The Influence Machine explores the construction of the self as the result of a systemic network of influences that begins in childhood and is perpetuated in social life. Through portraits that juxtapose child and adult, the work situates the early years of life as a structural origin where psychic patterns are inscribed that later interact with symbols of power, social imaginaries, and political and economic mechanisms.

 

The series does not propose a rigid determinism: childhood is both origin and potential, continuity and the possibility of escape. Some individuals, shaped by the system, come to embody and reproduce it, in turn influencing the construction of collective subjectivity.

 

Hyperrealistic language operates as a strategy of seduction and discomfort, reflecting the aesthetics of the very system it represents. The work does not judge; it exposes. It poses an open question to the viewer: to what extent does childhood determine us, and toward what forms of power or repetition does it lead us?