Arstusia

The María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation presents ARSTUSIA by Joan Fontcuberta, the fourth project in the series MIRADAS DE ASTURIAS (Visions of Asturias).

The guest photographer of the fourth edition is Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955): artist, teacher, essayist, critic, art promoter and winner of several awards, such as the National Photography and Essay Prize. Furthermore, Joan Fontcuberta is the only Spanish photographer to have been awarded with the prestigious Hasselblad Prize, an international photography prize that was founded in 1980 by the Swedish Foundation Hasselblad. The prize has been awarded to some of the most important 20th Century photographers such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson Richard Avedon, William Klein, Jeff Wall and Nan Goldin, among others.

The term ARSTUSIA is an anagram of Asturias. In Arstusia, Joan Fontcuberta treats photography as an “anagrammatic machine”, as a philosopher’s stone that can interchange possible experiences with reality. For this alchemist of light and shadow, photography is dust and time, ARSTUSIA is essence and memory… It is a unique and sensory experience, where observers will discover, through sixty light boxes, the images that are hidden behind each snapshot.

In addition to drawing up the catalogue for the ARSTUSIA exhibition, the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation has edited the artist’s book, called Trauma, which has been created based on images from different Asturian photographic libraries, and which appears in the exhibition on a site that has been expressly made for the museum’s atrium. In Trauma, Joan Fontcuberta proposes the idea of “sick” images: photographs that have undergone some type of deterioration (disease) that hinders their documentary purpose and makes it impossible for them to be placed in a file but, in turn, gives them an extraordinary plastic characteristic.