Adriana Lestido shows her Arctic in Mendoza at the Focus festival.

Lestido brings the Arctic to a Mendoza winery

The Argentine photographer Adriana Lestido is showing a series of images taken in the Arctic Circle inside the Huentala Wines winery, in the Gualtallary area of Mendoza. The show was presented during the Focus International Photography Festival, held from October 29 to 31, and it stays open after the event closed. According to Clarín, the works belong to her project Errante. La conquista del hogar (Wandering. The Conquest of Home).

Focus reached its fourth edition and was the first one organized in Argentina, because the previous three took place in José Ignacio, Uruguay. The invited photographers included Víctor Galeano and Sofía López Mañán, along with Musuk Nolte and Lestido herself. During her stay in Mendoza, she also spoke with students and young photographers who attended her activities at the festival.

Five solo trips to the Arctic Circle

The photos came out of five trips around the Arctic Circle that Lestido made alone, over a year and a half, from January 2019 to May 2020. The photographer says her premise was to work in extreme and unfamiliar places, with nobody accompanying her.

The images that reached Mendoza show no people. There is an aurora borealis above snowy stones and bare branches, and also a small settlement of low buildings with dark roofs, with mountains behind and a strip of water. The houses look tiny against that enormous landscape, and no human figure hints at how life goes on there.

The project also produced a film released in 2022, photography books and personal diaries. According to Clarín, the film does not follow the rules of the travel documentary: there is no narration that explains everything, and the camera lets the images and sounds build their own meaning.

From portraits to landscape: Lestido's path

Lestido was born in Buenos Aires and began her career as a press photographer. Her first jobs were at Página/12, at La Voz and at the DyN agency. Among the honors she has gathered are two fellowships, the Guggenheim and the Hasselblad, the Platinum Konex and a lifetime achievement award given by the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes.

For decades she portrayed women, teenage mothers and family bonds in black and white, and those series placed her among the central figures of Argentine documentary photography. Madres e hijas (Mothers and Daughters), made between 1995 and 1999, was in her words the last work about relationships between women.

Her search then moved toward nature. In Mexico she walked through forests with Patricia Mendoza, made the series Interior and in 2012 spent a month and a half on two Antarctic islands, reached in small boats. About those trips she said they were “very hard and beautiful”.

Time as working material

Lestido usually chooses slow shutter speeds, because that way the image keeps a trace of movement instead of stopping it completely. In the night photo of the aurora, the long exposure shows lights drifting across the sky. “I like to feel time passing,” the photographer says.

Clarín stresses that interest in her work arrives when artificial intelligence can create realistic-looking images without anyone crossing a landscape or waiting for the right light. Lestido avoids giving instructions about tools and argues that what matters is being honest with one's own feelings. For her, every project has to teach her something new.

If you go

The show is at the Huentala Wines winery in Gualtallary, in Mendoza province. The Focus festival ran from October 29 to 31 and, according to Clarín, Lestido's photographs remain on view after those dates.

The report does not say how long it stays open or what admission costs, so it is wise to confirm with the winery or the festival organizers before traveling. To approach the project from another side, the film that came out of the same journey, released in 2022, crosses the Arctic with a different eye.