Alter y Ego

Alter y Ego is a collaborative work developed with photographer Fernando Bayona as part of the Unexpected Method laboratory, which is part of the A/R/TOGRAFÍA VISUAL educational innovation project at the University of Granada.

The work stems from the convergence of two lines of research on fiction. While my artistic practice focuses on constructing simulations by inserting my face into photographic archives—both those of others and my own family—on this occasion the process is reversed: it is another artist who invites me to inhabit a character from his own narrative. Fernando Bayona proposes that I portray his supposed grandmother in a series of Polaroid snapshots taken on the Altiplano of Granada, where the overexposure of the face prevents any identification, prolonging the fiction of an incomplete family archive.

The project takes the form of a photo album that brings together 31 images from my family archive—altered through the metamorphosis of my face—alongside the 13 Polaroids taken by Bayona. Both archives intertwine to construct an impossible genealogy, in which memory, identity, and fiction cease to be stable categories and instead become a shared space of negotiation between two authors. Alter y Ego thus explores the shifting nature of authorship, the construction of identities through the image, and the capacity of the photographic archive to produce memories of what never happened.