Arturo Pizá Malvido

Arturo Pizá Malvido | Tlaxcala

Result of the workshop "Light" given by Eniac Martínez of the Fundación Pedro Meyer November 2012

Arturo Pizá Malvido (Tlaxcala, 1969) is the son of a Sicilian father and a mother from Tamaulipas. He was born flat-footed, with geographic tongue and an IUD incrusted in the cranial suture between the frontal and parietal lobes.

He studied Communication (UIA, D.F.) and has a specialty in audiovisual media (Claustro de Sor Juana, D.F.). He has spent time in Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico City and Veracruz, the state where he now lives. He has been an announcer, writer and producer of advertising and cultural projects in different media.

He was a professor of photography and digital images at the Gestalt School of Design in Xalapa, Veracruz. He currently directs his private photographic study in which he explores portraits and nudes at the same time as his advertising work.

INTERVIEW

ZZ. Arturo, you have a Sicilian father and a mother from Tamaulipas, which is an unusual combination. How have your origins marked the way you carry out your projects?

A.P. I suppose they did to some extent although, to be frank, I never think about crabs that talk like Brando in a Coppola move. My father was a pilot and blew himself to bits in a plane doing mid-air tricks; that did mark me for life.

ZZ. Are you working on a personal project at the moment? Which one?

A.P. The usual one, nudes and the limits of what are permissible. I do “erotic” photographs (in inverted commas) when time and opportunity allow. I have persisted in Bataille’s “unbridgeable gap.”

ZZ. You have been an announcer, writer and producer of advertising and cultural projects, which should make it easy for you to tell stories with pictures, shouldn’t it?

A.P. The visual and the written, pictures and words are different languages that should not be at odds with each other, just different and sometimes complementary. There are obviously things or situations that are impossible to describe but there are also beautifully formed sentences and paragraphs and any constructed or incidental image added to them tend to disappoint.

ZZ. The workshop you attended at the Pedro Meyer Foundation focused on “light.” How do you think shadow forms part of your photographic discourse?

A.P. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, shadows are like the silence in music. Light and shadow complement each other. One is impossible without the other. It's dialectic and contrapuntal. What I have tried to explain, rather clumsily, was the core of what we had to explore in Eniac Martínez’ workshop.

ZZ. Tell us about a photo you would like to have taken but didn't for some reason.

A.P. I’d rather describe a scene of which there are no photographs, but which would be bitterer than Marat's death. It would be Emil Cioran as a small boy and his few friends playing football with a human skull. That would be it.