LETICIA BERNAUS

I am from the southernmost tip of the American Continent: Argentina. I grew up in a small town surrounded by nature. For the past 20 years I have lived in different big cities from my country, but there was always something missing in those spaces: I felt as a stranger.

 

One year ago I moved to the US. This turned me into an official outsider. The differences between my country settings and the ones from the US made me remember that original connection with natural environments and drew me to grow a new work related with the experience of being moved by this diversity.

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In the pasts months I visited the states of Alaska and Virginia where I photographed trees. I intervened these images with collage techniques to create metaphoric compositions capable of evoking the particular pulses from those ambiguous topographies.

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For Susan Sontag photographing is an act of nonintervention: “to take pictures is to have an interest of things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged”. In Woods of America I expose the exact opposing gesture: my pictures are the appropriation of a foreign territory, a deliberate intervention of the environment: they force reality.