Melanie McWhorter
Showing posts with label Melanie McWhorter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melanie McWhorter. Show all posts
Melanie McWhorter
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Reviewed by Melanie McWhorter
Gardening at Night
Photographs by Cig Harvey
Schilt Publishing, 2015. 144 pp., 6x8¼x¾".
Some years ago I saw Nan Goldin speak to an audience of over 200 Italians in Rome. Near the beginning of the talk, she questioned the mostly non-native English speakers, “Do you believe photography is truth?” Not receiving much of a reply from the attentive, but bewildered watchers, she asked again, “Really… everyone believes that photography is truth?” Still no answer. The lack of response was likely because of Goldin’s intimidating approach, the lack appropriate venue for debate or the mere language issue, but her challenge to the notion of photography as truth or, at the least, as an accurate representation of the moment contained within the frame has remained with me in my exploration of photography. Many theorists and academics have debated the photograph’s place as a factual document, and this lowly book review will not venture into the disputes about whether there is truth in photography, but I will recognize and admire its capacity to tell the story of one person’s life through a series of real and staged images. Cig Harvey has an uncanny ability to use photographs to create a sincere, romantic and down-to-earth visual autobiography. Her first monograph You Look at Me Like an Emergency and her more recent photobook Gardening at Night share her story and her truth.
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Reviewed by Melanie McWhorter
The Art of Ruin
Photographs by Robert Stivers
Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, 2015. 54 pp., 26 color illustrations, 16x20".
A few years ago, I encountered a man outside of a darkroom. I was quietly sloshing away in the pitch-blackness illuminated by red light, using chemicals to fix the silver halides, developing, washing and fixing my image, and left the darkroom to see what had appeared, moving into the light like all silver gelatin printers do. There stood Robert Stivers, gazing at a 16x20 inch toned image: a beautiful, close-up, warm-toned photograph of honeybees. He talked about how he would print it darker, lighter, or maybe color it with coffee or tea. He was inexact in his process, but the aesthetics of his photographs benefited from his freedom.
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Reviewed by Melanie McWhorter
T: A Typology of T-Shirts
Photographs by Susan A Barnett.
Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2014. 160 pp., illustrated, 6¾x9¼".
Markings are a very personal thing for me. I have no tattoos and I have no bumper stickers. Sounds quite boring, but it is really a commitment issue and I hope not a sign of my lackluster personality. What do I want to say that is important enough for me to use my body or vehicle as an advertisement of my beliefs? Clothing, now that would be easier; it is not permanent. The T-shirt is a handy a piece of clothing used for this personal declaration. Despite the short-lived nature of their manifesto (provided that the wearer changes into a fresh clothing the next day), the T-shirt’s markings can express much about the wearer. I often wonder, who are these people who want to bear their soul, open themselves up to ridicule or hostility and openly declare what they feel and think on a piece of clothing? Susan Barnett is also intrigued. In 2009 she started to collect these shirts, not the object themselves, but photographs of the backs of the shirts on the wearer in closely cropped environmental portraits. She has hundreds of images from the United States and Europe in this collection and her new book, T: A Typology of T-Shirts published by Dewi Lewis, shows people of varying ages, races and backgrounds in the United States and Europe broadcasting their right to free speech and expression by donning the comfortable and pervasive fashion accessory.
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| T: A Typology of T-Shirts. By Susan A Barnett. Dewi Lewis, 2014. |
T: A Typology of T-Shirts is, as the title says, a typology. Barnett shows one after the other, individuals proudly showing their style and often their words, slogan or mantra. The word pride reveals itself prominently in her work. Each subject stands tall in posture, likely straighter than their normal stance. They profess through her work, tantalizing us with not just what we see, but also what is left out. It is the ‘what’ that Barnett gives us, but we want to know the who, why, and occasionally the where. Yet, where she excels is her portraiture. Despite the curiosity that the unseen evokes, she presents more about these individuals from the back than conceivably the front and, more poignantly, the eyes, could reveal.
