Claudia Huidobro: Experiments with Her Body and a Camera

Photography is one of my hobbies. Tout Contre was my first serious experience where I decided to record my own performance. I started to do this in 2008 when friends of mine invited me to spend a summer in their house in the south of France. The house was a small old castle with tiny rooms and secret passages. There I found a tiny room with a cracked mirror and a rotten window frame covered thick with dust. In this room I felt like I’d filled the void. I thought that I could do something interesting here.

I started shooting my performance in the nude, but then looked at it and realized nude is something self-contained. I got studies from the nude while I wanted to open up an empty space. I put on my blue jeans, a black sweater and started once again. My experiments took a few years. Every summer I came back to the castle, go into my room and took some pictures.

I felt constrained in this little white box, because I am quite tall. But dissonance between my body and the tiny room did not confuse me. I wanted to express the aching void in this place without any objects. But later I began using them, playing with them and making sculptures of them. Those sculptures should stand between me and empty space.

Self-portrait draws attention away from performance and obliges. That is why I refused to shoot the face, but I made only one exception last year. I photographed myself when I was behind an old window-pane and my face was covered with stone dust, it was not a portrait in the strict sense of the word, more like a mask or a sketch of my face.

It was an experiment with my body, camera and space without any concept. I don’t know exactly what I need from this work but I am going to continue.

Photographs courtesy Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. 11th International Month of Photography in Moscow PHOTOBIENNALE-2016 closes on July 16, 2016.