Operational Beings
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Operational Beings >
When people know they are being seen, they perform.
They inhale, expand, adjust themselves to the gaze.
They present a face that is favorable, controlled, legible.
When people do not feel seen, something shifts. The body exhales. It stops representing and begins operating.
Operational Beings is a photographic exploration of those moments when individuals are no longer performing themselves, but simply functioning. Moving, sweating, collapsing, connecting, dissolving. It is an attempt to portray people not as they wish to be perceived, but as they exist when self-awareness loosens its grip.
The rave scene offers the perfect environment for this transformation. Music overwhelms language. Stroboscopic light fragments vision. Darkness interrupts recognition. The collective trance induced by rhythm and repetition dissolves self-consciousness.
In this suspended state, people are not presenting identities, they are inhabiting bodies. Attention turns inward. The body takes over.
Here, faces soften, gestures lose intention, expressions escape control. Desire, exhaustion, joy, and vulnerability surface without explanation. People touch, hide, scream, rest, disappear into movement.
These are not performances: they are operations.
The body regulating itself through sound, proximity, and sensation.
Photographed between Mexico City and Melbourne from 2021 to 2025, Operational Beings does not attempt to describe the rave as an event or a subculture.
Instead, it attends to what happens when individuals are momentarily freed from the obligation to appear.
What emerges is not a mask, but its absence. Not identity as image, but presence as process.
Operational Beings proposes a quieter truth: that the most honest portrait of a person emerges not when they are seen, but when they are free to disappear into what they are doing, when they stop showing themselves and begin simply to live.