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| T: A Typology of T-Shirts. By Susan A Barnett. Dewi Lewis, 2014. |
Barnett has done her job as a typologist, recording one after another. What the project says as a whole references contemporary society more than the individual. There is strength in her numbers. While her photographs have the power to sit solitarily on the page or hang on the wall and inspire reflections, thoughts, or giggles, the groupings highlight contemporary fashion, politics and popular culture in the United States and Europe since the first decade of the 21st century. The book is where Barnett and publisher Dewi Lewis get to play with her work. In the opening image a young man stands in a concrete-filled urban setting clad in black shorts with a multi-key lanyard clipped to his pants and visible portions of a black snake winding around his arm, wearing a black sleeveless T that reads “Life’s Too Short To Wear Boring Clothes”. This image is followed by a man in a park wearing a white sleeveless shirt reading, “FASHION IS SO OUT.” The final in the triptych shows a young woman whose shirt states “Maybe Not”. That sets the mood for this book.
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| T: A Typology of T-Shirts. By Susan A Barnett. Dewi Lewis, 2014. |
That sequence opens to the next twenty spreads of T-shirt imagery with religious icons, Magritte inspired surrealist designs and animal patterns. With the final of these graphic plates the tone starts to change as we see angel wings with two .45 caliber handguns conspicuously pointing downward in the design. Themes that follow deal with killing, redemption, misogyny, oppression, anti-violence, money. Warhol, Picasso and Haring’s work all make an appearance along with Elvis, King Kong and Mickey Mouse. There is sex and more sex, drugs and more drugs, death metal, and energy alternatives. Jesus and Virgin Mary mix with Ganesh and Krishna. In one spread Jesus looks skyward on the black T-shirt of a man spending a day at the beach, contrasting with Marilyn Manson seeming to model the same gesture on the shirt of a young woman, maybe on holiday at the very same beach. The sequencing is easy, but brilliant. The opening spreads set the stage for lightness, fun, humor and fashion, but the meat of the book prompts serious conversations about difficult topics through exploring ourselves and our neighbors. In the end, the tone shifts again to optimism with the “Yes We Can” motto that symbolized change for a nation just before the beginning of this project. Filled with thematic groupings and diptychs playing with color, design and ideas, T: A Typology of T-Shirts is cleverly designed to provoke emotion, thought and possibly discussion and curiosity.
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| T: A Typology of T-Shirts. By Susan A Barnett. Dewi Lewis, 2014. |
Neither typologies nor portraiture are new, but Barnett uses both of these photographic approaches to create a visual language of her own. The book finishes with words from the three shirts: “No Pictures Please,” Leave Me Alone,” and “Do Not Copy My Style.” Indeed, Susan Barnett.—MELANIE MCWHORTER
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Melanie McWhorter has managed photo-eye's Book Division for 16 years and is a regular contributor to the photo-eye Blog. She has been interviewed about photography in numerous print and online publications including PDN, The Picture Show and LayFlat, has judged the prestigious photography competitions Daylight Photo Awards and Fotografia: Fotofestival di Roma’s Book Prize, has reviewed portfolios at Fotografia, Photolucida, Review Santa Fe and PhotoNOLA, and taught and lectured at numerous venues.
Read More Book Reviews
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Touching Strangers. By Richard Renaldi.
Aperture, 2014.
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This week's Book of the Week pick comes from photo-eye Book Division manager Melanie McWhorter, who has selected Touching Strangers by Richard Renaldi published by Aperture.
In video #45 of our In-Print Photobook series, Melanie McWhorter shares with us The Course of History by Bart Michiels published by Damiani.
In video #45 of our In-Print Photobook series, Melanie McWhorter shares with us In the Beginning No Bird Sang self-published by Anais Lopez.
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| A New York Minute and From Galilee to the Negev by Stephen Shore. Published by Phaidon. |
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| The Photobook: A History Volume III.
By Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. Phaidon, 2014.
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The Photobook: A History Volume III
Reviewed by Melanie McWhorter
By Martin Parr and Gerry Badger
Phaidon, London, 2014. 320 pp., 900 color illustrations, 11½x9¾".
It is difficult to create a complete survey of any medium. Even a tome on the history of the photobook that covers work as early as Anna Atkin’s handmade publication of cyanotypes of British algae from 1843 cannot fully document the entire photobook history. Yet, Gerry Badger and Martin Parr attempt to cover what they consider some of the most important books since the inception of photography in The Photobook: A History.
In video #41 of our In-Print Photobook series, Melanie McWhorter shares with us Birds of the West Indies by Taryn Simon published by Hatje Cantz.
