Eclipse

Eclipse (2021–2024) is an ongoing project consisting of a collection of vintage and contemporary postcards sent by tourists from the African continent to the West, altered using photocopy paper.

The postcards reproduce portraits of African people made between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, images that have contributed to consolidating an exoticised and stereotyped view of the continent. Through research into the authorship of these photographs, I traced the faces of the photographers and used them to cover those of the people portrayed.

As in an eclipse, some images partially obscure others. The faces of the photographed subjects — often objectified, commodified and represented without any agency over their own image — are shielded by the faces of those who photographed them. While the subject historically represented as the archetypal African native had a face but no name, the photographer typically had a name but no face. Eclipse reverses this pattern in a gesture that questions the power relations embedded in the photographic act and proposes a less unequal relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at.

Rewritten from a text by Alexandra Laudo for the exhibition Antibiography.