Maria Maria Acha-Kutscher and Cecilia de Val, winners of the Ankaria Photo 2024 Award
The jury was composed of: Ricardo Martí Fluxá, President of the Ankaria Foundation; Saleta Rosón, Trustee of the Ankaria Foundation; José María Luna, Trustee of the Ankaria Foundation and Director of the Public Agency for the management of the Pablo Picasso Birthplace, the Russian Museum Collection and the Centre Pompidou of the City of Málaga; Claude Bussac, Director of Artistic Studies at Casa de Velázquez; Linarejos Moreno, Photographer, researcher and winner of the 2022 edition; Sema D’acosta, Curator of Ankaria Photo. International Photography Prize of the 21st Century; after a careful and detailed deliberation, she selected the two winning projects of this edition:
María María Acha-Kutscher for the project “Reimagining aging”.
Cecilia de Val for the project “Eternal Network”.
The jury wanted to highlight the high quality of the proposals presented, which highlight the quality of contemporary photography.
MARÍA MARÍA ACHA-KUTSCHER
REIMAGINING AGING
Reimagining Aging is a project born in 2023 that builds an archive centred on an investigation into the imaginary of female ageing in the history of art, advertising or comics, while at the same time collecting contemporary narratives that include the author’s own experience, as well as those generated by middle-aged women on social networks, in whose voices many of us can recognise ourselves.
This project is formalised in series of digital photographic collages inspired by found material, intertextual images where the continuous presence of photographs of torn advertising posters, taken during street walks, reminds us of the great pioneers of décollage and at the same time function as metaphors for the passage of time. These photographs are juxtaposed with images taken from paintings, advertisements and even comics, to construct a large archive that houses a symbolic narrative of emotions and feelings of middle-aged women going through menopause in order to re-imagine contemporary representations of old age that challenge ageism, one of the great forms of discrimination in our society, second only to racism and sexism.
CECILIA DE VAL
ETERNAL WORK
Eternal network is a photographic essay based on an investigation of various works of art from different historical periods that inhabit museums and/or art galleries, which have been affected (accidentally or not) by the effects of water. It proposes an analogy between these well-known works transformed by water in order to talk about the current fluidisation of art in the technological era. The aim is to reflect on the relationship between Art and the Internet and how contemporary digital culture has altered and transformed the way we make, see and understand art, highlighting the considerable contribution of the social fabric to it.
The title is a nod to the Mail Art project of the same name, created in the 1970s by Robert Filliou, as a vivid antecedent to the current creation-consumption model of the current technological era. The project was based on networked Mail Art, and the main foundations of this movement were to question art institutions, create art based on exchange with the aim of bringing art and life together, eliminate the separation between artist and spectator, dematerialise the artistic object and encourage the proliferation of activity until any citizen becomes a potential artist, properties that eloquently describe the current paradigm of consumption-creation of today’s algorithmic society.