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In video #39 of our In-Print Photobook series, Melanie McWhorter shares with us The End of La Belle Époque self-published by Misha Pedan.
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| Installation of Sudarios in at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center, Santa Fe -- Erika Diettes |
Part II of Melanie McWhorter's interview with Colombia photographer Erika Diettes, an artist-in-residence for CENTER’s Artist Labs. An exhibition of Diettes' Sudarios series is currently on view at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center, home of CENTER offices. McWhorter spoke with Diettes about her work during the installation in Santa Fe. Read Part I of the interview.
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| Installation of Sudarios in Santa Fe -- Erika Diettes |
Melanie McWhorter: People
of varying professions -- like when I talk to massage therapist or school
counselors -- talk about the difficulty of carrying other people's weight and that
they have to look for ways to find relief afterwards. Do you feel that you need
to be a medium for those who do not have a voice? If not, what do you see as
your role? How do you deal with some of the weight of these experiences?
Erika Diettes: It's
definitely hard to sit down and listen to testimonies. I think that I started with
Silencios; you start to open yourself to this stage of fragility. You become
more fragile. You think it's going to become the opposite -- people think that
you just build this hard shell and it's the contrary -- it's definitely the
opposite. It's like walking with your raw skin. Sometimes you feel like you
have heard the most horrible story that you could ever hear and then you meet
somebody else and -- I don't want to count -- but there's always something more
horrible than what you already heard. So it is difficult, I'm not going to say
that it's not hard, it is extremely hard.
But at the same time it is extremely empowering. When you meet one of
the women of Sudarios, when you see their strength in front of you giving that
testimony and when you see the way they keep going with life and when you see
the power that they have because they are very strong women. The first
testimony that I heard from the Sudarios series I could not ever imagine how
you would recover from something like that. It was a woman who had to witness
-- who was forced to witness -- how they killed her mother, how they took out
her eyes, how they cut her tongue, and the perpetrator told her you have to
open your eyes because you have to see. You see this woman giving you that
testimony and you see that she has two daughters and she keeps going with her
life, obviously in a very hard way, but she still goes on. When you are witness
of that you think, "I have no reason what so ever to complain, I'm just
very grateful that I get to be a voice, I'm grateful that my work actually
serves a purpose." So I just feel-- I guess the right word would be
honored.
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| Installation of Sudarios in Santa Fe -- Erika Diettes |
I feel very honored and grateful to them for allowing me to be this
bridge that connects the stories from these areas of Colombia. Of course we
know where they are located but we really don't know what they look like. In
Colombia when you are in the cities, when you live in Bogotá or in a big city
it's like you really don't understand the dimension of the countryside, it's
like it's two different countries. So I think for me to be able to be the
bridge that connects these two places -- and I don't mean like physical place,
but I mean like all the cultural and all the spiritual things that go in each
place -- I think I just feel honor and that gives me the strength. I started
the Rio Abajo project without imagining ten percent of the dimension that that
project was going to have. I had no idea when I started that. So I think one
thing fits the other, and it fits the other and it just makes it bigger and
bigger and bigger, because I truly believe that we all need to be acknowledge,
and I think these art projects sort of does that for these regions. And it's
not only about talking about the violence but about talking about the strength
also, it is very sad and it is extremely hard, but I just feel this incredible
strength to also do something about it and the only thing I know is how to take
photographs. I don't know how to do anything else. I will not be able to do
anything else -- I don't know how to do anything else. My true passion and my
love in life is photography and I feel very blessed to have found a way to
express and represent something that is unrepresentable in a way. Because
there's really no way of representing the dimension of the horror that they go
through. I think that these are exercises or intents to do that, but there's no
real way to that sort of understanding. But I guess the only thing that I can
do is photography and I'm just very happy that they find my photography as a
valid place to show their pain to the world. So I just feel very empowered.
MM: Finally,
since we are sitting on the CENTER campus in the IHM Retreat Center Chapel,
where your work Sudarios is hanging, tell me why the installation and materials
of each project is so important. Will you describe how you install works from
Drifting Away and Sudarios and tell what experience that you are trying to
create as a curator of your own work?
