Juan Couder is GlogauAIR resident
from October 2024 to December 2024
Juan explores photography as a fluid, ephemeral process rather than a fixed image, embracing its transient, material nature through dialogue between author and work. Using an “expanded camera” concept, he equates camera, darkroom, studio, and exhibition space, highlighting the medium’s fleetingness and the meaningful human desire to make it permanent.
Meet the Artist
Statement
I am interested in photography as a process rather than a final image. As a latent being instead of a crystallised moment. In my practice, the process embraces its liquid, opaque and ephemeral materiality, positioning the author-work relationship in terms of dialogue.
I work with a concept of expanded camera that explores the equivalence between camera, darkroom, studio, and exhibition space. In this way of seeing photography, I pay attention to the relationship that this medium has with the fleeting, and our insistence on making it fixed. The image is not an indelible stroke in iron, but an infraleve light being, which disappears with the slightest sigh. It is in its fleetingness that I find its metaphorical power; and in our endeavour to fix it, I see a gesture loaded with meaning.
GlogauAIR Project
In 2020 a personal encounter with a waterfall derived in a series of explorations on photography as an ephemeral time measuring device. Clepsydra (2020-) takes its name from an ancient Egyptian device used to measure time by observing the flow of water out of a vessel. Inspired by these water timekeepers, the project incorporates similar processes of dripping, sedimentation and crystallisation with photographic emulsion. Cyanotype is a photographic process based on ferric salts that relies on water and sunlight. With this unfixed medium, the project explores photography as a body vulnerable to time, presenting photographic objects that transform according to the light conditions of their environment.
CV Summary
- 2023 MA Photography, Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Helsinki. FI
- 2018 Course by artist Javier Vallhonrat: Creativity and Strategies in Contemporary Photography. Madrid. SP
- 2024 The Active Image: Political Ecologies & Photographic Agency, Featured artist, The Sustainable Darkroom & Folk House Darkroom. Bristol, UK
- 2024 Image of the Helsinki Photomedia Conference. FI
- 2023 Biji Buaya, Artistic collaboration with the Migrant Ecologies Project.
- 2023 Espoo Cultural Centre, Group show, Helsinki. FI
- 2023 MoA 23, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Group show, Helsinki. FI
- 2023 Plat(t)form 23, Fotomuseum Winterthur. CH
- 2023 Leon es Photo. First accessit Ex+S 23. SP
- 2022 Dipoli Gallery, Group show curated by Outi Turpeinen, Helsinki. FI
- 2021 JustMad, International Emerging Art Fair, Group show, Madrid. SP
Gallery
