The method has consisted of photographing the computer screen with a cell phone, capturing the reflected image of the artist along with the different images that are currently reproduced by various video programs, live broadcasts, photographs, and other graphic expressions. Some have caught the author's attention instantly, others have been searched for and selected based on the narrative of the project. With this, not only a palimpsest of images is produced, they are also an archive of fragmented stories.
This project is mainly concerned with the representation of women in the media. It includes images from movies, television series, newsreels, works of art, and other representations in which women are protagonists. All of these images seem to share the same disposition for melodrama and kitsch. In fact, in other installation versions, the image sequences with subtitles create structures similar to that of the fotonovela.
The placement of the writing in the book is strategic. In this work, the importance of the melodramatic factor provided by the text has been downplayed and the photography has been chosen as a piece of writing in itself. The connection of these photographs with various products of mass culture must be deciphered by the viewer. The very title of the book has resulted from the montage between two images-texts.
Women are fiction could be rewritten as ”Women are / Fiction”. By dividing the phrase into two terms in tension, we are left with a term whose referent is interrupted halfway built (“Women are…”), something that resists being defined and completed, something unfinished and in process. And on the other side we are left with a self-referential term (“Fiction”), because how can we talk about fiction without resorting to fiction? It is the very character of the fiction that becomes fascinating. Because fiction is a quality of the story, associated with its imaginary condition and its poetic possibility. But symbolic violence also filters through the poetic, which is already relatively obvious here: women are fictions narrated by and for men, in a discursive universe still dominated by the male voice.
Perhaps this conceptual division gives us some clue as to why we have two books in one here. The first, in color, shows more clearly the exercise of self-representation, but draws attention to the technological condition and the media nature of the images. While the second, in black and white, seems like an intervention on the first, through a type of image that can be interpreted as private or at least more subjective or psychological.
The transition from screen to print leaves us with images full of noise and veils, which do not seem suitable for fixation. There is something coarse in these representations that distances itself from the contemporary trend towards the sharpness and hypervisibility of the icon.
Carmen Inés Bencosme has already worked before looking for methods of self-representation through reflection, breaking the direct relationship of the body with the camera, photographing with the mediation of other objects or surfaces (the mirror, for example) and distorting the figure. Now it does so through a surface with less apparent opacity (the screen), deepening the infiltration of the reflection into the object, and provoking more dynamic and profuse situations in textual crossings.
In this project, the reflection is reciprocal: the artist is reflected in the surface she is photographing, but said surface projects her own images onto the camera, leaving a diffuse trail both on the screen and on the photo. That trace is what we can name as a ghost. In fact, we can conclude that what Bencosme photographs is not his own face or his own body, but his ghost. And that is probably one of the keys to its aesthetics.
Written by: Juan Antonio Molina Cuesta.
