When you are part of a population accustomed to being studied from an anthropological lens -woman, queer, Latinx-, which almost always ends in a one-dimensional theorization of you, the image as a subversion of language becomes important. Photography as an epistemological, political and methodological position to meet eyes that begin to create imaginaries and new perspectives from an expansion of consciousness. “URDIMBRE: A visual tribute to identity” is a series of stories and portraits that show the complexity of these identities.
Bolivia is a country of diverse cultures where each one has a particular way of reappropriating globalization through the ritualism that characterizes us. The Bolivian identity is full of mysticism and symbolism that is evident in customs, clothing, language, art, etc.; This is continually adapted to contemporary global culture that develops among infinite stimuli and representations. This exhibition seeks to demonstrate this process through the works of three Bolivian photographers who portray the resignification of being a woman and being queer, from their own narrative.
The first artist portrays indigenous women from the Andean region in their typical clothing, submerged in water -an element that symbolizes renewal-, manifesting grandeur, beauty, strength and plenitude; muses that break patterns in a society that views them from a colonial gaze. The following artist shows the richness of Bolivian female identity that breaks with cultural and religious binaries and questions the patriarchal system, with imposing scenes of women with clothing, objects and expressions that reaffirm the particularity of their context.
The third artist invites us to discover the most intimate spaces of people of different genres. The aesthetic revolves around the Amazonian jaguar and/or the tiger as a Latin American colloquial symbol. For her, the persecution of this symbol/tiger/jaguar personifies the process/grief of facing insecurities and vulnerability and turning them into strengths, when they return as authenticity and freedom. The photographers work from a legitimate sensitivity by generating direct conversations with the people portrayed, in addition to including people from their own family and self-portraits in the respective series, suggesting a kind of self-reference.
This exhibition has approximately 40 photographs, 1 video and 1 sound installation, arranged in the room and accompanied by texts resulting from those conversations, -“Urdimbre” is the conjunction of threads within a loom, threads that intersect to create infinite shapes and patterns. Weaving is representative of Bolivia, the rituality of uniting the material, the textures, the colors, the iconography, symbolize existence itself - therefore, it is an invitation to a mutual nurturing of different times and different spaces, where it is proposed to move away from the notion of identity as something static, something resulting, something that is 'had', and perceiving it as a continuous state of knowledge and recognition of our stories where there is a connecting thread that builds us collectively and leads us to find ourselves both in our contemporaries as in our ancestors. Identity as the rituality of the very experience of being/existing.