Waiting for Photobook Mania / Mariela Sancari – Performative Books

About the event

Can a photobook transform a part of our bodies? Could it be the medium that connects us to another reader?

Mariela Sancari's practice explores the performativity of images – understood as a materializing practice of differentiation, as the potential to forge new relationships of meaning beyond the structures sustained by stereotypes and norms that order and discipline what we see and how we see it. Is it possible to untether the instrumental relations between images? How can we welcome and shelter the indeterminate?

Sancari is drawn to a notion proposed by Erika Fischer–Lichte in Aesthetics of the Performative: "Instead of creating works, artists produce events in which not only themselves are involved, but also the recipients, the observers, listeners and spectators. With this, the conditions of artistic production and reception are modified in a crucial aspect."

With and around three of Sancari's books – Image act (2025), Moisés (2022) and The Two Headed Horse (2021) – this encounter is an invitation to consider them as living objects. Speculative, untamed photobooks as spaces for potential stories and configurations; photobooks with no central element that determines meaning, but rather a non-linear network of nodes that expands.

Bio

Mariela Sancari (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1976). She lives and works in Mexico City since 1997. Self-taught artist who reclaims practice and thought outside the hegemonic circuits of validation and training.

Her work revolves around truthfulness and fiction in images, using personal narratives to explore the boundaries of the scope of photography as a means of representation. It refers to the affective dimension, yet not sentimental, of autobiographical work, as well as formal explorations of the medium, through questions related to staging and self-referentiality in photographic practice.

Her first book Moisés (La Fábrica) was selected by several curators and reviewers as one of the Best Photobooks published in 2015. In 2017, she published her second book in collaboration with writer Adolfo Córdova: Mr. & Dr. (This book is true) a photobook aimed for children and youngsters that explores the notion of the unknown through images and text. In 2021, The two headed horse. Reenactment in ten acts (Asunción Casa Editora), a book about the transit of a fixed image into a performed image. In 2025, Image acts (piedra ediciones) reflects on how gestures shape the world around us. Founder of FOLIO, Centro de la Imagen's public photobook collection in Mexico City.

Admission to the event is free. For more information, write to us at info@phmuseumlab.com.