Litofagos are a series of works based on the absorption of stone. Daguerrolito is the third action in which a group of twelve people ingest, in a collective action, a collection of photosensitive silver rocks.
A group of twelve people ingest twelve silver photosensitive rocks.
Silver Iodide nuggets also known as Daguerreotypes.
The participants are the carriers and supports of the work.
Each silver rock captures on its surface a picture of its journey inside the body.
In the process of digestion.
The bodies as containers.
Could be affected by the spectators during the action.
Until the rocks are expelled.
The digestion process becomes the performance itself.
Once expelled from the body
the rocks are developed and fixed, becoming a silver mirror that holds the traces of the bodies’ journeys.
At the centre of all is the mouth: a site of nurture, breath, aggression, appetite, language, and even knowledge: through our mouths, we originally come to know the world and differentiate ourselves from it.
Ingestion is a movement away from the skin, the border between one side and another. Suddenly the body is no longer contained as autonomous self, turning itself inside out and in a series of events it becomes a site of continuous connection and recomposition. We become a ‘we’: a collective action between life and non-life, a hot mess of material reconstruction. We are an array of bodies acting upon one another, altering one another.
Each stone swallowed is a scientific gem that can provide unique astrobiological information about our evolution. Here, silver is not only a photosensitive support as an inscribing apparatus. With the infiltration of exogenous bodies, we ingest their information, as they inscribe ours, transcribing and transforming materialities. There exists a temporary symbiotic relation between the foreign object and the body, each briefly absorbing and communicating with the other. Through this action geology and genetics are intertwined into a metabolic understanding of photography.
A work by Alfonso Borragán in collaboration with Sarah Bayliss, Laura Emsley, Anja Mikačić, Hannah Fletcher, Frane Marković and Matija Sinković.
