Provided by the artist - Muriel Hasbun As I photographed in San Miguel de Allende's Rastro, [ ] both the fury and the fragility of life permeated the air.
I have always been fascinated by the power of photography to record and reinterpret what is both absent and present, and have created images that re-construct what was once there but no longer exists. My current work encarnado: embodied re-visits this fascination in Mexico, with a body of work made in San Miguel de Allende's Rastro Municipal.
As I photographed in San Miguel de Allende's slaughterhouse, I was faced with the body at its most elemental. In a surprising intertwining of flesh, both human and animal, I was drawn into this sensory-charged space where both the fury and the fragility of life permeated the air. I set out to understand the strange mixture of repulsion and attraction, terror and power. Perhaps I could create an image that honed the sensorial onslaught into an offering.
encarnado: embodied is a testament to that search. The boundaries between predator and prey, sustenance and deprivation, body and spirit, subject and object become porous as I confront the visceral. What's left alludes to the complicated and violent order of things, in the liminal space linking life and death.
Courtesy of Muriel Hasbun, statement (Pers. email, 15 April 2012)
