MARISOL MENDEZ

MADRE/Padre (FOAM Talent 2024) 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 photo book 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 a 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 Alejandra sits shyly next to Mendez’s mother. In the oldest snapshot — that of her grandma — 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 photo book 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.

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 expenses 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 in elaborating 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 table? 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 a 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 it 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.

The Infinite Resonances of a Single Word: Marisol Mendez’s "Madre" by Arturo Soto

Returning to one’s country after years of absence can be as transformative as leaving in the first place, instigating a readaptation that confronts our new ways of thinking with the sights and sites that shaped us. However, anyone who has experienced this will know how painful it is to question what you previously ignored or took for granted.

Something along these lines happened to the photographer Marisol Mendez who, upon her return from Europe, saw more clearly than ever the structural misogyny in Bolivia. To aid her inquiry, Mendez’s mother showed her old family albums so that Mendez could better understand where she came from. These pictures, spanning three generations, solidified Mendez’s desire to make work about the cultural conventions that define how women are perceived in her country. 

The outcome is Madre, a handmade photobook that explores various interconnected issues about womanhood. Some of the book’s images – a cave’s entrance, a broken eggshell – are symbolic without being sentimental, while others draw on Mendez’s background in fashion photography to bluntly put their cards on the table. For instance, in what has become the series’ trademark image, a brown-skinned woman in a wedding gown and a veil full of flowers stares into the camera while holding a barrel gun. Her defiance ties her to the figure of Mama Killa, an Incan deity that represented the moon and was believed to safeguard women.

The link between current conceptions of empowerment and indigenous mythologies suggests that women’s social standing in pre-Columbian times might have been more egalitarian than the current status quo. The vitality of Bolivian culture is further embodied in the picture of a cook, midwife, and farmer named Salomé. Mendez says she only agreed to be photographed if she decided how and where to pose and could wear her Cholita Potosina outfit, which she made herself and reserved for special occasions.

Intrinsically related to the customs of indigenous people are the moral values of Catholicism instilled with violence by the colonizers, which still influence many negative behaviors and beliefs toward women. This critique can be inferred through sarcastic visual allusions, like in the picture of a virgin covered in plastic, which some may interpret as modernity suffocating the idol. Others might take the plastic as a shield against the sinful desires of our present, reinforcing the stereotype of a female purity that’s only meant to be broken to bear children.

In other pictures, these theological observations are closer to pastiche, like the woman in combat boots posing as a generic virgin from the Andes. The lack of ethnic diversity in Catholic iconography is directly addressed in a blue-tinted picture of a Cholita flanked by two sui generis plaster angels wearing sunglasses and fatigue pants that could easily pass for DJs or narco bodyguards. Mendez’s photograph contests the typical characterization of the Virgin while blurring the line between Christianity and Bolivian pop culture. An inclusive concept of womanhood in terms of age, ethnicity, and sexual preference is further articulated in a picture of a trans beauty pageant winner in lace panties and high heels. Her provocative stance and exposed breasts make her appear vulnerable and strong in equal measures, even if only the latter is apparent on the wall’s elongated shadow.

A different kind of ambivalence to images, this time influenced by the mechanics of the medium, is explored in a formal studio portrait depicting a woman dressed to impress but showing her discontent. A burn mark above her eyebrow contradicts the drive for unattainable perfection promoted by the beauty industry. Madre is not a compendium of grievances nor shows any graphic violence. Still, I find the above image enigmatic because it hints at the severe problem of gender violence in Latin America. As it turns out, the mark is a development error. Mendez has embraced imperfections like these that expound photography’s ability to imply rather than affirm. The blue tone in the image of the Cholita angel also comes from faulty processing. Their inclusion in the book speaks of the difficulties of working with analog technologies in Latin America (Mendez must travel to Argentina to process her film because no professional labs exist in her native city of Cochabamba).

As much as these images lend themselves to be analyzed according to established iconographies or critical theories – be it decoloniality, feminism, queer studies, or others – we shouldn’t lose track of their capacity to affect viewers in unexpected and contradictory ways. In fact, the mélange of styles, techniques, and registers Mendez uses reflects her mixed feelings towards Bolivia’s social landscape. As such, the process by which we work through our ideas and emotions to make sense of Madre relates to the confusion that prompted Mendez to make the book. Including archival pictures from her grandmother’s albums, printed on a grainer stock and manually pasted in, is another way of communicating the affects that the material aspect of an image can elicit.

