Sonia Martina is an Italian experimental photographer whose lens focuses on identity and female subjectivity.
She explores themes such as memory, presence, and disappearance through raw, analog self-portraiture in a perpetual attempt to reveal the relationship between the physical and the emotional.
“My work comes from a need to approach photography as something unstable, physical, and alive,” Martina states. Through the use of various techniques, including cafenol film development, “buried film” (the purposeful deterioration of film in soil), and unexpected juxtapositions, Martina’s photography becomes a multilayered manifesto for self-representation, curiosity, and the search for wonder.
She doesn’t view alterations, distortion, and erosion as signs of decay or corruption but as ways to free ideas and imagery from standardization and self-imposed borders, akin to peeling off burst wallpaper to reveal the original fresco or ripping up carpeting to discover the hardwood floor beneath. “Through these material interventions, I let the image move away from a fixed idea of representation,” she says.
Martina combines themes and techniques to fully embrace the element of experimentation and decay. Through vulnerable self-portraits, she embraces what is difficult to hold. “The body often appears in my images, but not as a simple portrait. It becomes a shell, a threshold, something exposed to transformation, erosion, and disappearance,” the artist explains.
The physical medium of photographic film is a vessel, a metaphor for the human body and its temporary nature, its wrinkles, stretch marks, grey hair, and sunspots. It is in a way unsettling how well the organic manipulation of a medium can translate the changes of body and psyche throughout a lifetime. “I am interested in the moment when a photograph stops behaving like clear evidence and becomes something more fragile: a trace, a residue, a surface affected by time, matter, memory, and loss of control,” Martina explains.
The artist doesn’t aim for perfection or an aesthetically pleasing outcome; instead, her artworks appear as everything else in life, “from contact, accident, waiting, manipulation, and decay […] not as a polished statement but as a sincere attempt to give form to what is unstable, intimate, and difficult to name.”
Read our “Roots” issue in full
The new theme, born as usual from what the submitted works held in common, is “ROOTS.” Within its pages, we present the artworks, creativity, and inspiration of 60 visual artists and writers from 21 countries around the world. Their diverse voices come together around a shared exploration of the return to where one belongs, the invisible threads of tradition that shape identity, and the ongoing reconnection with nature, others, and oneself.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
