Calafia Sánchez-Touzé’s new zine, A Slight Grip, positions the two works in conversation, weaving together her most recent series of black-and-white photographs of mechanical objects, portraits, and tableaux together with the color photographs of her family in Mexico.
In Calafia’s Mexico work, she examines the legacies of violence and spectacles of death predominant in the Mexican visual culture and how those iconographies can be used to explore her relationships to her family members. In the newer work, Calafia approaches her study of queerness through an evolutionary lens, thinking of queerness as a bioevolutionary, mechanically reproducible and therefore inevitable truth —an evolution occurring in faster and more vicious cycles.
The carcass of a truck burned and hung by environmentalist protesters in the forest of Cherán takes on a new bodily sensitivity next to a photograph of Calafia’s friends performing bondage; her mother’s sprawling body turns into a pile of pipes with indeterminate purpose. Through these fluid and imaginative movements, Calafia perforates the boundary between that which is mechanical and that which is human, granting bodily and physical importance to the immaterial and incorporeal truths.