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| from Drifting Away (Rio Abajo) by Erika Diettes |
ED: I
think nowadays we are in a very fortunate moment. If we think about technology
we can do whatever we want, there is technology that can solve any problem. I think
that the limitations are our ideas, because everything can be done today. You name it, there's a place in the
world that can do it. We have to think beyond regular medium, traditional
medium, but I think that you need to understand what materials you really need
to tell the story. If you have your story very clear, you will feel the
materials that are absolutely necessary for that. Like for the Rio Abajo
project, I was really obsessed with the idea of the river, and the idea of
fragility of life; how can you put that together? I had the elements of how do
you represent a person you cannot photograph, that was the first question. I
started to think, OK, what do people keep of the person? Mostly they always
keep clothing, and that also has a very-- of course it's a symbolic reason, but
there's also a very utilitarian reason. What if he comes back? He needs his clothes.
So they always keep his favorite shirt -- it's not any piece of clothing, it's
his favorite thing. In other cases it's "He looked so handsome in this
shirt" so that's the shirt that they keep. You have to keep into account
that many of these families are also displaced from their original house so
they have to leave that house with what they can grab and they always will keep
something of that person in case he comes back. So I decided that the clothes
was the way to go and then I needed the river. So I said, we need water, I
literally wanted to put the clothing in the water. But then what material would
make sense for this representation? So those images are printed on crystal, and
when you see the installation it's really heavy pieces, they are as tall as I
am -- they are very large pieces, they are heavy, but they are very fragile.
You can do that in plexiglass, you can print in plexiglass, but then it
wouldn't have the weight of the stories, which is why I chose to print in
glass. It makes it heavier, it makes it more difficult to ship, you need more
insurance, but that story would not be complete if you did not have the crystal
element. It's something that needed to be done that particular way. Of course
it took me many proofs to get the right color and right printer, but if you
give your project the time-- it needs its own language. It has to be spoken
perfectly. You need to have the symbolic element but you also need to find the
medium to fit the symbolism that you're trying to look for.
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| from Sudarios by Erika Diettes |
The Sudarios images on the other hand, it's like the
opposite. They are very weightless images. They are printed on silk and they
are called Sudarios because 'sudario' means shroud, and in some religions they
wrap bodies in white linen, and that linen is called sudario. If you look in
the Catholic religion, the sudarios is the place where Jesus' face was last
imprinted. I really wanted to give the idea to the spectator that these women
are ghosts. You see them floating in the church and you see them going to
heaven. The way I install the work, there's always one image that is higher,
it's like it’s ascending to heaven. I had the intention of that because in the
many testimonies that I have heard there's always this idea -- and these are
just literal words, I'm not making them up or interpreting anything -- that
after the encounter with violence they are left dead in life. So I want to
capture that because these are portraits of people who are alive, they are all
still living, but they told me that they feel that they no longer belong to
this world, after witnessing that violence it's like they are dead but they
have a pulse. I think the perfect element for that was the silk because I
wanted the images to be translucent and ephemeral, to have that ghostly appearance.
So I think as an artist you have to look for the language you need to speak in
that particular moment. And there's the technology available -- we can
definitely do whatever. It's an amazing moment to be a creative person because
there are thing to be done -- things you can do -- you just have to have the
ideas for it. Maybe you just have to be patient. The Sudarios images are twenty
images, but I had to print -- I think it was 97 proofs before I was able to get
the color right, before I was able to get all of them together looking the
same. I mean, it was insane, the number of images I printed. But you have to be
patient, you have to be obsessive! You can get it done, it is a question of
time and effort. You really have to commit to the effort of it!
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| Erika Diettes with images from Sudarios |
Diettes received a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes and has authored several essays on artistic representation in times of war that have been included in books, newspapers and journals. Her photographs have been exhibited in unique spaces linked to re-memoration processes developed by victims’ movements in Colombia.
Read Part I of Melanie McWhorter's interview with Erika Diettes. Diettes' installation of Sudarios will be on view at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center through October 24th.
Copies of Diettes' books, Silencios, Drifting Away (Rio Abajo) and Sudarios are available at photo-eye Bookstore.
