by jacquin cunningham
FF #10, 2025. Archival Pigment Print16 x 20 inches FramedEdition of 5 +2APs, Barbara Sanchez-Kane and Sofía Alazraki, courtesy of Kurimanzutto and DashwoodProjects.
FF #03, 2025. Archival Pigment Print16 x 20 inches FramedEdition of 5 +2APs, Barbara Sanchez-Kane and Sofía Alazraki, courtesy of Kurimanzutto and DashwoodProjects.
FF #06, 2025. Archival Pigment Print16 x 20 inches Framed Edition of 5 +2APs, Barbara Sanchez-Kane and Sofía Alazraki, courtesy of Kurimanzutto and DashwoodProjects.
Bárbara Sánchez-Kane: Sofia, remember that when we started to talk about analog? You had this conversation with a film director and you were talking about nostalgia and looking into the future until a picture didn't reflect its time. And I'm going to go back to a little bit, cause Saturday I went to a very, deep hole on going to the White House Instagram. It freaked me out all the videos like to towards this American nostalgia.
Sofía Alazraki: The other day I was thinking that even an iPhone 6 right now would be the same effect. I think that at first, we were wondering this: Why are we choosing digital and not analog and why this kind of low key, very simple way of lighting scenes up? And we were thinking about this thing of when you take pictures with analog cameras, and I think that even nowadays with digital cameras that are from the 2000s, it's already not an image of now. We were thinking, if someone sees this in 30 years, we want the quality of the time that we live in.
Jacquin Cunningham: It is very bizarre that there seems to be an alignment between political nostalgia and visual nostalgia right now. And even Interview Magazine just shot Apple Martin on an iPhone 4. So, it’s very interesting to choose a digital format right now.
Alazraki: Even the objects are very from now. Either they're objects that are very timeless and they don't represent a specific time, or they're just like objects of today.
Cunningham: And each of your backgrounds both weave in and out of art, fashion, media, history—
Sánchez-Kane: I’ve had my brand since 2016. I have a background in engineering and fashion, studied in Italy and immediately started. Maybe three years ago, I started working with this gallery in Mexico City that has a gallery in New York too called Kurimanzutto. But a lot of people kind of like try to separate my practices. I went to this pop-up that my friend did with this New York brand here in Mexico, and I was talking with the designer. I was buying these linen pants because I was going to the beach and she's like, “Oh, what do you do?” I was like, “I’m a fashion designer.” And I was like let's follow each other. She started to follow me and then she said, “But where's like, where's the clothing? I don't understand.” But even a fashion designer didn’t see that part. And I started thinking I have to do a collection! It’s ten years of Sánchez-Kane. But the body informs my practice. And it could be starting with the body as the plinth or dissolving and reminiscing the body. What I think gives new traits to my practice is how clothing can permeate any space, even a political or intimate space.
Alazraki: I'm an art historian and I have also been somewhere in between this liminal space in between fashion and arts, in which I constantly get this feeling that you kind of have to choose which way you're going. But these two practices feed off each other. I think that fashion is a really good medium to try things that could be released on the street. And in my practice and in my commercial work, I am mainly working with objects, not models. I take the lounge of how to make things desirable, something look expensive, something look sexy and show whatever you want to show. I think that with Bárbara, we both share the fact that we are super interested in fashion, but in the same way that we are fans of furniture. Fashion was the place we found in common. We go to the hardware store and get the same feeling. Fashion was what we found to link each other’s work because we are both in it in our own special way. I think of Bárbara’s brand and how she dresses with tailored suits where the commercial and art aspects of them live together in a way that is very unique and timeless. When she designs a product, it doesn’t necessarily use the logic of fashion. For me it’s a bit more polygamic because I work with so many different brands and get to see inside each one. So, in my commercial and personal work, if I, for example, take a shoe out of its context, it becomes mine. Como… it’s something that doesn’t rely on specific references; it’s more like a game.
