Photography, Fernanda Armada
My photos for Same Faces usually start from a song, a lyric or a phrase that comes to my mind with the prompt. For this series, it started from somewhere more personal; my relationship with faith.
Religion, especially catholicism impregnates my culture and identity, religious icons and images of saints have become part of my surroundings; rosaries, prayers, mi grandma giving me her blessing every time she says goodbye to me, altars on the corners of neighborhood streets… even though I’m not a believer, I can’t help but to feel warmth towards this everyday things. However, this devotion from my culture is accompanied by sorrow and immense guilt that is instilled with religion. My body is said to be sacred, but at the same time, my body is sinful from my birth, it is in a constant search for purification and vindication, but it is never enough. Catholicism is so impregnated that it reaches our skin in the shape of body devices; systems that control and limit our bodies, claiming them as theirs.
Fernanda Armada is a visual artist with a special interest for photography, she studied
Photography at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía at the age of 16. In her plastic production, she focuses on femininity, introspection, family memory and the unconscious. This production has led her to participate in different exhibitions in Mexico in addition to being published in virtual galleries such as Fotógrafas Latinoamericanas, Same Faces Collective, Strawberry Zine, and the book Violence and Gender in Times of Pandemic. She participated in the opening of the ODBK for the Democratization of Art with a collective work carried out at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Querétaro. She was a lithography apprentice in residency at La Ceiba Gráfica. She also participated in the 4th International Meeting of Performance No lo Haga Usted Mismo.
She currently continues to produce on these themes. Fernanda Armada is a student of
Visual Arts with a specialty in Plastic Arts at the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad Autónoma
de Querétaro and collaborates with the digital literary magazine Same Faces Collective in addition to being Assistant Art Director at CLUB 707, Paris.