The work of the Mexican artist Cristóbal Ascencio explores a parent-child relationship filled with loss, silence, death and reconciliation.
Ascencio’s father died when he was 15, but he was not told that it was suicide until he was 30. It was then that he began to revisit the images, places and memories that were left to him. His father, Margarito, a gardener by profession, wrote a farewell letter in which in addition to asking for forgiveness he asked Cristóbal to contact him.
Ascencio revisits his family archive and the last garden where his father worked using various digital strategies for altering the images. He intervenes in the code that makes up his personal photographs and deconstructs the images and narratives associated with them using a glitch or digital error as a tool. At the same time, a three-dimensional representation of the garden using photogrammetry addresses issues related to the plasticity of memory, represented in the plants that his father grew, which are still alive today.
Born in 1989 in Mexico, Cristóbal Ascencio is a Mexican photographer who currently resides in Madrid while studying for a Master’s Degree in Photography at the EFTI School. With a degree in Audiovisual Media and Advertising from the CAAV in Jalisco, his practice expands to new forms of the image such as virtual reality, data manipulation and photogrammetry. In 2021 his work was selected in the PhotoSlam of Les Rencontres d’Arles (France) and his work has been exhibited in places like Gimnasio de Arte y Cultura (Mexico), Experimental Photo Festival (Barcelona), Karne Kunst (Berlin), Space Millepiani (Rome), Casa Volcán (Guadalajara) or The Curated Fridge, among others. He was part of the 1st edition of MAPS / BFF (; Best Friends Forever ; ) of Getxophoto Festival – a meeting space with the students of photography schools in Spain – and his work “Las flores mueren dos veces” was selected by the curator Jon Uriarte to be exhibited in the 2022 edition of the Festival.
Promoted by the Begihandi collective, GETXOPHOTO is a festival dedicated to image that takes place in Getxo (Basque Country) for the last 15 years. It brings different proposals from photographers and visual storytellers from all over the world to the city, setting a contemporary conversation about the theme proposed each year.
GETXOPHOTO inhabits the public space and continues supporting the use of formats, stands and unconventional exhibition spaces to show the different images. This is a thematic festival that every three years works together with a different curator who understands the photography as a tool of knowledge, communication, and of course artistic enjoyment. Exhibitions, installations, projections, collaborations, experimental laboratories and many activities complete the program of the Festival.
Jon Uriarte is the curator of GETXOPHOTO 2022.
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