Despite the sensitivity of the issues on view, Madre never feels didactic or preachy. If anything, the book contains many veiled connections that prompt us to reflect on our own biases and cultural formations. In some cases, like in the picture of an old woman with cataracts, viewers might be initially drawn by the multitude of pearls or the large circumference of her hat, but to me, the secret of the picture lies in how the sternness of her expression intimates a history of rebellion against the establishment to pursue what her heart wanted at a time when those decisions came at a very high cost. Such moments may be facilitated when female gazes meet and exchange energies that evade simple definitions. This portrait also reminds us that the formal qualities of pictures can be how those energies are transmitted. In Madre, they gradually accrue a melancholic gravitas as we turn its pages. The result is as political as it is aesthetic, and Mendez’s caring vision amounts to a subtle gesture of resistance against the injustices that women constantly experience.

Reclaiming Bolivian Womanhood from Colonial Indoctrination (i-D, November 30, 2023) by Miss Rosen

When Conquistadors arrived in Latin America, they imposed Catholicism’s overwrought blend of pomp and circumstance cast a glittering pall over indigenous communities that had thrived for thousands of years. The church proffered false binaries of gender and sexuality, reducing women to “Madonna/whore,” a construct wildly complicated by the fact that these women in Jesus’s life bore the name Mary.

Growing up in Cochabamba, Bolivian, artist Marisol Mendez noticed femininity was largely defined by desirability, the culture relentlessly pandering to the male gaze. As too many womxn know, what begins as an innocuous imposition can quickly spiral out of control. “Your Body is a Battleground” Barbara Kruger famously decried in her iconic 1989 silkscreen work, a struggle now as then seemingly without end.

“You say, ‘My body, my choice.’ It’s so obvious, like why would my body belong to the state, or to a man. And then you get all these ideas,” Marisol says. “I have this theory about the Virgin Mary, who never owned her own body. God invokes Jesus on her, and then she ascends to heaven. She's the only being that goes into heaven with her whole body, because her body is the property of God.”

Mary Mother of God, a vision of purity and piousness, willing to make every sacrifice without a smidgen of backtalk; a figure that casts striking a distinctive contrast to Mary Magalene, only woman in Jesus’s inner circle. A sex worker who kept a gospel of her own, the Magalene is cast as the sinner because her body is her own and she is free from dominion and control. The Marys are casts in opposition unless one takes into account the understanding of womxn as a multidimensional force.

In her debut monograph, Madre (Sentanta), Marisol delves into realms of past and present to consider the feminine as life force: a creator of mind, body, and soul that transcends the limits of the physical realm. Weaving together past and present with a poignant selection of archival works drawn from family photo albums with still life, landscape, and flower photographs, Marisol elegantly upends patriarchal tropes with a kaleidoscopic tapestry of innocence and sacrifice, joy and pain, love and loss.

Madre took root as Marisol perused her grandmother’s photo album, searching for a connection to something greater them herself. As she paged through the vintage photographs, she noticed a curious phenomenon: a great many of the men had been ripped out of the picture. Drawing inspiration from a playful blend of camp absurdism and cinematic fantasy, Marisol considers the feminine as a force of creation and destruction, of rebellion and solidarity passed from one generation to the next.

“Our culture in Bolivia, our religion invalidates syncretism because everything, everything is always such a big mix,” says Marisol. She embraced these layered histories with selections from her family albums alongside new works: portraits of friends and acquaintances, neighbors and strangers encountered along the path who shared a desire to speak truth to power through photography.

As a writer who enjoys waxing rhapsodic about ideas, the camera proved succinct. “It’s very direct, because you have literally one moment to tell a whole story so it commands you to be brief, but very precise,” she says. “You have a frame to assemble a whole universe. It was a new way of looking at the world an understanding it. The camera allowed me to be curious and get near different worlds that I that I've been inquisitive about and I love that.”

As Madre began to grow, Marisol recognized the importance of casting a dialogue across time to explore identity as a multi-splendored flowering. She began casting people from her own life, inviting them to image where they might lie in the pantheon of the divine feminine. “I think you can go through the whole Madonna/whore cycle in a single day,” Marisol says. “You can wake up as the Virgin Mary and go to sleep as Mary Magdalene. It’s a spectrum that is very fluid and dynamic that creates a diversity and richness that is more powerful than fixed structures.’

Perhaps it is that ever-shifting balance that gives the feminine form: it’s ability to be both/and without being tied to a single outcome. With Madre, Marisol considers mother as the source of all things, and within that are endless permutations on who womxn can be; all it takes is imagination and the will to get free.