SEBASTIAN ABUGATTAS - PHOTOGRAPHY











































































YOU CAN TAKE THIS AS ME COMING OUT AS A VOYEUR.  ⌄⌄⌄⌄































Do you want me to come?
2015-2025

My current research is focused on the spatial politics of cruising. What is the current state of cruising in the gay community nowadays? Cruising spots are disappearing around cities and this is a trend that extends to all LGBTQI+ places. The recent and relative acceptance of the gay community, normalisation and the growing use of online dating platforms mean that you don’t have to use secret places to be able to meet other people like you. But, what happens to the spaces behind the undergrowth and who uses them now?

In Do you want me to come? I visit these traditional cruising parks in the city of London and examine their social activity, to see if they remain a place of social change or have become something else. Making myself known in the cruising space, I capture a plate with my 4x5 camera to preserve this place for posterity.

My work engages and explores the boundaries of photography as a critical practice to combat existing social power structures in public and private spaces, with an emphasis on the creation of a new visual language to portray the non-visible space. A question that I am currently trying to answer with my practice is, on the one hand, how do the evolving politics of my own community (LGBTQI+) change how we interact and cruise? And on the other hand, how do the effects of normalisation and social cleansing erode the cruising grounds?

I use photography as a tool to try to portray this invisible and ever-changing space, to preserve it against extinction. Eventually, it is as if these places were specimens to be encased in a transparent box, safeguarded to be seen by future generations. The lack of verbal interaction in the cruising act gives way to a distinct type of non-verbal communication, one based on gestures, looks and body language: a semiotics of cruising and its reflection on photography.





















ARCHIVE























Soul
2016


I have been exploring the flux between the city as an organism and nature's attempts to coexist with it.

Soul is a project that deals with how nature tries to make a space for itself inside the city, specifically in Seoul's constant metropolitan expansion. This project also explores the duality of South Korean society: extraordinarily modern but very traditional, with ancestral costumes rooted in the collective imaginary.

Analog to this, the same duality is reflected in the relationship that exists between the metropolis and nature. In a city that tries to find a place for the natural in a completely artificial context. In the same way, it is a society that looks to the future from the traditional.

In the end, a question remains: Is nature fighting back, or are we getting to a place where we are fighting for her?















Cyanotypes of London
2014


Text coming....















Deracination
2013-2014


Deracination
is a photographic project that follows the traces of nomadic shepherds during their stay in the Manchay region of Peru. 

They travel across the country with their families and cattle, looking for the vegetation that grows in the desert when the fog arrives during the winter.

The project discusses people, a locality, and even nature, which is transient and continuously evolving.















Rest
2013-2014






The remaining part of something.
To relax, sleep or recover strength.



















Book available upon request.
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