Ana María Gómez López

Punctum [Aperture – Lumen]

My fellowship project focuses on a series of microphotographs taken by Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch (1813 – 1871), a French camera inventor whose images of mites, salt crystals, seed husks, and human blood cells revealed the minuscule structures of overlooked inanimate fragments. Taking the material traces in Bertsch’s pictures as a starting point, I will develop an experimental short film and several durational works based on minutiae—small-scale and interdependent anatomies, ecologies, and living processes. These are set against the sweeping political, scientific, and technological changes of late 19th-century Paris, their detritus and debris enduring up to our present.

Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Her practice centers on self-experimentation, definitions of biological life, legacies of utopian thought, and archival research in the history of science. Ana María was selected for a 2023 CIFO-Ars Electronica Award, to be exhibited at the Lentos Kunstmuseum. Her work has been shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fonds d’art contemporain Genève, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Rencontres Internationales, and DOK Leipzig. She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has held fellowships at the Osler Library for the History of Medicine, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, International Institute for Social History, and Max Planck Institute for History of Science. Ana María was a 2015 recipient of the Premio Nacional de Artes (National Award in the Arts) in Colombia.