Cunningham: So, in their own ways, both of your practices are responding to the body. But for Fortuna y Fetiche, there's not actually a physical form but you still get that sense that the objects in the images come from the body or have used by the body. How that came about, was any discussion of the body being used at all, or did you always envision the work as combining different objects?
Alazraki: The work started as a W editorial. Before that we had never used bodies. It was mostly like a ping pong of like objects, phrases; I would send a phrase to Bárbara, she would use it for one of her paintings. She would send me a bracelet and I will take pictures of it and send it back to her. Then for W Magazine, they gave us an apartment full of clothes, so we were like, “Okay, we have to use this now.” But then we realized during the shoot that the day we had the most fun was when it was just us in the studio just playing with things and we didn’t have to think of like, “This girl is naked, and we are tying her up with seatbelts,” where you need to mind that she’s conformable. The object game was more intimate between me and Bárbara.
Sánchez-Kane: But still, even if you’re dressing in front of the mirror, there’s always an exchange with the diffraction of the mirror even if you’re not trying the clothes on, just imagining. So, I do think that even if the body has an absence or doesn't fill out the shoes, the objects, the gloves, the “bodies” are still there. A lot of the objects were used before, and Sofía and I were playing with them in these polygons, so the body is there also. We laugh all the time that we felt like these cats that brought a dead animal to its owner. Like, “Oh look at this!” And there’s a dead bird with the owner saying, “No don’t kill the animal!” Or that the animal was trying to lay it at the altar of someone else. That’s how we started that dialogue. Having fun with it was the main conscious part of it because the shapes of the objects we were making were more unconscious. I always have collaborators, but we were really working together. This is going to be our first publication. And we are still friends. That’s the best part of it.
Alazraki: We were stuck in the studio for 15 days and we didn’t fight once. At some point we were like, “Are we going to get hit by a bus?!” For the W shoot before the actual shoot for the book, we were just looking at each other like, are we having too much fun? We just took all the solemnity out of it, like two blow-up dolls wearing Chanels and imagining how the people are Chanel will react to the blow-up dolls. I think that in the second stage of the project we didn't have that in mind at all because it was just about us and it was just about this game that we were playing. With a lot of love also, because we both treasure each other's work. I collaborate a lot also, but I've never done something 50-50 like a baby with someone. And the fact that we blurred every possible line of authorship is like—it doesn't really matter who did what. We don't care. And I think that that was also a very interesting game of when you have to do zero effort to leave your ego on the side because it just becomes very natural.
Cunningham: It sounds like a really ideal marriage. It’s funny that the model almost becomes like a third person in the marriage who may unintentionally cause problems. But you can also imply eroticism without the physical body present in the work, which in the instance of some of the pieces makes them more charged as the viewer is allowed to place their own fantasy onto it.
Alazraki: I don’t usually work with models. There’s always the absence of a body. And I saw Bárbara’s work in Spain, and it’s these hung military uniforms. Her clothes are sculptures so it doesn’t matter if someone’s wearing them; they have a life of their own when they’re hanging. These things too are full of tricks and games, so it doesn’t matter if there is a human wearing them.
Sánchez-Kane: Even if you go to a fashion exhibition there is an absence of the body. Even if it’s hyperrealist, you understand that it’s not human. I don’t know if I told you this, Sofía, but I was walking in the Meatpacking District and come to Diane von Furstenberg and it was the best scene. This woman was just sitting down and they were showing her this color palette and that color palette, she was looking at all these dresses and trying things out. Fabric everywhere. She went through this whole process sitting down without ever even touching the fabric. There’s something very valuable in how we go through this mental process of taking off our clothes without even the act of taking off our clothes—this conversionary practice inside your head that is piecing things together. You live in the present, but with the future, with the past, even if your body's static.
Alazraki: I think that we were very turned on by the infinite possibilities of multiple combinations. Bárbara was obsessed with this bag of rubber bands. It was going to appear but was just a plastic bag of rubber bands. We played with it a lot. And then we put a cat inside it and it was like, “Ok, no you are Bárbara’s pet, you have transformed yourself.” It’s a surrealistic exercise that you can be whatever you want. Like the inflated rubber gloves holding each other or the legs.
