Shēntĭ 身体

A residency can be understood as a temporary project, a process of fermentation, a daily ritual that integrates the elements of a new territory linked to bodily experience — emphasizing a body that carries culture, history, and trace, in contrast to the theoretical body analyzed outside any context of time and space, under hypothetical or abstract conditions.

Both fermentation and photography are temporal processes through which we uncover invisible connections via the sensitivity of their elements. Fermentation occurs when microorganisms are transformed into nutrients. What happens when we apply this analogy to photography? Is photography not, itself, a process that ferments time?

Pushing this further, the residency becomes a way of positioning ourselves at pre-established boundaries in order to redraw the experience of bodies — to consider the body itself as a ferment, a constant alchemical process, present in a movement that dialogues with its own participation. A body capable of expressing power and the politics of culture in Chengdu.

— Diego García