INDIA 50/50
Snow Splash, Island Grounds, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
INDIA 50 / 50 is fine art photography series, consisting of 50 black and white images, taken by visual artist Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo during his 50 days journey around India. Only one image is chosen per working day.
In this original collection, the ancestral poetic essence of India is captured through the timelessness resulting out of the merging of space and place, and of people and minds. On one side it shows a diachronic narrative on India, while its counterpart generates a contemporary and synchronic work on today’s India. Both parts, brought together, dovetail into each other and foster a further visual text, out of which rises yet again another discourse on irony, on aesthetics and on the photographic world Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo lives in.
This project enables the viewer to follow the artist’s visual diary, where India – as a country – soon becomes another place: that of a world closer to ours, the world which we all live in, where place becomes irrelevant and where space becomes mankind’s nest, which like the author’s world, is never finished.
INDIA 50 / 50 is an attempt to fathom the morphing meaning of space and place in our era of “incredulity”. The world we are in is a world that is fully available to us, in the sense that us humans have fully explored its surface and brought all but the most remote corners of the Earth into an all-encompassing informational and economic system. Nonetheless, the meanings of the places through which we move have been subject to unprecedented levels of instability. Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo focuses on this instability. Although there may be no virgin territories or terra incognitae waiting to be discovered (short of outer spaces and the deepest depths of the ocean), the artist does a lot of work at the interstices between established domains, whose borders are constantly being called into question. The public recognize these spaces and these places, but sees them differently. This is because the visual eye of the camera and the visual I of Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo generate a discourse of transgression (= etymologically, a crossing of borders). This discourse provides a relevant model for spatial thinking in the post postmodern era India is entering in.
The lead photograph epitomises 50/50ness where a head, being built or rebuilt, is supported by a careful scaffold. Mankind has scaffolded the world, India is scaffolding itself into the future and Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo steps onto the scaffold and focuses on its interstices to see India.
Museums & Galleries
INDIA 50 / 50 is a travel art project comprised of 50 photographs taken over 50 days. Every time I would feel I had the photograph of the day, I would use the first means of transportation available to whichever destination it would take me. Once arrived, I would start all over again up until the following morning. In so doing, I drew a metaphoric time map of a space in a state of transition.
In the title INDIA 50 / 50, the first number 50 corresponds to the India of the collective imaginary. The / stands for the liminal space where my photographs are situated, whilst the last number 50 refers to an India morphing into a new identity.
INDIA 50-
Copper House Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2014
INDIA 50-50
Tasveer Gallery, Bangalore, India, 2015
INDIA 50-50
Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi / Delhi International Photo Festival 2015