Sánchez-Kane: There's something very interesting you're saying about the pets or putting objects how we want it like a “ready-to-wearness” and sinister power of getting it to that place. Ready to be used. These landscapes of objects permeate and penetrate each other. And these objects have lives after what we use them for. Maybe you took them to a shoot or I took something back to my house. They’re going to keep living in different constellations.
Alazraki: They were not pieces meant to stay.
Cunningham: That’s very evocative of the ephemeral emotions we all feel when it comes to love, sadness, the deepest moments of connection in our lives. But you’re also playing with a really diverse array of objects where some resonate with more traditional “feminine” energies and others with “masculine” ones. I’m thinking of the arrowhead attached to the front of the female mannequin’s absent vagina with the duck looking down at the arrowhead. This sort of process of building things up with all these disparate parts is really like a transgressive queer one in how people build their own personas.
Sánchez-Kane: We’re also thinking about cruising. We were talking to Guillermo Osorno who is writing for us and he is a queer writer, and thinking about Gary Indiana and cruising the city, too—meeting all of these different characters, to fold them and unfold them, drape your body on them. It was like there fortune of finding all these objects. Sometimes we could go to a place and nothing would be calling our names. Or even meeting Sofía in Mexico through a mutual friend and now we’re expanding this universe we’ve made together. It’s mutated from these love letters existing in an ephemeral way through the process of dismantling and remaking what’s around us. It feels like the first in many collaborations.
Alazraki: And also, about the queerness, I think that both of our works used to be much more literal about that. And we found each other in a moment where we were constantly looking at each other asking, “Is this too much? Is this too literal?” In another moment of our lives, we would be all about dildos and strap-ons, and now we were a bit like we don't really need to talk about it. People will understand that it's also about that because it's us. There was actually a decision pushed by Bárbara because there was this picture of a transparent cat this was, how do you say?
Sánchez-Kane: He’s being impaled.
Alazraki: It’s a very sexual, violent image, but also very sexy. That was one of the ones that was supposed to go in the exhibition but she said, “I think we should put the one of the duck that looks down at its dick instead of this one.” And at first, I wasn’t sure because the other one was a better picture. Then we realized like it was so important to make that change because we took a very solemn image that also related a lot to discomfort and making someone feel like a bit uncomfortable and weird within the sexiness of something that is also very us. Because really, the one of the duck that is looking at its dick, it's us. If we would have a dick, we would be all day looking at it probably. It was a way of bringing something in of which says, yeah, we can laugh of ourselves also.
Cunningham: And that really makes you evoke the fantasy of looking and the desire of wanting something more abstract stronger anyway. It’s like when you’re walking home from someone’s house and imagining what just happened in your head. But then you have to come back to reality in live in the real moment, and I imagine editing these images down for the show and book was difficult.
Sánchez-Kane: We were always having this conversation. if I wasn't sure, I was like, “Gimme a day, 'll come with an honest answer.” And even if I was very fond of that image, I was very open to see it again while the commentary was there. And we waited. It wasn't something that we took for granted, you know? We knew we wanted 11 images the exhibition because its line this one-on-one moment with us. And then even in the dialogue of the book, we were thinking about how actually, there’s a third person there looking at us.
Alazraki: Collaborating in a way didn't feel like having to make a compromise. I would just be like, “Okay, I don't get it, but let's do it. Maybe I'll get it later.” And I’d watch you play with these weird little rubbers for 5 hours and then be like, “Let’s shoot this, let’s see how this looks.” And that was the most supernatural part of it all, was seeing how these things came to life in-between certainty and doubt. We weren’t alone.
Fortuna y Fetiche is on view at Dashwood Projects, 63 East 4th Street, New York, NY until May 24th, 2025. An accompanying book of the same title for the body of work will be published by Dashwood Books.