Part essay, part documentary, Co/lapse adopts image-making processes tasked with the recognition of their subjects (like mugshots or some religious painting) in order to consider the formal and political entanglements of such practices. Conceptually, the work is made by exploring three interpretations of the concept of “recognition.” Each of these interpretations takes shape through the voice of a different person: a translator, a photography historian, and a migrant living and working in New York City. The voices and presences of these characters are braided throughout the film in order to form a layered image/discourse. In the end, Co/lapse attempts to use forms of image-making to consider the making (and most importantly, the potential unmaking) of social forms.

José De Sancristóbal is an artist and wannabe translator.

His work critiques and plays with the entanglement of narrative and image-making techniques. He uses the process of producing photographs, films, installations, and texts as a space to consider practices of erratic positionality operating inside seemingly closed representation systems. Informed by the camera’s history as a tool to regulate bodies and their movement, his projects sidestep established measures of identification in favor of unmeasurable processes. Fiction, memory, translation, and magical realism render useless those forms tasked with supervising self and belonging, such as passport photographs, national borders, or biographical information.