Memory of Christmas

In one of the albums from the  J.R. Plaza Archive, Bonillas found a portrait of his great-grandmother which was signed by his uncle, the photographer Carlos Somonte who noted, at the bottom, that the copy was number two of five. The artist then decided to track down the final destinations of the other 4 copies in order to create the same number of photographic records of their different contexts — the distinct lives of the same image —, proving, in passing, that what the poet Robert Desnos once said was true: that if there is such a thing as a ghost, it would be the photographic negative: only it can roam from one picture to another.

At the center of the original image we see Doña Pilar. Behind her, on the wall, are six paintings and portraits. From the inscription at the bottom, we know that Somonte’s photograph was taken on Christmas of 1982, whereas Bonillas’s shots were carried out a quarter century later. Each of the latter registers the location in space occupied by the original prints in their owners’ houses together with images belonging to other relatives. Only one of the prints, it is worth noting, hangs on an empty wall.

If Somonte’s photographed one of those “moments that from the very instant you experience them seem like old memories,” as Luis Ignacio Helguera wrote, Bonillas’s moment is unstable and multiple; he creates snapshots of a printed memory that seem to originate in a past that is as remote as it is fictitious: unpublished souvenirs that could easily be apocryphal or invented. A move or a rearrangement is enough to cause the resulting “supraimage” — the image that includes Bonillas’s records, which, in turn, contain Somonte’s prints — to generate a distinct reality through similar results.