Andrés Pachón is a Spanish artist and researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology. In his latest works, Pachón approaches the construction of colonial imaginary through the use of photography. In particular, ​he explores the relationships between the technical objects and images of the 19th and 20th centuries combined with the digital technologies of the present. In doing so, he aims to render visible some of the ideological or unconscious processes that have shaped how we see the world, both in the past and still today.

 

In this video, Pachón discusses an overlap between two of his projects, “Tropologies II” and “Abstract Machine”, which both coincidentally contain the same image of a man, only rendered differently. The artist reflects upon how this chance encounter affirms the impossibility of photography as an immutable reflection of reality, but rather as a productive reading of it. These works were developed with the archives of the New York Public Library and the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid. Since 2010, Pachón has worked collaboratively with other well known institutions, such as the Museé du Quai Branly, in Paris, and has been awarded several grants, such as the Leonardo Grant BBVA Foundation to Researchers and Cultural Creators (2019).