Uadi

A glass, a river, a trace, a scan, a print, a repetition...

Uadi [وادي] – Arabic for seasonal riverbed – extends this research, exploring water as both maker and eraser of landscape – and images. The Uadi series develops a process of cyclic chemigrams on a single glass plate, in which water is periodically poured over the cyanotype, documenting its erosion for several weeks.

The work explores photography as a vulnerable body, presenting objects that have been purposefully erased instead of fixed. The installation is composed of perpendicular small-format pieces, which seen from the front largely conceal their content. The frames are tailor-made iron watergates, used in some Spanish regions for flood irrigation. The past states of the cyanotypes are shown as a sequence of glass facsimiles that represent each week of erasure along the process.

Going back to the early efforts of the 19th Century on fixing images and testing their resistance, Uadi’s erosive methodology engages with photography through a compromise meant to be extended in time. It emphasises the very latency and fragility of the medium –which in spite of its hastening technical development, seems to be as deciduous as ever.