Zaida Gonzalez

Transfeminist photographer, born in Santiago de Chile in 1977, Zaida González is one of the most prominent contemporary Latin American authors. She completed formal studies in Advertising Photography at the Alpes School of Photography and Veterinary Medicine at the University of the Americas. She is also one of the founders of the Macrodosis collective and has received support from Fondart on several occasions. She has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in America and Europe and received the “Best Foreign Young Artist” award at the 13th version of the ArtVilnius Contemporary Art Fair in Lithuania. Zaida is also the author of three books, including “Las novias de Antonio” (Ediciones La Visita, 2009), “Recuérdame al morir con mi último latido” (Ed. El Gato de la Acequia, 2010), and “Zaida González de Guarda” (Ed. El Gato de la Acequia, 2013), which is large format and of an anthological nature.

Zaida González possesses a completely unique language in her work, which is constructed from a rich imaginary that is indebted to her most intimate obsessions and interests, as well as to popular Latin American visuality in general and Chilean visuality in particular.  that often appears bluntly under an irony or evocative forms of an apparently childish universe. Her work blends sociological types, adopted beings, mythological characters, religious and literary references, domestic animals, among others, who all share a paradoxical candor. All of them participate in a photographic ritual directed by the author. These inhabitants roam through constructed worlds where they share space and hierarchy with exquisitely chosen objects loaded with symbolism that situate the protagonists in a well-defined ideal environment. Zaida González has her own range of colors, which she achieves in her early images by applying manual techniques to analog supports. Her work must often be understood from the three-dimensionality in which the image is framed, where the objects that show it become part of it.