Portsmouth Open: Sebastián Rodriguez De Castro

Impending Doom and the Memory We’re Becoming explores Impending Doom as something embedded within the photographic act: every photograph preserves a present moment while simultaneously becoming an image of something that will eventually disappear. The work approaches photography not only as a record of presence, but also as a medium of absence, anticipation and loss.

The project consists of experimental analogue photographs, collages and a 16mm film projection, accompanied by an essay presented as a printed book. Working with images from my personal and family archive, I used darkroom processes such as partial development, fragmentation and analogue collage to intervene in the photographs. Through these processes, images are distorted and transformed, allowing chemical and material processes to introduce unpredictability and relinquish some of the photographer’s control.

For me, this process creates a feedback loop between the archive and the present: I return to an existing image, transform it, and create a new image that changes my relationship to the original. The photograph becomes both a record and material through which memory is reconstructed. Fragmentation, disappearance and reappearance mirror the ways in which people, places and memories change over time.

This relationship between archive, time and transformation remains central to my practice. By revisiting and reworking these images, I question the idea of the “Decisive Moment” and allow the photograph to move beyond the instant in which it was made. Rather than preserving a fixed moment, the image becomes unstable and continues to change through each encounter with the archive.