Los Siete Mogotes Nichos (2013), or The Shrines of the Seven Hills consist of seven cabinets, each containing a unique animation cycle. The series depicts a group of salvaged Baroque 17th-century wood sculptures from a shed in Santa Ana Zegache, Oaxaca, Mexico.
When the lost-and-found statues of saints, angels and monks were retrieved, the effigies left a trail of finely grated ground-wood caused by termites. The confused Archangel, the chubby cherub, the cheeky angel of lower rank, Saint Ana with her pierced head, the mutilated monks and the forgotten saints slowly grow into the picture through exceedingly long exposures and unpredictable diffractive light properties. A laborious procedure of documentation-through-animation entailed, employing a special technique and unique aesthetic expression created and refined over years of work. The photographs are shot in open-air daylight using a homebuilt pinhole camera, exposing directly onto 4 x 5 inch sheets of photographic paper (Ilford grade II).
The flatness of the perspective and proximity to the subject bypasses the prevailing practice of pinhole photography—shifting the process into a peculiar form of sunlight-scanning of decaying shapes in front of a rugged stone wall.
In this series of large-scale photographic prints of the crumbled icons of ecclesiastical practice present themselves for posterity as the haunting phantoms of ephemerality itself.
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