Description
OD Photo Prize 2024 | Shortlisted Artist
Selected by our International Jury from over 1200 submissions
Daniela Balestrin was born in Brazil in 1984. Since 2020, she has been developing her work as a multidisciplinary artist, using analog and historical techniques in image creation, as well as writing. In her works, she seeks to approach the events that intertwine with her routine, creating narratives that involve the movements of life and imagination, crossing memory and fiction, image and word. She was selected for the Nova Fotografia 2024 award by the Museum of Image and Sound of the State of São Paulo (Brazil) and is also on the shortlist for the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards in the Professional Creative category. In 2023, she received the Non-Professional Analog Photographer of the Year award from the IPA – International Photography Awards and was a finalist in the Discovery of the Year category at the Lucie Awards.
Artist Statement | “For almost forty years, one of my ancestors was known only as “my grandfather’s dead mother.” I did not know her name. There were no images of her. Her being, her story, were reduced to that sentence. I tried to guess her name, imagining it was lost amid my grandfather’s hardships. Last year, while organizing a drawer in the house where I grew up, her name unexpectedly surfaced. For a long time, perhaps all this time, it had been within the reach of all the family’s hands. A piece of paper with clear letters, by its own will, brought back the name denied for decades: Thereza. Later, other documents revealed that she died at 32 from puerperal fever, an infection that began during my grandfather’s birth. She died when her body became a mother’s body, and everything else disappeared. There were no narratives beyond that single sentence spoken when she was mentioned. This void moved the creation of images in which I could hold Thereza, in which I could meet her, and in which her name would return to eyes and mouths. I arrived at cyanotype because of all the contact the technique evokes. The material contact between the sensitive supports and the light, of course, and also the contact of my body and all my senses. In ideation, I felt that the invented images of Thereza needed to maintain a vast margin for uncertainties, for the undefined, for what is unknown about her. I resisted the temptation of absolute form. To say “here is Thereza,” the images needed to be like identities: alive, present, floating. Therefore, water, with its chances, became the element of the creations, where I believe Thereza herself manifests, contouring something and saying, “I am here.” The series “Thereza” thus emerges with its aqueous bodies, like a river that shows itself differently each time we look at it.” — Daniela Balestrin
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