Fine Art nominee

‘The Affective Archive’ is a study around memory, mortality and transience.

For the past year, I have been exploring my stepfather’s crumbling family home in France, which I feel deeply attached to, collecting objects which are imbued with history and memory. I seek to capture and enhance the natural presence and aura of these frayed belongings through photography, documenting them and giving them a second life.

The images of the children’s clothes are made without a camera, placing the antique garments directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light; the skin cells and body oils of their wearers seeping into the life size prints.

My practice is also concerned with negative space, the space that surrounds and defines an object. The duelling pistols are deliberately missing from their box in my work. Witnessing the tangible absence of something can be more poignant than seeing the thing itself, triggering suppressed emotions and the unconscious mind. Telling us more about who we are.

The act of photographing has become a bonding ritual for me, a gateway to both past and present, and a farewell with the fading house.

Alexandra Diez de Rivera is a Spanish-Argentine visual artist based in London working with photography. Her work deals with absence and psychologically ambiguous objects and spaces that are empty but charged.

Diez de Rivera’s work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, FT Magazine, Shanghai Daily, and Le Point and exhibited in galleries both nationally and internationally. She is represented in private collections in Europe, China, the US and UAE. Diez de Rivera was selected for 'London Grads Now 21' at the Saatchi Gallery, The Travers Smith CSR Art Programme 2021/ 2022 and The Pupil Sphere Showcase 2021. She was a finalist of the 2020 Critical Mass Competition and was invited to join the ‘Fair Art Fair’ community in June 2021. Diez de Rivera holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication and Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins University and a Master’s degree in Photography from the Royal College of Art.

Exhibitions include, 'After the High Tide' at Cromwell Place and 'London Grads Now 21' at the Saatchi Gallery in London.