Positive Disintegration, the first monograph by Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein, comprises an extended version of her acclaimed series Our Life In The Shadows. The work is influenced by the pursuit of the American Dream lifestyle in the Western World and contemporary practices of leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, eternal youth, and psychological sequels generated in our everyday private life. The project seeks to evoke a mood of isolation, desperation, vanishing, and anxiety, through fragmented images that exist both in a fictional way and a real one.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. We have left behind the immunological era, and now experience the neuronal era characterized by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome, and bipolar disorder. Drawing inspiration from his theories, Klein places this contradiction at the center of her autobiographical project.
The constant need to escape, to always look outside. Her characters find themselves almost anonymous, melting in places, vanishing into them, constantly looking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate and exhausted. Constantly in an odd line between trying and feeling defeated.
Tania Franco Klein was born in 1990 and began her photography praxis while gaining her BA Architecture in Mexico City, which took her to pursue a Master in Photography at the University of the Arts London. Her work is highly influenced by a fascination with social behavior and contemporary practices.
Positive Disintergration is available via Editions Bessard.
