honorable mention
Laurence Cuelenaere united states
title
A Place to Land
Laurence Cuelenaere (b. Belgium) is an interdisciplinary photographer who works at the intersection of art, social practice, and critical theory. She/they received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She/they has/ve conducted long term ethnographic research in Mexico and Bolivia. Her/their visual work examines the affective conditions of the production of images, but also how photography can resist the oppressive conventions of racial neoliberalism. Her/their practice addresses political issues pertaining to social justice and migration. Cuelenaere lives on the ancestral lands of the Musketaquid peoples.
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entry description
This photo project, is grounded in fieldwork with migrants in Tapachula known as “Prison City” (Mexico-Guatemala border) and in makeshift camps in Reynosa on the Rio Grande (U.S.-Mexico border). The people I work(ed) with live a most marginal existence and are often the focus of racial and class hierarchies. They expressed an urge to speak, to be heard and to be seen. They gave me permission to photograph them. I seek to mediate the viewer and the formal organization of the photograph (both with their conceptual frames and affects) to curtail the repetition of violence (and to reinstate the neoliberal conventions). Here I combine 35 mm film with other tactile media such as veils and stitches. These diverse materials give me the opportunity to work with a photograph on the level of its conceptual frames. My photographic work seeks to intervene in the (imagined) public sphere, becoming new fractured guides for those encountering them.about the photographer
Laurence Cuelenaere (b. Belgium) is an interdisciplinary photographer who works at the intersection of art, social practice, and critical theory. She/they received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She/they has/ve conducted long term ethnographic research in Mexico and Bolivia. Her/their visual work examines the affective conditions of the production of images, but also how photography can resist the oppressive conventions of racial neoliberalism. Her/their practice addresses political issues pertaining to social justice and migration. Cuelenaere lives on the ancestral lands of the Musketaquid peoples.
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