Jungle Check
Cristina de Middel and Kalev Erickson (United Kingdom, 1982) claim to have found a set of Polaroids on a flea market in Mexico City taken in the 1970s near the Mayan ruins of Tulum. The two artists ventured into a timeless jungle setting to recreate new images inspired by the original Polaroids. Paired up for the exhibition, the vintage snapshots blended with the recent images in giant lenticular prints, allowing the image of the past and that of the present to be grasped simultaneously. Through a picaresque story shifting between reality and fiction, the Jungle Check series invited viewers to sort the real from the fake and called into question the documentary reliability of archive photography.
The Perfect Man
Festival Images invited Cristina de Middel to travel to Adipur, India, to document an annual parade initiated over 40 years ago by Dr Ashok Aswani in honor of Charlie Chaplin. Through this reappropriation of western culture, the photographer structured a narrative that questions human condition in post-industrial society. Combined with a publication which is an integral part of the project, The Perfect Man series was exhibited outdoors near the statue of Charlie Chaplin, who lived in Manoir de Ban in Corsier-sur-Vevey from 1952 to 1977. In the indoor part of the installation, the clicking sound of slide projectors recreated the atmosphere of the factories the artist visited. Dr Aswani traveled to Vevey for the biennial and a pilgrimage in the footsteps of his idol.
Little Red Book
After a trip to China, Cristina de Middel diverted the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, better known as the Little Red Book. Redacting part of the original quotes with Tipp-Ex in a parodic facsimile, she played on the double meaning of the word “party” to create new word combinations, more gleeful than they are political. Presented in the glimmer of a mirror ball, the installation in Vevey offered a series of diptychs combining a photograph with a page of the redrafted text from the revolutionary opus, a kind impression away from the clichés associated with Chinese society.
The Afronauts
Cristina de Middel gained immediately international acclaim with this project that stages Zambia’s ambitious but short-lived attempt to reach space in the early 1960s. After years of working in the media, the photographer called into question the base foundations of photo-reportage with witty and poetic images that blur the lines between reality and fiction. Reinterpreting the elements of this incredible yet true adventure, The Afronauts series exhibited at the Espace Images invited viewers to question the preconceived veracity of documentary images in photography.
Poly Spam
For her first artistic project, Cristina de Middel focused on the spam emails that continuously invade our inboxes worldwide. Her Poly Spam staged the stories and characters told in these emails, such as an African banker offering large sums of money or a Russian widow desperately in need of mules to launder her inherited millions. De Middel then juxtaposed the original texts of the spam to her images. The Spanish artist, who later rose to fame with her Afronauts series, presented the very first solo show of her career at Festival Images, addressing outdoors the issue of electronic violation of the private sphere.
