Minini

2014 - 2026

Remainder, Found Image, and the Afterlife of Photography

Minini marks a decisive displacement in my practice: the moment when the image definitively ceases to be produced through capture and becomes instead a remainder—found, inherited, damaged, and unclaimed. If earlier projects interrogated photography as a critical act of registration (the city as counter-archive, the territory as communal memory, the landscape as ontological document, intimacy as affective archive), in Minini the image no longer originates in the camera. It emerges from abandonment. It is not produced; it is encountered.

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For over fifteen years, I have come into contact with photographs discarded under non-institutional conditions: images thrown into the trash, forgotten film rolls developed long after their time, negatives without names or narratives. Unlike the classical archive—organized, catalogued, and preserved—these images appear as residues that have lost their testimonial function. They no longer guarantee identity, memory, or truth. What once operated as evidence now survives as remainder.

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Through sustained engagement, these found images shift status. They are no longer documents of the past but sites of ongoing material transformation. Damage is not treated as loss but as a form of altered vitality. Corrosion, humidity, chemical reaction, and fragmentation become aesthetic operators, revealing the photograph as a vulnerable body subject to the same instability that traverses social and historical life. The image is not dead; it is transformed.

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Minini operates within the field of post-photography, understood not merely as a digital condition but as an ontological shift. As articulated by thinkers such as Joan Fontcuberta, post-photography names the moment when photography is defined less by capture than by circulation, deterioration, discard, and reuse. Minini works with what remains after photography—after narrative, authorship, and ownership dissolve.

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deterioration is not an accident

of time, but a generative act.

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The images undergo processes of immersion in water, oxidation, heat exposure, and chemical alteration. These are not applied effects but continuations of an existing violence—the violence of abandonment. The artist does not sabotage the archive; rather, the work inhabits a destruction already enacted by the world. The gesture is not restorative but relational: to accompany deterioration without closing the wound.

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The title Minini derives from a colloquial expression used to refer to someone whose name has been forgotten. Applied to the image, it designates photographs without owners, biographies, or inheritance. They exist, but no longer belong to anyone. This condition of namelessness forms the conceptual core of the project.

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The series is built from three principal discoveries:

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• A discarded drawer at the Centro de Idiomas de Risaralda, Pereira (2007)

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• Photographs submerged in water at Casa Rosada, San Antonio, Cali (2013)

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• An image found on a street in Getsemaní, Cartagena (2016)

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Each introduces a different degree of deterioration and biographical opacity, ranging from partial traceability to complete mystery. In this space, the work resists reconstruction. It does not seek to recover lost stories or restore original meanings. Instead, it accepts the impotence of the past and transforms the image into a poetic material of the present.

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In Minini, photography ceases to function as memory and becomes matter. The image is treated as a physical body—chemical, fragile, exposed. The work does not operate from nostalgia but from the violence of discard. Its origin is not the photographic act but the moment an image is expelled from circulation.

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Installed as an evolving archive, Minini culminated in a relational installation at Museo La Tertulia (In Art Cali, 2017), where viewers were invited to participate in the reactivation of these images through writing and association. This gesture displaced the work from a closed object toward a shared system of memory, presence, and responsibility.

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Within the broader trajectory of my practice, Minini extends a genealogy of the archive in crisis:

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• if Deriva corrupted the image as code,

• if Love Affair intervened the affective archive,

• in Minini the image arrives already wounded.

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The work remains open, continuing to incorporate new found images encountered through migration, displacement, and movement. It is not a project about the past, but about the residual life of images—about what persists when memory no longer has a subject to sustain it, and when photography survives not as record, but as altered body.