Interviews
Ginebra Siddal
Ginebra Siddal is a multidisciplinary artist based in Spain whose practice begins where reality stops making sense. Trained in Art History, photography, and cultural management, her work is shaped by a visual impairment she was born with — one that made her an exceptional reader of color, while synesthesia taught her to distrust the obvious. For Ginebra, color is not light; it is what light touches and does not let go: it pulses, becomes premonition, refuses to stay still. Her images emerge from the crack, from what is hidden, briefly revealed, then submerged again. Through photography, she explores perception, memory, and the unstable border between the visible and the imagined. She photographs not what the eye sees, but what it cannot.
Your work seems to begin precisely where perception becomes uncertain. How do you recognize the moment when an image stops documenting reality and starts entering a more psychological or imagined space?
I don’t think I will ever consciously recognize that moment — and in a way, it makes sense, because my perception is already altered by nature. For me there is no clear line between documenting and imagining. That boundary has never existed, because I don’t think I can truly document my visual perception — I can only trick it into something similar. And even then, it wouldn’t be tangible proof. Which is somehow funny, because analogue photography is precisely that: something very tangible. What I do recognize is something else entirely. When I observe a person and they transmit something I need to explore — it isn’t just visual. It feels more like trying to translate a tactile sensation or a thought, to memorize it before it disappears. I am deeply fascinated by how memory is diffuse by nature. Two people can remember the same moment in completely different ways. We ourselves can remember something in a way that was never real. That impossibility of memory as a faithful archive — that is, at its core, something I am obsessed with. .
Before I had words, I had color. It was the only way I could tell my mother from the sea — and I have never stopped needing it that way.
You describe color not as light itself, but as “what light touches and does not let go.” How has your relationship with color evolved throughout your life and artistic practice?
Color is, in the end, a consequence of refracted light. Those waves reflect off surfaces, generate volumes, contaminate other tones, and define the boundaries between things. I was born nearly blind, but my parents took a while to notice — according to them, I had the house memorized and never bumped into anything, or simply preferred to stay without looking up at the sky from my pram. Color was possibly already my navigation system before I even knew it was. I couldn’t see with clarity, but I could distinguish tones, volumes, masses of light. It was the only way I had to tell my mother from the sea. My relationship with color was born that way, as survival. And having learned to read it before I had words to describe it is what makes me use it so instinctively today. I use it now as a means to translate sensations. I believe every person has a tonal palette that belongs to them — a set of tones that define them without their knowing. The same applies to spaces and objects. When I photograph someone, part of what I’m looking for is finding the color that corresponds to them. The image isn’t finished until that tone appears.
Your visual impairment appears not as a limitation, but almost as an alternative way of seeing. In what ways has it reshaped your understanding of photography as a medium traditionally tied to vision and clarity?
Perhaps it didn’t reformulate it so much as confirm it. Photography has always been defined by its ability to capture reality — that was the first thing that made me fall in love with it when I studied it. But what truly obsessed me were wet collodion photographs: living people who moved and generated blur in some areas while others remained with an almost brutal sharpness. That duality within a single image — what dissolves alongside what remains — struck me as the most honest thing I had ever seen. That duality has a place in my work. Absolute sharpness made me uneasy at first — now I use it occasionally for certain projects, but in personal work I oscillate. The imperfect has something that catches the brain: it cannot close what is unresolved. And there, in that discomfort, is where I am interested in working right now.
There’s something deeply elusive in your images — as if they emerge from memory rather than observation. Are you consciously trying to photograph something intangible, or does that ambiguity happen instinctively during the process?
Both things. Sometimes I start from a very concrete idea or concept I want to express — almost like a dream — and I build the image as a single piece from there. When there is a clear intention before shooting, the only thing you cannot control is what the person in front of you will offer. And that is where it merges with the other part: sometimes I let myself be carried entirely by the game, by what I am perceiving in that moment. The image surprises me too. Something appears that I hadn’t planned and can’t fully explain — and it becomes exactly what I was looking for. What’s interesting is that the result of both processes is sometimes indistinguishable. A very constructed image can feel completely instinctive, and a spontaneous image can have a coherence that seems premeditated. I think that’s where the ambiguity you’re referring to lives — it’s not entirely a technique or an aesthetic. It moves between control and surrender.
You mention that synesthesia taught you to distrust the obvious. How does that mistrust influence the way you compose an image or interpret what is in front of you?
Synesthesia makes you distrust everything the moment you realize that most people don’t have those sensory alterations. And not only that — even other people with synesthesia experience it in completely different ways. My mind can associate colors with songs or flavors with certain people, while someone with the same condition might associate a specific number with a smell that makes them nauseous. Every brain builds its own sensory reality. So you learn quickly that you don’t know what reality is like for anyone else. You only know how you live it. And from there comes a kind of obsession with trying to make others see it the way you do. Years ago I had a problem during a review because someone didn’t understand my need to saturate images. They called me superficial. It was uncomfortable, but also clarifying — you can’t take anyone inside your brain. And I’ve learned to work with that.
“Before I had words, I had color.” That quote feels almost like the emotional key to your entire practice. Do you think photography, for you, is closer to language or to sensation?
For me the two things are inseparable, my own language is built around sensation, so I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins. What I do know is that some of the most difficult emotions I’ve been through have led me to try to resolve them with something I consider beautiful — which is often not what is canonical or normative. Photography has been a way of moving through that. Not always resolving it completely, but freeing myself a little. And there is something curious in my work that took me a while to recognize: my most naif language, the softest and most colorful, is often the one that hides the greatest impulse of pain. And the other way around. I don’t know if it’s an unconscious strategy or simply the way I process things — but I think that tension between what is shown and what is hidden is at the center of everything I do. Even if only I know it, and not whoever is looking at my work.
Your photographs often feel suspended between revelation and disappearance. What role does absence play in your work?
“I don’t know about absence / but absence knows about me.” Alejandra Pizarnik lived absence not as a concept but as a territory. Sontag went a step further and said that every photograph is a certification of absence — that shooting is already an act of mourning, because you fix something that is already dying in the moment you capture it. And that brings me to something that goes even further back. When we look at the sun, we see the light that left it eight minutes ago. When we look at a star, we see something that happened years, centuries, sometimes millennia ago. We never see the present — we always see the past arriving with a delay. Photography works the same way. You think you are capturing something that exists, but in the moment you shoot it is already memory. What remains in the image was never entirely present — it is something between what you remembered and what it was, but that never existed exactly like that. So absence in my work is the starting condition. We are always photographing something that has already left before we could hold onto it. And if that is inevitable, then I can hold onto it however I want — even distorted, even imagined. I think that impossibility is the most honest thing I can offer.
Many photographers pursue sharpness, precision, or visual control, while your work seems to embrace uncertainty and fragmentation. What attracts you to what cannot be fully seen or understood?
If I can see it completely, it no longer interests me. A resolved image is a closed image and a closed image doesn’t breathe.
