Solange Adum Abdala

Photo documentation at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. 2025.

Crónica de una Disección de Maravillas [Chronic Dissection of Wonders] questions, through the processes of disarticulation, the use of photographic encyclopedias that impose narratives about power, history, and territory.

The work examines and dissects two encyclopedias that were in my home: «Maravillas Naturales del Mundo» [Natural Wonders of the World] (Reader’s Digest, USA, 1983) and «Crónicas del Siglo XX» [Chronicles of the 20th Century] (Plaza & Janés, Spain, 1987). These books disseminate information using the “technical image” (Flusser, 1990, p.17) as a resource to circulate their discourse, reducing complex landscapes and historical events to edited objects that reinforce ideologies of modernity and prosperity from the perspective of the global North. Both publications shaped my understanding of the world during my childhood and adolescence, yet they ignore my place of origin, my heritage, and my gender. With its scientific and objective gaze, «Maravillas Naturales del Mundo» organizes landscapes alphabetically through a strict didactic and aesthetic structure, while «Crónicas del Siglo XX» constructs a linear and Eurocentric narrative marked by wars, technology, power, and patriarchal achievements.

The interdisciplinary installation Crónica de una Disección de Maravillas is composed of three pieces. The first, Maravillas Naturales del Mundo, emerges from 197 landscape photographs extracted from the encyclopedia. I organized all the images according to their colour palettes and digitized them. Through algorithmic digital processes, the average of the pixels of each image was calculated to obtain a solid colour, thus annulling the formal value of colour and reducing each landscape to a single tone. Then, to abstract form, I merged the images using GAN-based AI, combining one with another and then blending the result with the next, and so on. This process generated new interpretations of the landscapes, new geographies, viewpoints, and ways of seeing native to other lens-based technologies. As a consequence, photography ceases to be a stable object and shifts toward more mutable, ephemeral, and relational forms (Concha, 2011, pp.18–19), existing more as process than as document. In the second piece, Crónicas del Siglo XX, the publication’s thin pages are photographed over a lightbox, revealing the palimpsest of information between the recto and verso of the paper, alluding to what remains hidden in twentieth-century history. The images are printed on long, thin rolls of paper. This process interrupts the chronology and the informative character of the original layout. The third piece, Maravillas Naturales del Mundo + Crónicas del Siglo XX, merges both encyclopedias into 197 collages made with the original pages, exploring the tension between space (nature) and time (history) as a single entity: spacetime. From a perspective inspired by Karen Barad (Barad, 2007, p.224), spacetime is not a passive background but a material-discursive practice in constant becoming, where images actively participate in its configuration. These collages are suspended on a mirrored wall that reflects the gesture of forcibly assembling the montages.

Crónica de una Disección de Maravillas questions how notions of territory and history in the twentieth century have been constructed and imposed by colonizing countries under the discourse of modernity in the context of the “Anthropocene-Capitalocene” (Demos, 2017, p.86). By dissecting and intervening in these publications, I question how knowledge is constructed, represented, and consumed, making them “burn” (Didi-Huberman, 2012, p.26). This is grounded in the belief that history, nature, and photography are mutable and open to being reread, reinterpreted, and transformed.