Public Story
Juan sin miedo (Dreampress, 2023)
Juan sin Miedo (Juan no Fear) is an exercise in the reeassemblage of images and their role in the reproduction of white masculinity and violence. The book is structured through 3 strategies (collage, rephotography and risograph printing) in order to unsettle the violence and coloniality of white masculinity’s (sometimes inconspicuous) presence within popular culture images. The strategies become a process of unlearning and disorganizing the mechanisms by which such forms of power are formed and reproduced.
The title, Juan sin miedo, is taken from the entertainment section of a popular newspaper of my youth in Colombia, known for its sensationalist approach and combination of soft porn and graphic images of violence.
The book is structured in two sections; one, printed in bulk paper, is made with misprints from the risograph printing process, and varies individually in each of the 25 books. The use of process images, some of them re-altered during the printing, alludes to the circulation and accumulation of images as well as to the possibilities of their manipulation. The second section contains a sequence of 11 images. These photographs are made from cut outs from Colombian and South African magazines and weeklies from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The cut outs, sometimes intervened with inks and tapes, are then rephotographed over photographic prints from my own archive.
Every book is wrapped in a folded book cover paper. As a third strategy of reassemblage, this paper has a unique and original Chine-collé collage for each book, made from the source magazines and newspapers used for the photographs. It also includes an A3 risograph print on Acid free 250gsm paper.
34.5 x 29 cms 11 color photographs + individual variations of 8-10 process images
Risograph printing on Creamy Bulk 80gsm and Munken Lynx 130gsm (Yellow/Fluorescent Pink/Bright Red/Aqua and Black inks)
Soft cover: Light Pink Folia 130gsm, printing in three colours: yellow/aqua/black with Green Book Tape binding and pink thread singer sewn stitching.
Text in English and Spanish
Edition of 25
Design: Juan Orrantia and Candice Jezek
Printed at Dreampress Risograph Studio, Cape Town, 2023.
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