Yolanda, Liliana Merizalde González
Liliana Merizalde González is a Colombian visual artist and documentary photographer based in Bogota. Her work makes fine use of photography’s vast potential for exploring personal and political history, memory, identity, and nature, often with and through an intersectional feminist perspective. Her commissioned and personal work has been published in Americas Quarterly, VICE Colombia, The New York Times, and many other publications. Regarding this ongoing photo series, titled “Yolanda,” TSUKI had a conversation over email with Liliana about her techniques and process, her recurring themes, and finding a balance that works.
TSUKI: I immediately was taken by your use of archived family photos (of your aunt Yolanda); there’s always something immediately disarming and effective about reintroducing these kinds of images into newer photographic contexts. But there’s also a visual connection to your other projects—plants and natural matter, obscured and augmented faces and bodies, the natural and unnatural world—but here it’s more obviously playful, personal, deconstructed. The transferal feels therapeutic in nature, and the effect is charming and sad at the same time. Will you keep working on this series? (Please do!)
LMG: Nature has always been a persistent topic in my work. Our relationship with nature, and the questions about this relationship—knowing it’s not always a nice or a balanced one—are ideas that I’m obsessed with. In my work, I am interested in subtly leaving these questions on the table; most of the time I don't get answers, but more questions open up to me and I think that's what it's really about. In most of the projects I work on, I have the feeling that they are piercingly personal, if they weren't, they wouldn't interest me from the start. However in this project, the ‘personal’ is not only mine but pertains to my entire family. And this makes me question myself more about the issues I'm addressing, which have to do with the memory of a loved one (my aunt), with her existence for others (not only for me), and the relationships she had with other people. In other words, it is personal, but in this case the person is the whole family, and my individuality plays on a collective field.
Paradoxically, although I had not really thought about it, perhaps this project is a little more playful than the others: I’m dealing with a strong theme yet the playful element becomes important and sort of balances the dark side that death could represent. In the end, the project speaks to a duality that can be found in everything, or if we look at it from a broader perspective, it talks about everything being relative (including death.) Each new image that I build for this project brings me an empty feeling in the stomach and at the same time, brings me a relief. Presence and absence coexist, as well as the living and the deceased, the organic and the inert. It is as if with each image my aunt was born again but also she dies again. Presence and absence need each other and nourish each other. The more I try to understand my aunt, the more she slips away. For all of the above, I’m still working on the project, but with a slightly slower pace, since not every day I want to deal with this scale—and also for me it’s important not to force the project. I try to let each project speak for itself and tell me what its rhythm is; in this case, I try not to force myself to work with any archive images that haven’t resonated with me in a profound way.
With its specific, built-in technical capabilities (of recording, capturing, preserving, archiving, documenting) and then on the other hand with its thematic evocations (of memory, time, proof, loss, and so on) I think overall photography is a medium that is particularly adept and equipped to explore the ideas, and the realities, of degradation and renewal, both on a personal and a sociopolitical level, and even as a way of drawing connections between the two. Is this something you always consciously explore and push in your work? Or does it just come with the territory, because photography has always been “about” these things?
I think it is something that I have always explored in my work, sometimes more consciously than other times, but it is almost always there. For me photography has never been a record of objectivity, but a construction of subjective and constantly changing truths—but no less real because of it. And within this, I have always tried to take that construction to different extremes to discover these technical and poetic capabilities of photography and how I can relate to them in different contexts and projects. For example, it usually happens that when I feel that I have discovered a specific photographic method or language, rather trying to reproduce it because it "worked," I’ll try to do something different. And in these searches I also try to test the photographic characteristics and explore fine lines or limits, or escape the purely photographic characteristics altogether: projecting images onto textures and re-photographing, printing, scratching, modifying, going from the analog to the digital and vice versa, using art prosthetics, using questionnaires as a starting point, making self-portraits, photocopying a photo until it disappears, etc.
Also, speaking about time, I feel that photography is a crack in the timeline. And in this case I am somehow entering that crack, to make another one, and to make two different moments coexist: the moment of my aunt’s initial photo and the moment when I make the collage and take a second photograph.
Reusing or repurposing photographs from one context to another, you’re sort of transforming them from a document to an art object, and then further adding collage and introducing new elements. This process, and the evidence of this process, well, the whole thing sort of feels hopeful and optimistic, despite that very implicit sense of loss. It’s nicely balanced. This isn’t really a question, more an observation, and a compliment. Can you speak to this, or about this process?
Thanks. The truth is that the process for this project has been very intuitive. Images that I thought might work—when I tried them with the nature collage on them—they didn’t. Also it happened the other way around, sometimes I thought the images wouldn’t work, and when I combined them with the proper plants, they did. In some cases I tried many different plants until I found the one that worked—the right size, the right colors. This project has many layers of elements, conceptually and materially, so if I try to rationalize everything, I could get lost. I prefer to stick with intuition and gut feeling to find that balance.