biography
Liza Ambrossio (1993, Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist, Filmmaker & Women’s rights activist, Franco-Mexican who lives and works in France. She began her artistic practice at the age of sixteen when she asked an ancient maid from her mother’s house to steal the photographs from the family albums looking for traces of a dark past for which there seemed to be no evidence. At the same time in her native Mexico City, Ambrossio portrayed her transition from adolescence to adulthood looking for ways to survive from a distance during a chaotic and stormy process of emancipation from her family.
After concluding her university studies in Politics at the Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales in the U.N.A.M., Mexico City, specializing in negotiation and management of political and social conflicts at U.T. (U.S.A.), she received multiple scholarships in the United States and Europe, among them; the Descubrimientos scholarship for the Master in Photography and artistic projects at the PIC. A school awarded by the PHotoEspaña festival and the editorial house La Fabrica in Madrid, Spain.
Her universe breathes a real attempt to understand the powers and weaknesses of the mind as a way to scrutinize the human experience, which goes through the past, present, and future time. Ambrossio is incorporating symbols alluding to witchcraft, eroguru, mythology, memories, and legends that she mixes with her written narrative, photo sculpture, photo books, objects, installations, sounds, paintings, drawings, performance, and videos that she unites by free association, schemes promoted by her own theories related to psychological manipulation and its influence on the continuation or rupture of the power professed by the different social structures. Their approaches have an intense but anarchic relationship with chance and instinct and imply the destabilization of female canons that threaten the possibility of exceeding ethnic, sexual, moral, religious, and political limits.
She is the author of “The rage of devotion_La ira de la devoción” edited by La Fabrica, considered by the British Journal of Photography and El País as one of the most exalted and risky photo books of the year 2018, her work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, Malaysia, Mexico and Singapore. Including sites such as the Somerset House in the UK, the Palazzo Palmieri and the Ex Mattatoio-Rome in Italy, the Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACQ) in Mexico, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb (msg) in Croatia, the Museum National of Contemporary Art (ΕΜΣΤ), in Greece, Casa de America in Spain within the official selection of PHoto España 2021, the Manuel Rivera Ortiz Foundation, during the Rencontres de la photographie de Arles 2022, the Académie française and the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France; also international fairs such as Art Basel, Arco, Photo London, UNSEEN, Zona Maco and JustMad. Ambrossio’s imaginary has been reviewed by Art Nexus, The British Journal of Photography, The Magnum Foundation, El País, Babelia, El Mundo, Der Greif, GUP, Unseen magazine, Vogue Italy, L’Officiel, El Universal, Fire cracker, and Lens Culture. She has received the FNAC Nuevo Talento award in Spain,Voies Off in Arles, France the same year 2018, the Flash Forward in Canada, the PhEST in Italy, and the PHmuseum New Generation Grant in the United Kingdom during 2019. In 2020 she was awarded by the annual photography residence from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in París, France. Ambrossio is currently a member of the Académie française in Spain, also she was recently nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet in Switzerland, the Prix of Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), and the Arts Electronica in the U.S.A. The year 2022 she won the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), and the Helsinki Photo Festival, and exhibited at the Yvon Lambert collection in Avignon, France. Ambrossio was invited to the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society as a speaker at the table: When art calls for social change, recognized by the Financial Times, like one of the most influential forums in the world. Also she has presented her second photo book “Blood Orange_Naranja de Sangre” and during 2023 works on her third photo book entitled “The witch stage” with the acclaimed German publishing house Kehrer Verlag, and in her first book of art criticism entitled “Toda devoción causa ira” by the Spanish editorial Pepitas de Calabaza.
Ambrossio has received favorable reviews regarding her different projects from top international curators and art critics such as Arianna Rinaldo, IT, Cuauhtémoc Medina, MX, Christine Barthe, FR, Fabienne Aguado, FR, Jae Seok, KOR, Javier-Martín Jiménez, SP and Johan Sjöström, SWE. Her works are part of important collections such as the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, FR, the Académie de France, Madrid, SP, and the Nadine Foundation, NL, among others.
The witch stage
In a society that strives to exterminate fragility and poetry “The witch stage” is presented as a thermometer of social decomposition, ironizes some principles of psychoanalysis that Sigmund Freud called “stages or faces” within his theory of psychosexual development which in turn mixed with conspiracy theories, social denunciations, thoughts, prejudices, the misogynistic questioning of the notions and symbols of witchcraft, criminology, traditions, punishments, uses and customs, pretending a synchronous representation of a global feminism that touches different geographical areas.
Crossing the Mexican, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese imaginary, she allows herself to explore visual similarities of a story so represented that it seems forbidden. As a pretext to speak of the prevailing unwritten right to commit violence against women and the feminine she is leaving crumbs of non textual cases of territories and cultures, with no apparent connection beyond their exacerbated telluric belly, which refer her to Derrida’s seismic lexicon in which she remembers emphasizing that “a tremor can be the result of something that it has affected you or the tremor without apparent explanation can also affect you it may scare you.
Coming from the most dangerous undeclared country for a woman in the world, where it is easier to kill one of us than to steal a car, her view of fragility and strength is dangerously unstructured. So in “The Witch Stage” she is making a declaration of responsibility, of empathy with the desire of freedom and love.
In “The Witch Stage” she draws a space where the magicians are independent beings and little concerned about the archetypal standards of the world and hierarchical ethics. She considers the act of dropping as a series of metaphorical and bucolic rituals with the possibility of transmuting to a mental state and modifying the reality of those who practice it. Worshiping her multicultural family history, psychomagic the Italian film tradition that represents social class clashes at the same time as the contempt and satirical elevation of its women, the eroguru and the American feminist movement of the 60 s WITCH that she considered that the cultured, revolutionary and progressive society intended a renewal but not including women and that is why the machista schemes and violence against women are repeated to this day intergenerationally, this documentary fiction is an act of cathartic and critical exploration that embodies a kind of social psychoanalysis, explaining why some women of her generation and earlier consider ourselves witches in a space of reality that surpasses us due to its burden of violence, rescuing the magic feminism connection with documented encounters with sorceresses, activists, femmes fatal, writers, etc. Conjuring in her work a neo feminist performative act archived in images that seek the re interpretation of the pictorial iconography of the witch and madness, presented in an exhibition installation format, texts, objects, performance, paintings, audios, photos, video, and photo book.
