Premonitions is a photographic work by the artist Rachel Walther, developed during her residency and presented at the November 2018 ´aceNITE. Rachel photographed the city of Buenos Aires searching for threads of the different political moments, migratory processes and economic situations that have shaped the city in the last decades.

PREMONITIONS (by Rachel Walther)

So much of our identity and our personal history is wrapped up in the towns we choose to live in, yet in the very process of living we learn to tune out our environments and ignore the beautiful landscapes we inhabit in order to complete our daily tasks. We remain ignorant of the important and sometimes brutal events that shaped our communities. How can the soul of a place, a city, be conveyed in a photograph? I have spent the past year and a half developing my current body of work, centered on location portraiture. Not landscapes per-se, but documentation of locations as one would create a portrait of an individual, eliciting elements of their personality and attitudes in a single frame or a series.

I’m seeking to document cities and places as one would a person. For me, these locations have just as much power, nuance, and complexity as any human subject. I want to immerse myself in the locations and histories of Buenos Aires, and devote my time to exploring not only the physical places, sounds, and moods of the city but dwell in what events and eras shaped the city as it exists today. I want to trace the forgotten landscapes of Buenos Aires, the places that have disappeared naturally over time due to inevitable progress and the places that were torn from the city during its many upheavals in the last century.