To be alive is to be vulnerable. The sensation of individual separation, rooted in a very real experience of physical and psychological encapsulation within a body, is, at a molecular level, an illusion. Our skin is permeable, as is our mind. To breathe –the defining act of living– is to engage in a constant exchange with the material world in which we exist.
Alfredo Ramos Fernández’s Stein and Staub series delves into live’s inherent exposure –made huntingly evident during the Covid-19 pandemic– and the individual and collective performances of control that emerge in response. Building on the photographer’s longstanding inquiry into the mechanisms by which past events reverberate into the present, the series documents how people in his hometown of Havana, Cuba coped with the viral threat, as well as the cracks it made visible in the city’s social and political infrastructure. The photographs capture material traces of how this moment was lived and felt, the fears it activated, capturing an internal state that was collectively, even if differentially, experienced. This shared uncertainty materialized in cleaning rags and plastic water bottles meant to innoculate the interior sphere of homes and shops, masks worn while in solitude outdoors or in the middle of crowds, illusions of state order –anachronistic facades that functioned as psychological shields against the recognition of sheer openness to the Outside, like a tree with exposed roots.
Moving beyond the archival, the artist’s use of decades-old film inhabited by mold, in a format smaller than 35mm, results in textured images that, in their increasing abstraction, reveal the ever-present filter through which any given moment in time and place is perceived. Thus, by capturing an event defined by vulnerability, through a medium itself altered by exposure, the XXX series reflects the artist’s commitment to recognize, see through, and lay bare the processes that frame and manipulate our sense of the real.
Lucia Cash, Berlin 2024