Joan Fontcuberta’s new project Blow up Blow up takes as its starting-point the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, in which the director explores the boundary between objective reality— the reality one might be tempted to liken to photography—and illusion, through an unorthodox murder.
Using photograms of a 35mm duplicate of the film, Fontcuberta continues to blow up the negatives beyond the point where Thomas, the main character, stopped.
Through enlargements that exceed our intelligibility level, any reference to the original scene is lost; they yield all the information intrinsic to the filmic medium (the grain, specks, scratches, imperfections and so on).
Fontcuberta thus leads us to the degree zero of filmic equipment; passing through every possible signification, he pinpoints the character of representation itself—a tension between event and representation, between document and fiction, between experience and image.