Fantastic Pseudology

FANTASTIC PSEUDOLOGY

Exposure takes its name from a psychological disorder characterised by an uncontrolled impulse to tell fantasised stories that the subject eventually believes. The individual's goal is to gain admiration, sympathy, recognition or protection from others, without lying per se constituting a primary pleasurable stimulus. 

Some real events are intermingled with elaborate fantasies. The patient may be driven by an uncontrollable and unhealthy tendency to lie. It occurs in pathological personalities and is probably related to low self-esteem and lack of impulse control.

In the artist's own words, this phenomenon is intrinsic to her work because it serves to explain her use of the archive: "I make her materials my own and offer totally different versions that have nothing to do with the intention with which they were created".

THE SERIES

De Middel tells us that "Afronautas is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in images. Based on this incredible but true piece of news from 50 years ago, I reconstruct the scenes that could have documented it then and reinforce its veracity by adding my personal burden and the fruit of my imagination to this certainty".

After the success of Afronautas, the artist travelled to China, where she lived for six months and conceived Party. The proposal is based on Mao's Red Book and articulates a presentation of the country through censorship. To do so, she transformed the texts that were to be the basis of the thinking of the good Chinese citizen into a sort of humorous and ironic poems that, for her, "serve much better to navigate today's Chinese society".

In 2015, the artist acquired the archive of a Mexican newspaper from the 1920s called Alerta! through which she invites us on a journey to the "centre of the earth", a journey through images and drawing to the rhythm of a narcocorrido, which gives rise to the series Cucurrucucucú. The starting point of the series was to work with the idea of exploring the different languages of violence and what role photography played in this field. The result of this work, which combines photography, drawing, comic strips, rancheras... was the photobook of the same name, which received the Fotolibro del año Award in 2016.

An archive is built with the intention of ordering and grouping elements that already exist, giving them an order to facilitate their location. With Aleatoris Vulgaris, her project inspired by the Museum's Tender Puentes inspired by the Museum's collection, the artist poses a challenge to this same logic. Using a registration system of collection pieces, the project plays with the creation of random algorithms using the most disparate means of selection and registration.

Cristina De Middel's work investigates the ambiguous relationship between photography and truth. Combining documentary and conceptual approaches, she plays with the reconstruction of archetypes and stereotypes that help to blur the separation between reality and fiction and suggests that we apply a critical eye to the way in which reality is told to us. On this occasion, he invites us to explore several ideas: the expedition and the journey, the culture of violence in Mexico and the impossibility of randomness.

Cristina de Middel Winner of the National Photography Prize 2017 and curator of PhotoEspaña 2018. In 2017 she was invited to join the international agency Magnum. After a first stage in which she worked as a photojournalist for various media, she is currently developing artistic projects, in which she plays with the boundaries between reality and fiction.

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