A question permeates many of the works in this edition. How to face the violence inscribed in the history of photography and deeply rooted in the archives of images? With different strategies, the artists presente here look into ethnographic production, family albums, journalistic projects and even travel photographs to repossess the images, restore their stories and celebrate life.

At the opening of this edition, Paulo Nazareth’s photographs are transformed into postcards “in reverse” as they return news of a history of racism and xenophobia to the United States. Nazareth also fights the death evoked by the historical archives of black people by animating photographic reproductions with the breath of the white spots of helmeted guineafowls. Gê Viana recovers the history of the quilombolas of Alcântara by throwing light on an important set of photographs with layers of color and life; while the Mexican artist Diego Moreno uses his family snaps to reveal the creatures that inhabit the depths of the human soul.

Racial and erotic tensions overlap in Lyle Ashton Harris’s Blow Ups, which combine world news with the intimacy of the artist. Made over many years, his blow-ups have been combined for ZUM to form a single narrative. In this edition’s interview, Sophie Calle reveals how she writes her biography by projecting herself into the life of others with grains of fine irony.

Facing the visual ocean is also a way to reestablish history and redefine self-identity. Featured on the cover of this edition, artist Igi Lólá Ayedun uses self-portraits and artificial intelligence to construct a future of beings who navigate an ancestral universe. Between the ready-made and the assemblage, the costumes worn by the papangus photographed by Nicolas Gondim make the future a sampled present. The crises of the present echo the melancholy of the past, as seen in Adriana Lestido’s distant Buenos Aires, and in the economic crisis facing contemporary Argentina. In a dialog created for this edition, writer David Campany and artist Penelope Umbrico advance and retreat into a time machine to show that the reproducibility of photography, since its inception in the 19th century, remains radically subversive and current. The future sleeps in the past.

 

Thyago Nogueira, editor