• Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán
  • Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán

Dialect - Felipe Romero Beltrán

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The poetics of documentary, performance, and choreography combine to politically interrogate the dead time of bureaucracy for young migrants stuck in the Spanish legal system.

Dialect covers three years of state violence for nine young Moroccan migrants exiled in Kafka-esque limbo in Seville, southern Spain. When underage migrants enter the country illegally and cannot be verified as adults, their custody remains in the hands of the state – subjecting them to a lengthy process of up to three years to gain legal status.

In this state of suspension and liminality, Beltrán engages with the body as a metaphor: using a carefully articulated language between photography, performance and collaboration, the weight of dead time is registered upon the shoulders of these young men, entering into dialogue with their memories, journeys, and the humiliating mundanity of waiting and migration. Alongside video works and choreographed dance, Dialect breaks new documentary ground to shine a critical light on practices of bureaucratic oppression.

 

Sam Youkilis's immediate and generous indexing of everyday life reaches across space and time in his debut monograph – a 528-page typology of human experience.

Sam Youkilis has been building a continuous archive of photographic works through his phone for the last six years. Working instinctively, Youkilis's short, immersive videos gather universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the cameraphone to evoke something profound, anthropological, comprehensive and yet incomplete. Youkilis’s work springs from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains depth beyond the offhand ease in which his images freely circulate.

In Youkilis’s first publication, the depth of this engagement with human patterns of behaviour is archived and scattered across a diverse range of themes, divided into chapters that playfully tease the tensions between categorisation and chance that inform his observational works. Made exclusively of video stills, Somewhere scours Youkilis’s database for images of everything from the time of day–7:07AM, 12:33PM—to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples and gestures of romance.

Presented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates the archive and the typology as a source of human joy and communion while emboldening his subjects and unlocking the deep essence of different places worldwide. Youkilis embraces the real by engaging with both ephemerality and sincerity, while steeped in reverence for the photographic medium through a meticulous engagement with composition, colour, chiaroscuro and framing.

  • 176 pages
  • 21x30cm
  • English/Spanish
  • 2023
  • Loose Joints