cristina de middel

Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015


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Jan Mayen, 2015



In 1911, the North Pole had already been discovered, paving the way for subsequent explorers eager to showcase their courage and bring back unforgettable memories. This marked the inception of extreme tourism.

In this context, a group of affluent German and British individuals, posing as scientists, chose to “re-discover” Jan Mayen—an island between Greenland and Iceland; utilized by whalers for years but lacking scientific study. They sailed, argued, fought, forgot their compass, ran out of coal, and reached the island, but the boat’s size hindered a successful landing.

End of the story. No medals to bring back this time and no groundbreaking discoveries in the scientific fields proudly represented by the crew.

History is often written by winners, a fact not lost on the cinematographer within the crew. He persuaded the group, despite their setback, to stop on the way back at an Icelandic beach and stage the landing with the dramatic flair befitting heroic tales. This is the true story of how history itself was staged.

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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018


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Aleatoris Vulgaris, 2018



Starting from the premise that an archive is constructed with the intention of grouping and accumulating elements that already exist, and of imposing an order and a name on them in order to facilitate their study and use in fields for which they were not originally created, my idea is precisely to deconstruct that order and play with it, with the aim of reconsidering each of its elements in isolation and stripped of the original interest or value with which they were included in the archive.

However, it is very difficult to break an order without falling into another, and this interest in generating a series of images that bear no relation to one another leads me to study the conditions and consequences of randomness, as well as its intrinsic impossibility.

My proposal therefore focuses on the study of different ways of generating random numerical combinations and, in a second phase, working with the images selected through these processes in order to create a new work.

The numbers generated through these “random” systems would correspond to the registration numbers of the different collections that make up the photographic archive of the University of Navarra. These images would serve as the basis for a new composition, which I would transform into a drawing in order to also eliminate their original photographic nature and to reconsider their documentary value in relation to their aesthetic or purely informational content.

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