GESTUS

The title was taken from a term found in the writings on theater by German author Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), to whom we owe the conceptualization and early scenic development of a dramaturgy that seeks neither cathartic liberation nor the identification between actor and character or character and spectator; but rather, the kind of distancing that allows an audience to sustain a dialectic relationship with the work being represented, thus acquiring the ability to shift from a plane of contemplation to one of action. In the words of Brecht himself, gestus can be understood as “a complex of gestures, facial expressions, and usually ordinary statements which one or more persons direct toward one or more persons,” via which the underlying attitude of a determined social group becomes intelligible. Unlike her other portraiture projects, which outlined their field of action beforehand or maintained a previously established route, in Gestus, the photographer has summoned the forces of dispersion, the possibilities of anonymity for hire, and the poetics of chance encounters. People who were total strangers were invited by her to form part of prearranged portraits. Parting from contacts facilitated by friends and colleagues, and through the use of flyers and media announcements, Venegas longs to renovate a pact that has been taken for granted in model-portraitist relations, under the assumption that they have already and will continue to be modified by the omnipresence of photographic devices, which we use to continually offer up the expressions of gestures both inherited and learned. Obsessive nosiness, encouraged by the widespread availability of electronic equipment with built-in cameras, does not necessarily lead to an appraisal of human diversity. Venegas mistrusts both typological registration and imposed spontaneity. She gambles on the portrait as a smallscale form of recognition of the individual traits inscribed on bodies and surroundings that are continually in flux. “We must also look at others,” as Walter Benjamin wrote in his lines praising the work of August Sander, who dedicated the second and third decades of the past century to making a physiognomic and social catalog of Germany, published in part under the title The Face of Our Time. Yvonne Venegas can attest to the fact that even in a megalopolis as hectic as Mexico City crossing gazes continue to form new worlds both large and small. The perfect stranger living in one of them ignores the fact that he has an appointment with the photographer in a place that has yet to be defined. Still, he and she are both fully aware that portraits can outlast people, or buildings.