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Photography

Chrysalis

Rocío Araújo Martínez

Project year: 

2021

Integrated Project

Chrysalis is a project that emerges as a need to talk about everything we have inside us, but without talking. Take out, at the stroke of different processes, everything we are not able to say in words and turn it into images. Starting from who we are, from our own image and, in a very physical way, showing everything that is inside us. Make the invisible visible, what is not seen from the outside.

We’re used to building albums of happy moments, of what we want to remember and preserve, and we try to forget the bad and the negative. I don’t want to forget it, because somehow it’s also part of me and who I am. Since I was a child, I have lived the family as a symbol of unity, love, respect, trust ... A series of values that little by little have been engraved in me.

I grew up and was incorporating people into that family that I was building, with their successes and failures. The project talks about all this, almost like a diary or a family album. Situations and emotions that anyone may have experienced but is not yet able to tell.

Create an image from a feeling. A single image, real, no gimmicks, no makeup and no retouching. An image-shaped representation of who we really are, with our marks and our stories engraved on our skin. An image in which, through physical manipulation on itself, tell something that is inside us.

To do this I analyzed each of the moments and memories of my own story, extracting a list of feelings that have been marking my day to day. I began to shape them, one by one, through different processes in which I experienced that very sensation. Supporting each candle, in the middle of the ice, underground, between embers, being devoured, submerged in water, with chains ... Images that transform over time, as well as feelings. A process in which each image is created based solely on each emotion, without looking for a specific aesthetic or result. The unconscious gesture, in which the feeling travels from the head to the hand without going through reason. Some of them with a common element, sewing, a point of connection to my family history.

With Chrysalis I want to break the fear to show, to let out what I feel. To portray, in various ways, the different ways of feeling in which I think many could be reflected. Each of the pieces is a sample of something: The mental load, the values lost over time, the fragility, the growth, the wear, the wounds, the learnings, the drowning, the toxic, the harmful, etc ... Twenty and seven images to date. An album that hurts and heals, almost like a therapy. Twenty-seven images in which the process is part of me and who I am today.

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