In 2017, Performing Pictures was invited to document three sacred statues at the newly restored church in the pueblo of San Jacinto Ocotlan in Oaxaca, Mexico. One was a Holy Mary sculpture, "Our Lady of the Rosary".
The sculptures were captured through a laborious procedure. The “slow-animation technique,” an aesthetic manifestation devised by the artists and refined over years of work, merges analog photography with digital imaging. The essence of the moldering sculptures, distilled through a homebuilt pinhole camera, was exposed directly onto 4x5-inch sheets of photographic paper. Requiring exceptionally long exposures under unpredictably diffractive conditions for each image, each animation cycle took a whole day to capture the trajectory of the light. Each image is developed, scanned, and printed onto aquarelle paper, where the monochrome images are colored by hand. The "new originals” were scanned back into the digital workflow and assembled into film loops of swirling motion with the flutter of individually applied watercolor wash.