Echo (2023)

By appropriating the formal conceit of Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971), Echo celebrates structuralist cinema while expanding its horizons. Unlike Frampton’s original, Echo reverses the action of the series of personal photographs, burning on a heating-coil, allowing the voiceover to precede the image discussed, but also to meet, at last, with its flowering, unburned state, before the cycle begins again with the ash of the succeeding photo. While Nostalgia featured the work of two men, Echo is a collaboration between two women. Bustillos’s display and commentary on a series of Polaroids functions as a love letter to her subject, Sarah Evans, and to the formative subject of experimental, photochemical film, as yet vital in an age of virtual image-making and social media.