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| Installation of Erika Diettes' Sudarios at Iglesia Santa Clara, Bogota |
Colombian photographer Erika Diettes’ work is about bearing witness and reconciling memory. She has photographed survivors of Nazi concentrations camps who escaped death to find a new home in her native country and allowed those sitters to express thoughts regarding their journeys. Many expressed the desire to not let this happen again and thus they participate in recalling harsh memories from the past. Diettes’ later projects, Rio Abajo (Drifting Away) and Sudarios symbolically represent those killed in the long-running armed conflict in Colombia with, respectively, the clothing of the disappeared floating in water and the closely-cropped faces of women who witnessed autrocities first-hand, often the death of a beloved family member. Diettes' work deals with difficult issues, but her touch is so delicate and her work so respectful as to not be heavy-handed or overtly political. The photographs make powerful exhibitions, but have also each been presented as stunning photobooks.
Erika Diettes is an artist-in-residence for CENTER’s Artist Labs and on the occasion of her exhibition at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center, home of CENTER offices, I welcomed the opportunity to visit with Diettes during the installation of the show and talk with her about her work. Part two of our conversation will be featured next week. -- Melanie McWhorter
ED: I
always see -- and that can start from Silencios in a way I think -- that my work is
about grieving. The entire theme that crosses all my work, that is the same
within all the projects, is grieving and mourning and loss. Even though you see
these different bodies of work that you would imagine would start in one point
and end up in another, it's just part of the same-- suspended in the same
thing, they just take different visual forms. So I think in Drifting Away, it's
the same violence that I'm talking about. Drifting Away has a particular theme,
which is the desaparecidos, the disappeared, and I chose to represent that absence
through their clothing. Obviously I was not able to photograph them, so an
object represents them, an object that takes the place of the person who is
missing. I think one thing that is really important to understand about the
clothing and objects that the families keep is that they actually take the
place of the disappeared in the home. Some of these objects go through certain
rituals. For example, there was this woman who told me every time it's the
birthday of her son she takes out the shirt, she washes it in a very special
way, she irons it, she puts it back in the closet. They go through this
intensity of really representing -- I use the word representing, representation
literally -- making the absence disappear with this object; this is the
sacredness of those objects. And I also chose to do a literal representation of
one of the ways that they disappear the bodies of people, tossing the bodies
into the river, which is why the project is called Rio Abajo. And I think [Rio
Abajo and Sudarios] are related in the sense that both of these works represent
the absence of somebody. In the Drifting Away case it is the clothing, in the
Sudarios case, it is the face of the person grieving the person who is no
longer here with us. So it is the absence that I'm trying to capture,
represented in different ways. Sudarios is obviously about the violence; it is
a very particular thing being
witness to that violence, being forced by the guerillas, the paramilitary or
the armed forces to see the killing of their family members, to be forced to
open your eyes in front of the massacre of your mother, to be forced to open
your eyes because the perpetrators tell them: "Open your eyes, you have to see." When you see
these portraits you see that violence being executed in front of them, but what
you see is the terrible pain of losing that person in front of your eyes. So I
think that the [projects] are related in the sense that yes, here you see the
survivor, in the other project you see the clothing that represents [the person], but what
you actually are seeing and feeling is the loss and the pain of having somebody
who is very close to your heart killed. So I think besides the literal
representation what you're experiencing is a memory honoring space to those who
are no longer here. Some of the women who are portrayed in Sudarios are in the families
of the Rio Abjo project, so I've been working with the same community very
closely for many years now. That relationship allows me to be able to represent
and be so close to them that I can give different visual form to their loss.
ED: Since
the work has been produced, inspired, worked and shown you have this different
status within the artist practice. You need the inspiration and you have to
execute the project, then sharing the results of that project with them-- they
love the project because it's about honoring the memory of their loved ones. If
you see the Rio Abajo images they are in a way peaceful, they are in a way soothing,
they are not aggressive images; they are meant to represent the preciousness of
their families, they are meant to elevate the representation of their family
members to a beautiful honoring level, so people want to be part of this
project because it’s a way of not leaving the memory of their loved ones in the
dark. It's a way of having this symbolic funeral. If you see the exhibitions of
Rio Abajo in the region the families go with candles and pray in front of the
images. The purpose there is a symbolic funeral, it's really something that is
not just an art show, it's something that is very powerful within the symbols.
