About the Exhibition
Spotlight: Felipe Rivas San Martín
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.
In the series A Non-Existent Queer Archive, Rivas San Martín employs artificial intelligence to generate photographs of imagined LGBTQ+, working class, Latin American couples from the early 20th century. In 1999, homosexuality was decriminalized in the artist’s home country, Chile; since this shift in legality, Rivas San Martín’s work explores the existence of sexual diversity, while being critical of the notion that certain sexualities are inherently “deviant.” Inspired by and in response to Cuban American queer critic José Esteban Muñoz’s notion that “heteronormative culture makes queers think that both the past and the future do not belong to them,” Rivas San Martín creates his own records, stories, and visual markers of pasts ignored and untold.
Felipe Rivas San Martín is a visual artist, essayist, and activist of sexual dissidence. His work emerges from the crossings between queer activism, archive politics, technology, and decoloniality. In 2002, he co-founded the Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual (CUDS), a Latin American group working in activism, artistic experimentation, and critical reflection. His work is part of the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Ministry of Culture of Chile, AMA Foundation, and Museo Reina Sofía in Spain, among others. He holds a master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Chile. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Art at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), as a fellow of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) scholarship.
Spotlight: Felipe Rivas San Martín is part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories.
The FotoFocus Biennial, now in its seventh iteration, activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces across Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky in October 2024. Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; the 2024 theme, backstories, focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance.
