Vol. II: Duende
Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968 and brought up in Argentina, where she lived from 1970 until 2003. She studied Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires until she left to NYC to enroll in General Studies at the International Center of Photography.
While home in Argentina, Alessandra began working on a project that evolved into her acclaimed series On the Sixth Day, which explored the relationship between humans and domesticated animals in the countryside south of Buenos Aires. Five years into the project, she turned her attention to nine-year-old cousins, Belinda and Guille, who lived on neighboring farms. Her work documenting their relationship has turned into a decades-long collaborative project. This work has been published in two monographs: The Adventures of Belinda and Guille and the Meaning of their Enigmatic Dreams (2010), and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (2020). Alessandra is working on a third project about Guille and Belinda as adults.
Published work by Alessandra Saguinetti includes:
On the Sixth Day (2005), Sorry Welcome (2013), Le Gendarme sur la Colline (2017), the aforementioned monographs The Adventures of Belinda and Guille and the Meaning of their Enigmatic Dreams (2010) and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (2020), and most recently Some Say Ice (2022): a portrait of people, places, and animals in the small Midwestern town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, where Sanguinetti confronts photography’s uneasy relationship to life and death.
Sanguinetti joined Magnum Photos in 2007 and became a member in 2010. She is currently based in San Francisco, California.
For more info please see: www.alessandrasanguinetti.info
Instagram @alessandra_sanguinetti
Ashima Yadava is a conceptual documentary photographer and printmaker. With the camera as her conduit, she works on long-form stories and believes in art as a means to social activism and reform.
Born in New Delhi, Ashima now lives in San Francisco, where she works in digital and analog methods. Her work has been exhibited around the world including the deYoung, United Nations in New York, ICP, and Technische Dresden among others. She has been featured in publications like National Geographic, Mother Jones, and SFChronicle.
Ashima is a California Arts Council Fellow. She graduated as a Director’s Fellow from the ICP, New York, and is a part of the development committee at SF Camerawork.
She is the founder of the collective project,
Huq : I Seek No Favor - Artists Respond to the Abortion Ban
(please see www.huq-iseeknofavor.com for more info on this worthwhile endeavor)
“I thought quite a bit about what “Duende” means to me. I take it as the inspiration that drives me. While photographing other people, documenting their lives and the times we live in, I am often reminded of how similar we are, as people. We may come to it from different languages, cultures, and identities but our aspirations, our fears, and our dreams are all very alike. So the closest I have come to feeling the duende is acknowledging this idea of our shared humanity.
The images you see in this issue of Dada Duende, are testimony to that idea – what affects one, affects the other. They were made in September 2020 when California was enveloped by these ominous wildfires. They scream climate change is real and it has reached our backyards. And if you can connect with them, I guess you have just been duende’d!“
For more info see: www.ashimayadava.com Instagram @indigonyx
Rachel Elise Thomas is a lens-based multidisciplinary artist, designer, and youth art teacher. With their artistic practice, Thomas aims to push the boundaries of traditional photography, collage, and site-specific installation to tackle issues of identity, family, and colorism. The use of her personal and familial archive serves to place their personal history within a larger context, allowing Thomas to explore memory and nostalgia in a way that is both personal and cathartic, while also speaking to a larger audience. Heavily influenced by her collection of Black publications (Ebony, Essence, Jet Magazine), and advertisements pertaining to Black Americana, Thomas confronts viewers with the realities of colorism and its biases, exploring the complexities of racial identity, while also challenging conventional notions of beauty. Through her use of collage and site-specific installation, she creates immersive environments that engage the viewer in a dialogue about these themes.
Thomas’s work is both visually striking and intellectually stimulating, offering viewers a unique perspective that intersects with larger cultural narratives.
Thomas’s art practice also involves teaching art classes and workshops with a focus on community involvement, mainly working with young people from Detroit and its metropolitan areas. Her classes explore themes of identity and representation—encouraging her students to explore their own experiences and unique perspectives through collage and mixed media.
Thomas received their BFA in Photography from the College for Creative Studies in her hometown of Detroit, Michigan. She is currently an MFA candidate, and Gilbert Fellow at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, with an emphasis in Photography.
