Un nudo que también es una estrella

Shutter, directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, is a horror film where a girl’s ghost manifests as shadows in photographs. Released during the transition from analog to digital photography, the film highlights how analog technology, like 35mm film, becomes a medium closer to the spiritual. The use of analog photography nowadays is less about documentation and more about evoking the past to coexist with the present.

From this idea comes A Knot That Is Also a Star, a project based on a found archive of slides taken in the 1950s and 60s in Querétaro, Mexico, by amateur photographer Federico Lozada. Paired with an intervened version of the Shutter soundtrack, the project distorts Lozada’s portraits and landscapes by filtering the projector’s light through various objects, creating moving shadows.

Gradually, the images become increasingly abstract, destabilizing the archive and transforming it. This process acknowledges the past but also alters it, opening the possibility of constructing a future not from hope but from mourning—because mourning is how we hold a ghost. As Derrida suggests in Specters of Marx, mourning is an ongoing task that contains the spirit of the past while creating a new space—a kind of dam that regulates how the past filters into the present.