"Film music for a still image," is how photo artist Iñaki Bonillas, born in Mexico City in 1981, calls the motif he worked on for the poster of this year's Enjoy Jazz Festival.
It shows a faded photograph of a man in the midst of soaring pigeons in St. Mark's Square in Venice. It is a moment that becomes a narrative, an imaginary film. The picture shows the artist's father and accompanied him, after his early death, through his childhood. It is the portrait of a happy, playful moment and linked to the music that the father loved, whose record collection has accompanied Iñaki Bonillas since then and is the soundtrack for his art: Jazz.
In addition to exploring his family history, which Bonillas describes as "a very intimate way of having a conversation with someone who is no longer there", his artistic practice examines the cultural history of photography and its structural behaviors. Bonillas transforms his working archive, of which the photographs of his grandfather alone comprise more than 3000 images and slides, into his own artistic investigation in an analytical, conceptual, humorous and speculative way. In this way, he succeeds in creating new realities and narratives.
He has tried, Bonillas says, to compensate for the lack of memory of his father through his artistic work. And it was thanks to his father, he says, that he began to be drawn to jazz himself. Through his extensive music collection, he said, he began collecting records himself. He says that the work "Soundtrack For A Still" is about understanding who his father was and that he himself was able to approach jazz because this music was so important to him. As a connection of the past to the present, as the film music of a still.
Date: September 28, 2022