MADRE by Elisa Medde
During the summer of 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised an exhibition titled Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum, showcasing works spanning 100 years of photography history derived from the eponymous collection, created by the North American collector starting in 1983. Triggered by a generous donation of works gifted by the collector to MoMA in honour of Roxana Marcoci, who also curated it, the exhibition had the ambition to reframe “restrictive notions of womanhood, exploring the connections between photography, feminism, civil rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and queer liberation”, asking “How have women artists used photography as a tool of resistance?”. The show included images from a wide array of female-identifying artists whose photographs “attest to the overlapping histories of colonialism, ethnographic practice, and patriarchy in Latin America”, including many Latin American examples: from Graciela Iturbide to Flor Garduño, Ana Mendieta, Marta María Pérez Bravo, and Mariana Yampolsky. The webpage devoted to the show on MoMA’s website quoted Argentinian artist Silvia Kolbowski in 1983 saying: “Society consumes both the good girl and the bad girl, (...) but somewhere between those two polarities, space must be made for criticality.”
The contraposition between “the good girl and the bad girl” is powerfully, deeply ingrained in Western society - probably the most widely spread dichotomy of all. The complexities of femalehood have been largely wiped away by Christianity and Catholicism, simplified and polarised by the readings of the figures of Eve, Lilith, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, with the latter becoming the embodiment of Christian devotion defined as repentance. The depiction of these literary figures, with their complicated interpretations, fuelled the images of the binary, oversimplified vision of femininity that largely contributed to the foundations of gendered power structures, benevolent patriarchy, and repressed sexualities, mostly disempowering women. They constituted the literal model over which womanhood has been shaped; a model that forged itself through internalisation brought by religion and colonialism over the centuries, at the expense of ancestral and indigenous visions and identities. As with many other cultural and identity aspects, Christian and Catholic iconographies have been built over pagan and ancestral ones through syncretic processes, creating complex and fascinating unions and fusions.
Latin America, identified as the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language, constitutes an incredible conglomerate of such religious and cultural syncretic processes due to the experience of conquest and colonisation by the Spaniards and the Portuguese from the late 15th century onwards.
Throughout the whole continent, Catholicism has grafted itself on pre-Colombian spiritualities and pantheons, with iconography following along. From santería to Candomblé, to the devotion towards La Santa Muerte, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and the general identification of Pachamama (Mother Earth) with the Virgin Mary - there is a strong and deep red line that roots Catholic beliefs into pre-Hispanic ancestral spirituality and ultimately models and visions. The feminine ecosystem is, as one would easily guess, at the center of it, with photography playing an important, yet to be fully grasped, role. Going through the edit of these images, I often thought of Graciela Iturbide’s photograph Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, from 1979, part of her seminal series Juchitán de la mujeres (1979-1989), and how much her work (amongst others) paved the way for the incredible bloom and variety in contemporary female photography in Latin America.
It is peculiar to notice how much of cultural and religious syncretism, up to the title of this book, rotates around the word Madre, which we translate as ‘mother’ and yet has paradoxically little to do with factual motherhood and any childbearing role. It connects much more with a larger idea of origin, source, root, primordial life origin and creation. Madre is here almost a synonym of woman, or better yet, of womxn - as the binary conception of gender is itself a result of a similar oversimplification process. In many indigenous cultures, female goddesses are complex, multifaceted beings. There is benevolence and fury in them, there is kindness and ferocious violence at the same time - as needed or wished. There is right and wrong, nurture and rupture, life and death, and most important of all - the whole spectrum in between. There is no good or bad girl, as they embody with their beings that complex space for criticality that we strive for so much nowadays, struggling and suffering in having to reduce our complex, rich, and variegated feminine being to a duality that only benefits a patriarchal structure of power and control.
When Marisol Mendez started working on the images presented in this book, it was largely to address a discomfort. As often happens when experiencing a path of diaspora, the moment of returning home creates and sparks some sort of revolution, triggering a chain of events. Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in her seminal 1991 essay Pachakuti: The historical horizons of internal colonialism wrote: “The restoration of the cosmic order - what a linear perception of time condemns as ‘turning back the clock of history’ - is expressed by the Andean concept of nayrapacha: a past capable of redeeming the future, of turning the tables.”
In the case of Mendez, turning back home in Bolivia after years spent abroad allowed her to see clearly, perhaps more than ever, how much the visual representation of womxn in her own country was a product of a problematic, oversimplified, patriarchal and colonial gaze - one that could not and would not offer that space for criticality and variety of representation that her community and culture would require and deserve. She thus set out to elaborate a project of collaborative portraiture, exploring representation and how context informs and contaminates it, in which each session would start with a conversation: how would each sitter wish to be represented? What was their perception of the juxtaposition between the Virgin Mary and Maria Magdalene? Was it possible to reappropriate the loaded realm of symbols and visual elements of religious representation, so as to reinvent a representation ecosystem that would move away from the sexist orthodoxy of Catholicism and be able to redeem the future, turn the tables? In her own words from an earlier interview published on LensCulture: “Often relegated to the extremes embodied by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, Bolivian womxn grow to both defy and perpetrate traditional gender roles. I wanted the images to allude to these contradictions. As a result, womxn in MADRE are mother matriarchs, devout witches, emancipated wives, devilish virgins, dancing widows. They’re unconquerable, ungovernable, and undetermined.”
The portraits created by Mendez in collaboration with her sitters are intertwined in the edit with landscapes, still lifes, and most importantly, archival images. Such elements come from her own family history, depicting only female members. These images are activated by alteration, some elements are hidden while some others are exposed and enhanced - in an interplay that puts opacity and transparency at the center of her own lineage and history, providing a framework for redemption. The importance of such images in the narrative is crucial, as it is paired with the active involvement of Mendez’s own mother in all the stages of the project, contributing to a collective re-mothering process that tastes like acceptance, solidarity, understanding, and again - redemption.
The world of symbols re-created in Mendez’s images alludes and subverts, suggests and hides, includes and decontextualises. Each element becomes function, and each function becomes signifier of a higher purpose, of a larger conversation. While the iconography she employs and creates allows for large readability and welcomes the viewer, opacity plays a fundamental role in this collection of images. There are areas and moments and levels in which we, or some, are not welcome - creating a deeper stage of conversation within its iconology that contributes to its complexity, of course, and to its richness - that space for criticality so longed for.
Here, past, present, and future collide, defying a linear perception of time in favour of a renewed, rediscovered, and reappropriated nayrapacha where complexity, diversity, and recognition thrive and take space through visual representation and celebration.