Sonnet XLII

This 2021 photographic work by Rocío Bueno from her Renascence project called “Soneto XLII” is an archival photograph intervened with rose petals. Inkjet fine art print with pigmented inks. Ilford Studio Matt 235g paper. Gold wood and glass frame. Single copy 3/5 Renascence is a search and an encounter with a female reference from the last century. A choral photographic project around the figure of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the most influential women in 20th century poetry. The work is an act of re-discovery to make visible and bring to the present a forgotten female reference, in a round trip, of identification, resonance, reality and fiction, in which the poet becomes a mirror that allows me to go beyond the reflected image. I have had the collaboration of 8 photographers who have made 8 self-portraits inspired by Millay's poems. The story is built in an imagined space, where reality and fiction, past and present, are mixed in two parallel worlds that are intertwined. Childhood, the relationship with the mother, artistic creation, free and bohemian life, independence, love without gender, being or not being a mother, the body, pain, nature and death, are the underlying themes.