For more info see: www.rachelelisethomas.com
Instagram @implied_wisdom
“I think all the great things in life are spirit(s) speaking through us; sex, birth, death, writing a good poem, writhing in agony or pleasure, a good mushroom trip or just a moment when the light catches just so and you feel alive, unthinking in all the dust swirling about, but so deeply within your body that all the constructs fall away. These flow states are contagious, I guess that’s why art begets art, why duende matters.”
Kelly Gray is a writer living nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean with her family of artists. Her manuscript,
The Mating Calls of the Specter, is forthcoming from Tusculum Review, and her writing has recently appeared in Lake Effect, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Newfound, Rust & Moth, Permafrost, and Northwest Review.
Published collections include:
Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press), Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, Gold Medal Winner from IPPY), and Quag Daughter (Dancing Girl Press).
For more info see: www.writekgray.com Instagram @_west_of_west
Cetology, originally published as part of the collection Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press)
Dawn Surratt earned a B.A. in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and a Bachelor and Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Georgia. Her years spent working with dying patients in hospice settings is the backbone of her imagery, combining photographs with photography based book structures, installations, and objects as visual meditations that explore concepts of grief, transition, healing and spirituality.
Dawn’s work has been exhibited widely and purchased for private and permanent collections across the United States. She is a 2016 and 2020 Critical Mass Finalist and a 2018 nominee for the Royal Photography Society’s 100 Heroines.
For more info see: www.dawnsurratt.com
Instagram @dawn_surratt
Megan Bell is a painter who fell into her career 30 years ago, quite by accident. Despite childhood dreams of becoming a famous musician, she quickly came to realize that her musical aspirations far exceeded her musical abilities. After a short stint in art school, she spent much of her twenties listening to all the music she wished she could make and painting sad, representational pictures of herself and the boys she liked but was too shy to talk to.
In 2000, after seeing the film “Pollock” Megan returned to her Minneapolis studio hoping to replicate the raw energy and emotion Jackson Pollock instilled into his work. It was during
this time she first began to explore abstract expressionism and became interested in visually interpreting the music she was listening to. For the last 23 years Megan has been painting what
the music feels like, and she has found it to be just the compromise she needed.
Megan is a full-time painter who lives in Minnesota with her musician husband, Andy, two teenaged daughters, a dog, and two cats.
For more info see: www.meganbell.net
Instagram @meganbellstudio
Daniela Spector was raised in Miami, where she attended the Art Institute for Photography. She moved to New York in the Fall of 2013 with an ill-fitted coat and the right amount of naivety.
Her work seeks out human connections through intimate but playful portraiture and archival research, which allows her to steep her practice in context and meaning.
“When my mother passed away in 2019, I tasked myself with the job of sorting through everything she left behind. I came across an image I had never seen before. It was a portrait of my mother framed by a heart. Underneath her relaxed expression was the phrase “Te prohibo que me olvides” written in my mother’s handwriting. It translates to: “I forbid you to forget me.”
That is what Duende means to me.”
For more info please see: danielaspector.com
instagram: daniela_spector
Minneapolis-based composer and bandoneonist Charles Gorczynski works in contemporary tango, new music, and studio production. He is the director of Twin Cities Tango Collective, and leads the acclaimed modern tango outfits Charles Gorczynski Tango Quartet and Redwood Tango Ensemble.
Charles is dedicated to spreading tango music and culture with an inclusive and supportive spirit, DIY community building, and widespread international collaboration.
Charles has performed with Tango Sin Fin, Chamber Music Northwest, Dubuque Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Chorale, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, California Symphony, Vocal Essence at Orchestra Hall, Mason Bates’ Mercury Soul Orchestra, Mariano Barreiro Tango Trio, Tango BC Quartet, Alejandro Ziegler Cuarteto, Maxi Larrea Trio, Maldito Tango, and Los Tangueros Del Oeste. He is a Latin Grammy-nominated mixing engineer who has produced and contributed to 100 albums, including releases for Serein Records, Ropeadope, 482 Music, and his own Caverns Records.
Charles Gorczynski Tango Quartet includes Devan Moran (violin), Sarah Lahasky (contrabass), and Alex Woods (piano). This quartet plays regularly in the Twin Cities for concerts and milongas, performing both classic tango repertoire and new original music.
For more info see: www.charlesgorczynski.com/cgtq
Instagram @redwoodtango