MADRE/Padre by Valeria Posada-Villada
It all started with a cup of coffee in Cochabamba’s café Elevaté. Vanessa’s taciturn yet graceful expression had sparked something in Marisol Mendez that she for a while had been longing. ‘Can I make a portrait of you?’, Mendez managed to ask once Vanessa came to hand her the drink. Vanessa’s first reaction was disbelief. Requests like these are not to be taken lightly, images can be treacherous, turning against their models, employed for means beyond agreed. Mendez’s genuine interest in the archetypes of Maria and Maria Magdalene, nonetheless, persuaded her. And so, Vanessa became an icon. Clad in a cream and gold-threaded cloak, in front of antique mobiliary, and sporting camp leather boots, her figure paid tribute to the Marian figures to be found in Potosí, Cuzco, or Quito such as Virgen del Cerro, Nuestra Señora de Belén, and Nuestra Señora de Guápulo. Virgins whose triangular shape evoked the peaks of the New World, their fertility and motherly deity Christians could trap but not domesticate.
This encounter gave Mendez the impulse needed to create her Madre series. She reconnected with her native city whilst seeking to get a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman in this Andean territory. ‘I chose to start with a cliché, rather than to end with it’, Mendez argued, acknowledging the colonial weight of the two archetypes she chose as starting points of her Madre project. ‘The conversations I had with each of the portrayed and the research I did on my family history helped me complicate my initial findings, challenging the images and fixed ideas we associate with womanhood’.
The editorial conception of Mendez’s photobook makes this intention palpable. Her images do not follow a linear pattern, a series of easily decipherable connections. Instead, we encounter a game of tensions through which Bolivia’s syncretic reality emerges. Outspoken images of Oruro carnival masks and folk dances of pre-Columbian origin, such as the Diablada and Morenada, coexist side by side with more introspective images, such as a solitary flame slowly burning atop a mountain or the crackled and silky surface of an egg. We are thrust into a flow of motions, sensations, and figures where the past merges with the present and present evokes past.
This ‘serious game’, according to Mendez, also allowed her to call into question the sexist and racist undertones connected to these archetypes.‘Take, for example, the diptych I created of my grandmother and La Salo’s image’, she states. Here she references the black and white, à-la-film-noir portrait made of her grandmother in the 1960s and the one she made of the Indigenous midwife Salomé, standing amongst a red halo proudly wearing her Potosí dress. ‘I am not sure my grandmother would have appreciated such dialogue; it surely transgresses her conservative social values. However, both images and life stories complement each other and are much part of my family’s history, as well as that of others in Bolivia’.
Two other snapshots Mendez included in the book further reinforce this message. They feature the Indigenous housemaids who used to work for her family. In one of the photos, housemaid Aleja sits shyly next to Mendez’s grandmother. In the oldest snapshot — that of her mother — the housemaid is seen preparing food, her silhouette barely visible. Her presence is only discernible through her apron and the black braid that pops up in the left corner of the photograph, but there she stands, representing the nurturing spirit of mothers, in a long-overdue recognition.
Through personal and visual encounters with the stories of the women around her, Mendez has been able to create a photobook that is eclectic, intimate yet socially resonant, and simultaneously public but uniquely individual. The thoughts and emotions shared have also spurred her interest to engage with the close-knit counterpart of MADRE, that is, the father figure. A set of letters written by Mendez’s grandfather during a stay in Mexico City in the 1980s, addressed to his two sons, are the main point of departure of this new project entitled Padre. She has been delving into the authoritative, restrained but candid language enclosed in these letters and attempting to give them a visual form. Contrary to the making of MADRE, however, Mendez has found it harder to strike conversations with strangers, to exchange thoughts of an experience she herself has not embodied, and to visually reflect on an archetype more traditionally bounded to concepts such as weight, power, or structure.
‘Practically speaking, it has even been hard to make dual portraits, some fathers and sons rather prefer posing as individuals’, argues Mendez. Nonetheless, these discoveries are feeding her work and are giving way to imagery that plays with shadows, debris, and natural elements, evoking local feasts and historical events such as the Ichapekene Piesta in San Ignacio de Moxos or the Chaco War (1932–1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay.
Her path will be made by walking.