and challenging traditional power structures.
Santiago Forero Ramírez