 |
By Alessandra Sanguinetti.
 |
Photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti
MACK, London, England, 2020. 120 pp., 11x11".
Alesandra Sanguinetti’s The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, originally published in 2010, has now been reissued by Mack Books. The book is the first of an anticipated three-volume set dedicated to her two-decade strong project about the Argentinian cousins, Belinda and Guille. A devotional to female friendship, Sanguinetti witnesses the girls in childhood and early adolescence, charting the imminence of adulthood in their everyday.
Sanguinetti elaborates on the documentary premise of the durational project with her collaborative approach to working with Beli and Guille. The girls would improvise on different narrative cues. In some, they enact the anticipated stories of (heteronormative) womanhood: romance, marriage, pregnancy. Biblical iconography informs their playacting too — a nativity scene, a dead Christ — nodding to the country’s Catholic dominant society. These dramas, refracted through the sensibilities of the girls, stage a feedback loop of play, culture, and fantasy, set within the backdrop of Argentinian farm life, a powerful third character of their dream life. Beli and Guille are charismatic performers, full of verve, humor, and vulnerability. Sanguinetti depicts their intimacy with warmth and tenderness alongside the richly observed details of their domestic landscape: family, animals (they are everywhere), and the farm.
 |
Their roots in home and land are brilliantly depicted in a pair of images. Guille bathes in a metal bathtub in the yard, surrounded by ducks, a single chicken, and a dog. An elderly woman holds a fistful of her long hair, the strand forming a line with the grandmother’s arm. An uninterrupted stream of water, another line, flows from a pipe that juts into the upper left corner of the frame. In the next image, Beli and a man stand in a field, facing one another, holding a thin length of ribbon stretched between them. Lines of attachment unfold through touch.
Looking at these pictures, I was reminded of a game I played with my daughter when she was a baby. We held opposite ends of a Slinky. I would walk away, stretching the toy as far as it could go. Hold on, don’t let go, I said before I would walk back to her. I always come back.
 |
A peek on Sanguinetti’s Instagram reveals a video of Belinda and Guille carrying out a funeral ceremony. Beli, playing the role of the priest, recites the prayer; Guille, the only attendant, weeps. Suddenly, they erupt into giggles, puncturing the solemnity of the play. There is no grave, just two girls riffing off one another. The photograph of this scene shows a smiling Beli watching Guille’s convincing, if scenery-chewing, enactment of grief.
Death is a prosaic presence in the book, a familiar companion in the rhythm of their days. The girls watch the skinning of a cow. Later, Beli delicately peels the viscera off its head. Early in the book, we see Guille gently stretching the wings of a rooster in the kitchen. Later, she carries a dead chicken by its feet through a field. I wondered if it was kin to the rooster. Brutality filters into their play. The girls stage scenes of melodramatic violence, riffing on the gestures of tabloids and Hollywood movies. Beli points a toy pistol under her chin, her head lifted towards the sky while Guille, hands on her hips, watches her suicide reflected in a puddle, seemingly unmoved. In another image, Beli turns the pistol on Guille who appears to beg for mercy, hands clasped in prayer. It’s her turn to look up at the sky.
What haunts the long-term documentary project is the life expectancy of its subjects, the understanding they will die too. This is the melancholic chord of the work, knowledge held in tension with these vital portraits. I want to make a claim here that this is the gaze of a parent, a set of eyes that knows well the expanses and limits of a life and how it can, and can’t, be rendered in a photograph. She generously reserves as much as she shares, honoring the girls’ intrinsic mysteries. Sanguinetti’s photographs are prisms, multiplying and layering time: the textures of the quotidian, its roots in family and land, and the imagined joys and sorrows of the girls’ futures.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
