Artist Volumes Series, Issue 1, Fall 2023
Giancarlo Montes Santangelo’s images bring together staged scenes involving his body against archival images, pulled from private photographic archives from Argentina and Puerto Rico. He makes collages, enlarges them as prints, and stages himself and others within the collages – a reiterative process until the final image is made. In other photographs, Montes Santangelo poses himself or friends in performative actions. His works consider ritual, pain, masculinity, and spirituality.
Multiple, often competing narratives are drawn together in layers with physical collaging and ripping – tools implemented to highlight gaps between visual planes and the unseen. By “queering” conventional photographic practices, Montes Santangelo depicts a multiplicity of experience, describing a narrative that maybe isn’t accessible through straight photographs. This way of looking embraces dichotomies and inconsistencies, which opens histories and makes space to contribute to them, creating pictures that don’t necessarily refer to the past but depend on fictional narratives to visualize an alternative future.
Contributing writer Jan Rattia says:
“I believe in familiarity as a precious gift when otherness threatens to drown me. I belong. I would love to live in one of the layered worlds from Montes Santangelo, where mobility is a nomadic proposition that forcibly challenges migration, and where domesticity is reimagined, accounting for my weird multiculturalism, all of my otherness, and all of me.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Giancarlo Montes Santangelo
Images are courtesy of the artist.
All works by Giancarlo Montes Santangelo.
Text by Jan Rattia and Giancarlo Montes Santangelo.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design & Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellin, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
Edited in Colombia.
First edition / 300 copies
October 2023
** Please note the shipping / handling fee is from within the US. To process international shipments outside the US, please reach out to newpoeticsoflabor@gmail.com. **
Artist Volumes Series, Issue 1, Fall 2023
Giancarlo Montes Santangelo’s images bring together staged scenes involving his body against archival images, pulled from private photographic archives from Argentina and Puerto Rico. He makes collages, enlarges them as prints, and stages himself and others within the collages – a reiterative process until the final image is made. In other photographs, Montes Santangelo poses himself or friends in performative actions. His works consider ritual, pain, masculinity, and spirituality.
Multiple, often competing narratives are drawn together in layers with physical collaging and ripping – tools implemented to highlight gaps between visual planes and the unseen. By “queering” conventional photographic practices, Montes Santangelo depicts a multiplicity of experience, describing a narrative that maybe isn’t accessible through straight photographs. This way of looking embraces dichotomies and inconsistencies, which opens histories and makes space to contribute to them, creating pictures that don’t necessarily refer to the past but depend on fictional narratives to visualize an alternative future.
Contributing writer Jan Rattia says:
“I believe in familiarity as a precious gift when otherness threatens to drown me. I belong. I would love to live in one of the layered worlds from Montes Santangelo, where mobility is a nomadic proposition that forcibly challenges migration, and where domesticity is reimagined, accounting for my weird multiculturalism, all of my otherness, and all of me.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Giancarlo Montes Santangelo
Images are courtesy of the artist.
All works by Giancarlo Montes Santangelo.
Text by Jan Rattia and Giancarlo Montes Santangelo.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design & Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellin, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
Edited in Colombia.
First edition / 300 copies
October 2023
** Please note the shipping / handling fee is from within the US. To process international shipments outside the US, please reach out to newpoeticsoflabor@gmail.com. **
