IMAGE, MYTHS AND THE CONTEST OF MEANING

Despite living in constant uncertainty as to the truthfulness of images presented in the media, largely determined by the immediacy of social networks, photography continues to emerge as a fragment of reality, instead of a representation and reaching, in this way, a power that elevates it above the implications of the actual fabrication of facts.

Faced with the loss of referents, inherent to our present digital condition, we continue to claim thepotential of images to make sense of reality, thus propagating a myth of photography as a tool forrevealing evidence and forgetting that the meaning of things is imagined and built by our own discursive systems.

By highlighting the ways in which photography can manipulate, distort or construct certain realities, we can approach the myth of photography as a model of objective representation, as well as the particular meanings it imposes, by unveiling the photographic artifice and using it as a resource for opening up new possibilities of imagining new realities and questioning the current ones.

In this session, the editors of this year's volume of Archivo Papers Journal, Andrés Pachón and Ana Catarina Pinho, will engage in a conversation with the collective duo Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, who will present their visual work and creative process around the construction of photographic meaning.

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This event is part of  Archivo Sessions | Speakers Series, organised by Archivo Platform in the context of the current volume of Archivo Papers Journal — "Mythologies of the 21st Century", edited by Ana Catarina Pinho and invited editor Andrés Pachón. This Speakers Series is developed in partnership and with the support of PARC - Photography and the Archive Research Centre, at the University of the Arts London (UAL), in the United Kingdom.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

LORI NIX / KATHLEEN GERBER

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber form an artistic duo who have been making art collaboratively for over nineteen years. Basedin Cincinnati, Ohio, they construct meticulously detailed model environments and photograph the results. Their miniature fake landscapes and interiors reflect a love of science fiction and dystopian entertainment, an appreciation for great architecture, and an affinity with classical Western painting. Because the work is of a model and not a real place, it createsa safe space to consider the larger ideas of disaster and our collective future.

ANDRÉS PACHÓN

Invited Editor of Archivo Papers Journal 2021

Visual artist and FCT Research Fellow, developing a PhD in Anthropology at Coimbra University, Portugal. His work focuses on photography in regard to knowledge construction, establishing relationships between the its uses in the 19th and 20th centuries and the current uses of technology, as is the case of his current research on visualization and cognitionin the computational technics, specifically in relation to the Artificial Intelligence phenomena.

ANA CATARINA PINHO

Archivo Platform Director

Visual artist working with lens-based media and FCT Research Fellow, developing a PhD at the European Centre for Documentary Research, University of South Wales, in the UK. Has recently edited the book Reframing the Archive (Archivo Press, 2021) in the context of her doctoral research. Is the founding director of Archivo Platform and a member ofInstituto de História da Arte, at NOVA University of Lisbon, and the Global Art Archive, at University of Barcelona, Spain.