Madre de un Ave

A visual essay by Manuel Bianchi Ferrand for Glamcult #143, the DEEPREAL issue

Manuel Bianchi Ferrand, the Peruvian art director behind Madre de un Ave, wants you in a state of surreality while witnessing the photographic account of his manifesto of chaos. “The most dangerous idea I put forward in this project was violence and human vulnerability,” Bianchi Ferrand articulates his process. Orthodox values and understandings of fashion, power, gender, and cultural belonging melt like silver in a crucible. Bianchi Ferrand’s dialectical dance of oppositional aesthetics, of the sacred and the profane, elegantly dilates the aesthetics of the saturated online ether — it is surreality, a combination of desire and the repressed that whispers through the colours. The simulacra extends, or maybe reality subsumes the unreal. The characters are the disruptive fire burning the metal, and Bianchi Ferrand’s yearning for the “theatricality” of life animates them. “It was a year when I was dealing with sobriety, taking responsibility for my mental health, and trying to heal. My mind went to many places during that process, and I was able to manifest different mental states through these characters,” Ferrand shares. This visual exemplar of automatic writing is Bianchi Ferrand’s testament to his homeland of Peru, where the artist learnt “to see beauty in chaos, danger and decadence.” He emphasises that “it’s not about romanticising it, but about finding beauty despite the context and using imagination to build new universes,” that dismantle c/overt binaries. Madre de un Ave‘s new world brings together uncanny and striking creations from local Peruvian designers and artists to tell a collective collision of desire, intimacy, brutality, and dreams. Through his narrative, Bianchi Ferrand obliges us “to think about all the possibilities that exist when telling a story,” to let go of fear. Gaze with one eye open and one eye closed, letting your unconscious spill over the pages of soft madness and seeping transgression.