Nocturno. OFF Festival of PhotoEspaña 2025

Nocturno brings together the work of artists Cyrus Mahboubian and Evelyn Sosa, curated by Piero Tomassoni and Claudia Paola Pérez. Presented as part of the OFF Festival of PhotoEspaña 2025, the exhibition explores themes of night, memory, and intimacy through distinct photographic practices.

Cyrus Mahboubian, Ghost (Swan), 2019. Unique Polaroid.

Cyrus Mahboubian, based in London, works with analogue processes, notably expired Polaroid film, to explore the temporal and material limits of photography. Rejecting digital manipulation, his practice foregrounds slowness and impermanence as both method and philosophy. His work belongs to a nocturnal tradition—one that escapes the rational, the visible, and the accelerated. These images do not seek to represent the world, but rather to initiate the viewer into its hidden rhythm. They contain the invisible architectures of longing, erosion, and memory. Their substance is time—a folded, mineral time, more akin to geology than to narrative.

Evelyn Sosa, based in Havana, has dedicated over fifteen years to the portrait genre, with a particular focus on the female portrait. For Sosa, the human face is both the most intimate and the most revealing landscape—a territory that changes with time and simultaneously maps the spirit beneath the skin. Her portraits are not only visual records but also narratives of love, friendship, and identity. Through a restrained visual language, she captures a quiet intensity that reflects both personal and collective experience.