So my work has been very well received by the families, by the media, by the
art critics, because I think it has the power of the memory of the lost ones. I
don't see it so much as just a show for a gallery; that would have a different
meaning. The work has grown and walked so many kilometers. The power comes from
the grieving and from the love of the families to their family members. It's
like it's something bigger than just a representation. It has the power of the
community, it has the power of the memory and the love of the people that also
take the time to go where I am, to take the memory of that loved one and allow
that memory to be part of this big symbolic space. It is also a journey for me because
I have to travel away from home, they also have to travel away from home and we
sort of meet in the middle and in the middle is the art. We are sort of collaborating.
So I think it's very powerful and it's very well accepted. I've had major
exhibitions in major museums but not just for the sake of it, it's because
Colombia is in a very important stage in its history; we're trying to find the
truth, we're trying to put this violence behind us. I mean, it's a process but
I think the memory and representing what has happened is really important in
the history of the country and I think art can serve that purpose.
To answer your second question, I have visited areas that I had never imagined going. I have visited areas where conflict has happened. It's safer now, yes. I think a couple of years ago I would not have been able to go to these areas, I mean, it would have been impossible. Now it's safer, but it doesn't mean that the conflict is over, it doesn't mean that the people from the region are not threatened. I think it definitely takes them a lot of courage to be part of these projects. It's a way to make visible what has happened. I think we are on the edge of that in Colombia; we want to make it visible. I think it's just a question of ethics. I respect and I value and I am extremely serious about what information I use, what information I talk about out loud. I know every single testimony behind the images I have created, the clothing that's represented in Rio Ajabo, but I made the decision to not share that information because I really don't know what that would mean for the people of the region. It would be easy for me to travel to Houston or Buenos Aires and say this shirt belonged to this person, from this area and I just know that it's not the purpose of the work and that is extremely serious information. There are some people who I know that are very open with it and those are the names that I share because I do have their permission and I do know that they are going to be OK because it's part of their political quest, but I try to keep the work as apolitical as I can. Again, my work is about grieving and about loss. It is not about the Colombia conflict only, it is not about trying to figure out who killed who, it's not about trying to blame a political group or an armed group; for me it's about representing and honoring the pain of these women and honoring the memory of the victims.
The second part of Melanie McWhorter's interview with Erika Diettes will be published next week. Diettes' installation of Sudarios will be on view at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center through October 24th with an artist talk at 7:30 on Friday October 18th.
Copies of Diettes' books, Silencios, Drifting Away (Rio Abajo) and Sudarios are available at photo-eye Bookstore.
Erika Diettes is an artist-in-residence for CENTER’s Artist Labs and on the occasion of her exhibition at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center, home of CENTER offices, I welcomed the opportunity to visit with Diettes during the installation of the show and talk with her about her work. Part two of our conversation will be featured next week. -- Melanie McWhorter
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Melanie McWhorter: You
have worked on some very intense projects in your home country of Colombia.
There is a evident relationship of victims of conflict and their struggle to
make peace with what happened and the struggle between trying not to forget,
but not letting the events rule your waking moments. First, I would like to
start with your first book project Silencios on WWII Jewish emigrants in
Colombia. How did you conceive of this project? How do you see that Silencios
has contributed to the two related projects Sudarios and Drifting Away?
Erika Diettes: Silencios,
I thought about this project because my husband, Joseph Kaplan, is Jewish I got
to know the Jewish community through my relationship with him. We got married
and I sort of got immersed into the Jewish community. But then his grandmother
died, her name was Ruth Rosenberg, and when she died we were cleaning the
house, helping with her stuff, and I found this very interesting photo, it
looked like a very contemporary photo because of the way the picture was
framed. So I asked "What is this image of?" and it was Joseph's
grandparents coming from Germany to Colombia and that's when I realized, "Wow, this is so interesting, we should look for survivors of the Second
World War here in Colombia." You have to understand that the Jewish
community in Colombia is really small, so it's not like we were aware that
there were Auschwitz survivors or Buchenwald survivors -- that was something totally new for me. So I started this
journey of getting to know the survivors, and I ended up collecting the stories
of 30 survivors that lived in our country. So that was a very big interesting
project because most of us were not aware of them being in Colombia. So I think
that was fascinating for me. It ended up being my first book; there was a huge
opening in a spectacular place. We had the exhibition at one of the first
movies theaters built in Colombia that was abandoned. So it was a spectacular
installation, and we had the show in different cities also. You know, I think
at the time I was not really aware of what it really meant to have these
testimonies, it was really just the perfect time to do it.
