Argentina Week: Laura Antonelli: Secrets

Argentina Week: Laura Antonelli: Secrets by Eleonora RonconiMarch 27, 2020

©Laura Antonelli

I got to know Laura Antonelli‘s work through a mutual friend. I really love how she tells stories. Her palette is rich and sumptuous and there is a darkness in her photographs that makes us wonder what the real story behind each image is. Both series I’m featuring are about being a woman and aging.

Laura was born in Buenos Aires in 1966, where she lives with her husband and daughters.

At the age of 40, after having made a career in the insurance field, she discovered photography after searching for a new space to deepen her personal development. She enrolled at the ISAF (Instituto Superior de Arte Fotográfico), and then later graduates from the Escuela Argentina de Fotografía in 2013. She also did workshops with Juan Travnik and Valeria Bellusci.

In 2013 she had a group show at Photolux 2013 at the Centro Cultural Borges. She had solo shows in 2014 in La Plata, in Rafaela, Santa Fé in 2018, both as part of the Festival de la Luz, several group shows such as Sala Matta at the Chile Embassy in 2018, the photo gallery of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, La Fragua gallery, and her video installation “Woman” was presented at Mumbat in Tandil.

SECRETS

©Laura Antonelli

If I could walk on my own steps and examine my memories, like a series of retablos, I would stop to find out when fear inserted itself like a wedge between my body and life.

These photos try to find that path. Everything that was left unsaid, everything that was unfinished. I can build a map with my scars. They are the start and the finish line, in both directions. I see the sky, or that light that reveals a corner, a piece of furniture. I see the land, I go to the sea and come back clean. But fear returns, and it does not stop calling me from the shadows, all the list of possibilities is discarded, the invalid. While I look for the right answer and I ask myself the wrong question, standing in silence, I hear, I see, I shutter and shoot.

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

©Laura Antonelli

WOMAN

The feminine, sexuality and seduction at a certain time in the life of a woman. The passage of time as a game between life and death.

Although it is an introspective look from a place of loneliness, intimacy amidst a constant search to find the answer to my own fears and concerns, these topics are universal. They adapt to any language, all latitudes and times. It is the cycle of life in motion with several appearances in its singularities but also in its universality.