Trance and Truce explores the metaphysics of the photographic act through communication with ancestors. Its guide is Dolores, my great-great-grandmother, a spiritualist who appeared in a dream; her story joins that of women shaped by restriction, silencing, and control. With archival photographs, digital images, and gum bichromate prints, a slow nineteenth-century process, photography becomes a second body, an oracular medium through which I traverse the psychological house inherited from my grandmothers. From it comes an oracle for the female psyche: not an ascent but a descent into the inherited, the unconscious, and the forbidden, toward sovereignty over our own territory. Magic and trance become resistance to capitalist disenchantment that disciplines bodies and extracts vital forces.