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| from Silencios by Erika Diettes |
MM: Because
a lot of them have passed away?
ED: Now
-- after the project -- many of them have passed away. So it was a way to have
their testimony and honor their lives through this book. Also I think, to
answer the second part of your question, how this contributed to the other
projects, I think it was the first time that I ever faced first-hand witnesses
of such a horror. When you get to meet somebody who had to go through a
horrible thing like Auschwitz, when you have somebody telling you that they saw
the gas chambers, that they saw these piles of corpses, when you are in front
of that person it is extremely powerful, and it gives you the sense of what
violence does to people. You see their eyes, and I think that's the very
intensity of this project is that you see their eyes and you know they saw
something that is impossible to put in words. We know so much about the Second
World War, we've seen so many movies, you can read the books, you can see the
movies, you can see the documentaries, and really nothing captures the tiniest
part of what they saw. This project was the beginning of me working with the
witnesses and the victims. So I think that's the importance of that particular
project.
MM: Why
did a lot of them end up in Colombia specifically?
ED: Some
of them had family there, so they were invited by their families. If I don't
remember wrong, two of them got left in Colombia, they were going somewhere
else and couldn't finish the journey so they sort of stayed in Colombia. And
those are fascinating stories. I
remember this particular man, when I met him he was 97 and he said, "I
don't consider myself to be 97. I always count the beginning of my life as when
I got to this country. I think I'm 60-something."
MM: He
said he was 58.
ED: Yes,
thank you! I love that story because it tells you how you become part of some
other country and how you really think and rebuild your life. So I think that
Silencios is a book that holds the testimonies of such horror, but also the
rebirth of many of these families, so it's not only about the horror but about
how life goes on. I think that's the importance of that book.
MM: Drifting
Away (Rio Abajo) and Sudarios are sister projects, each being an exhibition and
book project relating to the victims of violence in Colombia. Drifting Away contains
portraits of the victims of the violence in absentia represented by one article
of clothing and Sudarios shows closely cropped photographs of women who lost
family members in the violence in the area of Antioquia, home of the city of Medellín. How are both of these projects related? Were some of the
women in Sudarios those that you interviewed for Drifting Away?
 |
| from Drifting Away (Rio Abajo) by Erika Diettes |
 |
| Sudarios installation in Australia |
MM: How
did you find them?
ED: Through
different journeys. I started visiting for the Rio Abajo project, it was the
first time I went to this region and I visited the victims organizations,
different victims organizations, and I would introduce myself and say I am an
artist and I'm interested in doing this project and it was this mutual trust--
imagine what I just told you about the objects of the Rio Abajo project, these
are sacred objects, this is the only thing they have, because they don't even
have the body of their son to bury. So imagine just an artist from Bogota
coming and saying, "Lend me those clothes." It took really high
courage and trust from them because I needed to travel with the clothing back
to Bogota where my studio is located because those images were shot in a very
controlled studio environment; I needed to build a pool in my studio, it could
not be improvised. I had to go back to my house, photograph and then go back
and give back the objects. So I think what helped the true dimension of that
project is my commitment and actually going back, returning the clothes, giving
them the image that I had produced, and then over the years I also came back to
that same area and had the exhibition show for them. Within the memory process
that they do they sometimes have certain dates where they do a symbolic act to
remember their families, so I would bring the exhibition to them and have the
show with them. So that going back and fourth and really committing in an
honest way to the project is really what has allowed me to pursue other
projects in the community, to be engaged with my artistic practice.
MM: How
is the work perceived in Colombia? And is there any danger as far as you or
these people speaking out about things that they've seen?
baja.jpg) |
| Sudarios installation in Mexico |
 |
| cover of Sudarios by Erika Diettes |
___________________________________
The second part of Melanie McWhorter's interview with Erika Diettes will be published next week. Diettes' installation of Sudarios will be on view at the chapel of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center through October 24th with an artist talk at 7:30 on Friday October 18th.
Copies of Diettes' books, Silencios, Drifting Away (Rio Abajo) and Sudarios are available at photo-eye Bookstore.
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