Coral Pereda is a Spanish photographer and filmmaker, based in Chicago. She grew up in Madrid, Spain and lived in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. She currently is a MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has a Bachelor degree in Communication from IE University, Spain and Master in Photography and Design from Elisava School of Design and Engineering, Barcelona, Spain. She has exhibited work at Galería Mitte, Centro Comercial Las Arenas, Fundacío Vila Casas in Barcelona and at the Nightingale Cinema and Defibrillator Gallery in Chicago, IL. For more information, please visit www.coralpereda.com.
Score in Four Lapses is a new reiteration of the piece Por Qué Me Muero de Frío. The latter is a storyboard generated by five rolls of 35 mm film. The camera used was broken and skipped most of the frames, leading to an “arbitrary” curation of photographs. Among the “embryonic” images that never got to exist were pictures of my life in Chicago, of the few nights I was able to spend in my home city Madrid and of my impressions after a 2 week artist residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. My family just recently moved to Mexico City. Therefore, much of my work has focused on the triangular relationship (or lack thereof), between Madrid, Chicago and Mexico DF.
The developed film generated a contact sheet made out of empty spaces mostly: moments that skipped the grasp of the chemicals, time that is not accounted for. However, there are some visible portraits and landscapes. Faces become spectral traces of shadow and light – like sheets of vellum, trying to retain the paradoxical nature of quantum light. Occasionally, expressions stubbornly stick to the surface, without fading. I am interested in the present absences that this arbitrary process created and in the influence that viewers’ agency will have upon it. I have been documenting through sounds daily voiceovers of my thought process trying to remember what I shot. I also have some ambient sounds from Mexico, maybe recorded when the shutter of the camera did not open. The soundtrack of the piece is as much about what is there as about what is not. Therefore, the protagonists of the score are the gaps, the artifacts of the film holder, the slippage of time.
I hand audiences the responsibility to decide whether to trust me or not. Trust that my memory will not betray me. Trust that I’m not pretending to find a home in the snow. Trust that that blurry face ever meant something important.