Humdrum returns to the ART MARKET Curated Program with ritual – 02, a project that transforms the family archive into a field of emotional reconstruction.
humdrum, ritual – 02 • 2025
The series expands the artist’s ongoing investigation into how inherited images continue to operate long after their original context dissolves. Drawn from the wedding photographs of the artist’s grandmother, the work approaches memory as an active force shaped by selection, instability, and the intimate logic of affection rather than chronology.
In this series the archive acts as a moving field of memory.
Memory circulates through blur, pixelation, softened contours and deliberate erasure, allowing the grandmother to remain as a stable pulse while all other figures recede into opacity. The images behave as surfaces where recognition remains partial and presence emerges through insistence rather than clarity.
Seen together, the six unstable recall works form a living architecture in which photography becomes a ritual of reappearance rather than a record of events.
unstable recall /01
The first work opens the emotional ground of the series. The grandmother anchors the composition, while the surrounding faces dissolve into a haze that signals the instability of familial remembrance.
The piece introduces memory as an incomplete gesture, suggesting that recognition often begins from what resists narrative order.
unstable recall /02
This piece shifts the emotional register of the series. Memory unfolds as rupture rather than continuity, turning the photograph into an affective zone instead of a biographical one. The image develops the idea that recollection operates through selection and omission rather than through the linearity expected from family archives.
unstable recall /03
Here the punctum emerges as an active mechanism. The point of recognition does not come from the original scene but from the act of looking, piercing through distortion instead of clarity.
The grandmother becomes the axis of return, while surrounding figures fade into unreadable fragments that reveal the selective nature of emotional inheritance.
unstable recall /04
Digital manipulation becomes a tool for revealing rather than disrupting. Through erasure and reconstruction, the grandmother’s presence emerges as a reactivated signal, showing that remembrance is an intervention rather than a recovery.
The work affirms that memory retains its force when altered, revised, or reframed.
unstable recall /05
The archive appears simultaneously as reservoir and wound. The photograph becomes a site of return where the grandmother resurfaces through altered texture and softened detail. The piece suggests that even manipulated images can sustain forms of existence, allowing presence to survive through transformation rather than fidelity.
unstable recall /06
The final work enters a post-photographic zone. The archive is rewritten, contradicted, fragmented and recomposed, generating a new architecture of remembrance. The grandmother remains a steady echo in this unstable field, showing that recognition persists even when the image shifts, breaks, or reorganizes itself entirely.
Humdrum is a visual artist working between photography, audiovisual practices, and archival performance.
Their practice explores how affective and inherited memories reappear through the manipulation of family images and how digital systems reshape the perception of local scenes.
Their work has been presented across institutions in Argentina, Chile, and throughout Latin America, turning archival material into a site for emotional reconstruction and contemporary image research.
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