Discover the finalists of the VII Fiebre Dummy Award!
From the total of 150 proposals received from 29 countries, including Spain, Italy, Portugal, United Kingdom, United States, Brazil and Argentina, we present the 12 finalists:
- Bárbara Traver – Te quiere, mamá
- Bruno Claro – Tentativas Operatórias no Tratamento de Certas Psicoses
- Calebe Simões – OVO
- Chino Moya – Monosodium Glutamate
- Federica Mambrini – Come costruire un castello di carte
- Javier Talavera – Obra Obra
- Julia Mejnertsen – HUN
- Luca Iovino – The name we hold
- Maki Hayashida – Beyond the Mountains
- Nicholas F. Callaway – La herencia
- Rafael Roncato – Tropical Trauma Misery Tour
- Yorgos Karailias – The Whale and the City
Te quiere, mamá – Barbara Traver
Within the responsibility as a mother, comes the inculcation of what they have learned, conditioning the woman she should have been. I soon realized that knowing her meant discovering myself, understanding motherhood as an act of sublimation that hides in the smallest details.
Tentativas Operatórias no Tratamento de Certas Psicoses – Bruno Claro
In 1949, Egas Moniz became the first Portuguese national to win a Nobel Prize. He was awarded the prize in Medicine for his invention, the prefrontal leucotomy, popularly known as lobotomy. Throughout history Moniz and this invention have been regarded as both controversial and heroic.
OVO- Calebe Simões
The photobook is an investigation into the patriotic, traditional, family and religious relationships that led to the rise of the ultra-right in Brazil. The Brazilian artist Calebe Simões rescued photos from the family archive, photos found in the street and photos from his photographic archive, to study the Protestant religion, soccer and violence, factors that sustain the extreme right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro. Calebe also includes himself in the work, with the intention of confessing that he is also part of a fractured society that has shown its darkest side in recent years.
Monosodium Glutamate – Chino Moya
This series was initially inspired by the depiction of saints in Baroque paintings. I was particularly interested in the representation of ecstasy – the body language and facial expressions used by artists to convey a transcendental experience. The other aspect of these paintings I wanted to explore was the use of objects as symbols of spirituality. Today, depictions of ecstatic states and symbolically weighted objects are deeply embedded in the codes of advertising. The Christian promise of supreme happiness in the afterlife has a contemporary analogy in the idealised lifestyles promoted to us by modern corporations. Through these pictures, I wanted to represent the unfulfillment of that promise – the collapse of the idea of a capitalist paradise and the decline of its centuries-old, uncontested patriarchal ruling class. Inspired by José de Ribera’s choice of ‘lowlifes’ as models for his religious paintings, I cast middle-aged white men as subjects, staging the portraits in dilapidated interior spaces. Here, the body language that conveyed a mystical experience in classical paintings mutates into the silent screams or desperate mating calls of anonymous, isolated men trapped in a mundane hell, deprived of any spirituality. The sublime quality of the religious paintings that inspired these photographs has been replaced by a bleak vision that reflects the cultural and material degradation of Western societies. Rather than representing enlightenment, the generic objects and fabrics portrayed in these images reflect the surplus of mass-produced, meaningless stuff that surrounds us. In these images, ascetic Christian saints have devolved into middle-aged outcasts wandering around desolate industrial areas or stuck in low-cost housing units filled with pound shop decor and obsolescent appliances.
Come costruire un castello di carte – Federica Mambrini
Focuses on some personal attempts to investigate precariousness, balance and the tensions and weights that characterize the pieces. Through an interdisciplinary approach, driven by continuous construction, layering, subtraction and abstraction of notions, the permanent and the finite acquire a new unstable value. At every moment, man, in the cantilever of his weight, breaks his position of stability; thus, within the survey, the possibility of falling is also contemplated as a contemporary experience and necessity. Is it possible to return to the starting point once the equilibrium is lost? Is the sensation of falling a state of mind? As in a scientific dossier, the book is presented with rigor in its absurdity, hierarchizing the content and dividing it into three chapters: direct observations on the territory; experiments, tests, attempts and verifications with elements, objects and people in more or less protected systems; the hypotheses formulated through different approaches on the same subjects. Throughout the work, photography is proposed as the final result for the representation of an idea. In the obsessive and potentially infinite exploration, an attempt was made to revive the situation of unpredictability and the continuous search for a tangible proof of the balance between the parts.
Obra, obra – Javier Talavera
Is the construction of a construction. A photographic exercise that lasted as long as it took some workers to compose a concrete image. For months, from the windows of my house, I observed the daily routines of the work of some workers transforming a limited landscape. Interested in the plastic qualities of the forms that appeared, I began to document this active process from a precept that transcends the objective image. Like another worker, I developed a repetitive and mechanical work plan. I created daily tasks of systematic capture, in an exploration of the idea of emptiness and infinity through the white.
HUN – Julia Mejnertsen
Is an answer to my mother’s comment, when she once said that hunting your first animal feels the same as giving birth to your first child. HUN is a family project dealing with the complex and invisible bond we establish with our family. HUN understands the family as a cosmology, which means everything that is alive, that surrounds us. What happens when one of these elements ceases to exist? What happens when a plant or an animal stops breathing? HUN’s nine chapters is a story about how white, western societies have structured and shaped our cultural understanding of nature. It is made to revisit our own beliefs and biases. HUN means “she”. HUNTER means “us”.
The name we hold – Luca Iovino
An intimate story that talks about possession and existence, taking a move as a pretext I wanted to twist my idea of home as a safe place using the concept of perimeter as an oneiric measuring language to put into question our presence and create always new familiar space and redefine my certainties.
Beyond the Mountains – Maki Hayashida
Is a visual archive project related to illegal dumping in Japan. Focused on the large-scale cases across Japan, as well as some important related matters, photographs, maps, figures, tables, and documents are collected from the national government, local authorities and the general public, along with my own photographs.
The Whale and the City-Yorgos Karailias
Forms a study of Athens downtown during the past five years (2018-2022). It includes a sequence of more than 100 visual fragments and a serial, improvised conversation via email with Carlos Emarquis, a theorist of political science. Through the combined set of images and words, the project presents a spacetime of “disorder” that resists classification and identification, as it has recently resisted two gentrification attempts and the process of desertification that usually anticipates “progress” in the neo-liberal context.
La Herencia – Nicholas F. Callaway
Exploration of my father’s portfolio, inherited after his death.
Open call sponsored by Artes Gráficas Palermo
Co-edited with Dalpine
Prepress by La Troupe