FotoFocus Biennial: backstories

FotoFocus Biennial: backstories

Artist and activist Felipe Rivas San Martín’s multimedia practice fuses artistic representation with technology. Featuring work from two series, Spotlight highlights this convergence of the analog and the digital.

The two portraits from the series Biometric Recognition are from the Gusinde Archive (1919-1923), a series of photographs taken by German priest and anthropologist Martin Gusinde. Comprised of approximately 1200 portraits, this archive is the only visual record of the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar peoples, who were indigenous to southern Chile. As these populations were nearly exterminated by European settlers prior to Gusinde’s arrival, Rivas San Martín applies contemporary algorithmic systems, like those used to identify the presence of human faces in images on social media, to “recognize” the existence of the Selk’nam; the white boxes around each face mark a failure of technology to identify the faces as human, a visual reminder of erased histories.