“17 months ago my dad called me and told me: Silvino, can you come back to your brother’s funeral?.
That night half of my soul died with my baby bro, and while I write this I’m crying.”
It’s hard, really hard to expose yourself, to open the wounds and put your fingers on it, going deeper each time. It’s even harder to expose the wounds to others and that is what I do when I get naked in front of the camera.
Some time ago someone told me with a sarcastic smile: “Silvino always getting naked in front of the camera”, and it made me angry and sad, to think how sometimes people are able of seeing so little beyond the surface, even people with art education and who loves you.
Also it allowed me to question how much of their own intentions and fears people impose in the reading of the images.
That scares me to be honest, but this project is an exercise of catharsis, a physical, gutural, raw need to scream my pain and try to grasp life in some way.
Peek a boo is part of this process, it started as an exercise and ended as a project in itself.
Memento mori is a homage to my baby bro, an attempt to make sense of his departure, the pain of my family, my pain, loneliness, depression, desolation, angst.
My idea and goal is to make portraits of males close to my bro and part of my family and self-portraits. To make photographs in which the technical approach would be more “professional” but as usual, the person who promised to help me with this project failed me. That’s family, the fail you and you still love them, you fail to them and they still love you.
Today, October 12th is a sad day, a day to remember the start of one of the worst genocides in history, my Indigenous blood hurts today a bit more than usual, and my blood is the tie that links me with the people I love most in the world.
186 captures for this first attempt to star this series, some of them related to the project others with my relationship with my body and my love for vintage physique photography. Part of the project is also the relationship, sometimes confusing, between eros and thanatos.
I’ll include here several versions of the same image, as part of the visual exploration that with some luck will nurture this process.
A visual journey to the inside of Silvino González 