“The Pigment Change” on show at Rencontres d'Arles 2021 is the result of the BMW residency in partnership with the GOBELINS School of Visual Art, which
“The Pigment Change”, is a meditation on creation in a time of environmental crisis: in an era when production has become overwhelming, be it of goods or of images, Romero tries to see if there’s still space for the production of knowledge and for a conversation on the meaning and role of the photographic process. All the ethical and philosophical conundrums linked with the idea of producing something new in an overflowing world intertwine with the question of reproduction, and the feminist stance on the freedom to choose not to be a mother.
Lately, with the advent of digital photography, we’ve witnessed a growing interest in the materiality of the photographic process, a resurfacing of ancient methods of printing and taking pictures, something Romero is an expert of. But in her research she questions the environmental impact of those methods and she actively experiments new ways of producing images, using only light and plants’ natural pigments, such as chlorophyll and carotenoids. In “The Act of Producing”, by controlling the amount of light and the natural shades of green and yellow she manages to impress images of her hands actively manipulating nature directly on different kinds of leaves. “I produced many images in my grandma’s garden in Valencia, because the quality of light and water there was perfect for this kind of work. I also like the fact that this work is also a result of the labor of some invisible hands, my grandma’s, the hands that nurtured and grew the very garden I was working in”.
In “Offspring”, Romero starts a conversation with her mother about the choice to not have children due to the climate crisis, and reflects on what legacy means for her and for the next generations. The work is a time-lapse of 30 days documenting the birth of a new leaf, and it’s a metaphor of the process of selective birth in nature. Just as Welwitschia Mirabilis, a desert plant that only produces 2 leaves in its entire lifetime, Romero feels “like a plant growing in a restricted, constrained context, a small pot plant”: by her choice, her legacy will be her artistic work, not her children.
“Family Album” analyzes the idea of photography as a way to document family history: negatives from her family archive are projected on cress cultivation panels. The result are time-lapse videos that show images of her family appearing and disappearing, a generation after the other.
“Faire Une Photographie” is a two-act photographic performance that uses photoperiodism (the reaction of plants in this specific case, to changes in daily or seasonal cycles of light and darkness) as a photographic process.
The majority of Romero’s work is ephemeral, or probably expirable, the ultimate challenge to the commercialization of photography. Her work power lies within the ideas and questions she raises, not only in challenging the role of art and images but also in the way she is forcing us to confront our own involvement in the environmental crisis and to reflect on what our very own legacy will be, reminding us that we always have a choice.