Masterclass - Deneb Martos: Between Gold and Fungi

Visual artist Deneb Martos presents a masterclass that offers a journey through her artistic practice and creative processes, shaped by experimentation with celluloid, the body and living materials.

From handmade films to ritual installations that reactivate analog devices, her work moves between light and shadow, between what shines and what ferments, between gesture and trace. In dialogue with works such as Gold Film and Ser Hongo, this session invites us into an imaginative space where the visible and the invisible coexist, and where cameraless cinema becomes a site of transformation, of listening and of communion with the materials that surround us.

A sensorial journey to think of the image through what decomposes, is projected, takes root and is reborn.

Deneb Martos (Madrid, 1975) is a visual artist specialized in cameraless photography and eco-sustainable photo-chemical techniques. She is the founder of the photo lab at La Casa Encendida and the coordinator of film lab LAV, both in Madrid. In one of her latest projects, Ser Hongo (Being Mushroom), she’s working with fungi and film. Using the technique of water rayograms, she is also part of What Water Tells Us, an artistic and environmental project on the Manzanares River that approaches the river as a living territory – one that speaks to us about biodiversity, pollution, memory and resilience. In an earlier piece, Skin Film, she worked with skin as a material.

Before and after the masterclass, her work Gold Film will be exhibited, as well as during the weekend of 25 – 26 October at Kunsthal Gent. That same weekend, Martos will lead a two-day workshop on 35mm chemigrams. On Monday 27 October, she will then activate and perform Gold Film – an artwork that is at once a sculpture, an installation, a film and a performance, created by working directly on 35mm celluloid with fine sheets of gold. 

Deneb Martos: Vimeo | Instagram

In collaboration with Europalia España and Kunsthal Gent (Vrijdagavonden)