For more than a decade, Laura San Segundo collected around two hundred photographs from the early 20th century showing portraits of women with their dogs. In Los Cuerpos que Despedimos (The Bodies We Say Goodbye To), these images lose their original context, confronting us with reflections on touch, contact, loss, and mourning: the intimate, but also social, way in which we say goodbye to someone.
Through the use of archival materials, photographic and moving images, writing, and performance, San Segundo reflects on how we represent animal mourning, on the bodies we say goodbye to, and on the role that images play in this ritual. The artist explores the possibility of an image as a place of affection and as a space of contact between species, about the emotional place in which the human body is transformed into impulse, smell, and touch, becoming equal to the animal.