What we all are
EXHIBITIONS Adriana Lestido, the remarkable photographer has organized a new exhibition, Some girls, a selection among images of her most representative essays with women protagonists to allow them to tell a new story, one that does not relate to any particular anecdote, that allows them a new breath of air, a lighter one, according to the artist; with the same warrior and loving spirit as ever. They’re easy to relate to no matter the circumstances.
by Marta Dillon
“There are some photographs that have a way of returning”, Adriana Lestido says, “they can pop up anywhere, when I open a box, at a friends house, hidden behind another one, huddled up waiting for its time to come. I might have discarded it in one of those rigorous selections where images fall like the petals of a flower you’ve cut but isn’t kept in a book. I may have had my doubts about it, and it may have sensed that inkling. So, silently and confidently, immersed in time until the opportunity to shine and be once again light and shadows, a story, one that can be rewritten and relived.
There are some of these among Some girls, Adriana Lestido’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires (Macba). A blackboard, for example, with a handwritten list, like a shopping list with prices, of prison sentences as if those individuals were like apples. It could be a sombre image, it reflects the economy, the countable goods of a prison. Adriana passed that wall for a year to meet up with women who turned her visits into a celebration. Forgotten by time and with a new possibility to emerge, like a new hand of cards, among other images in a poetic process like the throwing of tarot cards, providing clarity, underlining and highlighting some kind of promise across the bars. Another image that of a tree appearing behind a wall of glass bricks, in which one is missing so you can clearly see the leaves and branches, conquering the blindness imposed inside. Bringing in a texture, like a warm caress. What else can cross those wall, what promise? You can’t help but understand that each encounter between Adriana and her protagonists, even if they were inside, without any power to decide anything, was a moment of happiness that got around by word of mouth.
In her essay Women in Prison, the title stresses the ‘woman’ because the rest is circumstance, and that was the museums request. The idea was to show the original vintage copies. Initially 48 copies, then 42 and finally 24 ended up in the small, memorable book that was exhibited throughout the world and will be exhibited in Berlin in October. However this proposal didn’t tempt Adriana. With a touch of her magic she preferred to plunge into her photographs and find in them what can’t be seen on the surface. And so the Girls remained; tough, rebellious, loving, desiring warriors and dreamers. A bunch of girls that the photographer saw or the photographs captured to leave a mark on them, a mirror for anyone who dares lean over the edge towards the impulse of life, beyond circumstances. That is what Lestido depicts, rescues, that which burns in daily life, even if only embers of an impulse to seek affection, beauty, adventure, even the absurdity of what you do aimlessly, life like a sea with it’s force ebbing and flowing.
“Some girls always knew they’d have to clear the way, machete in hand. Know of loss before it occurred, forced to feel resignation, draw romanticism out of a perverse game. As if one’s story wasn’t what you lived but how you deal with what you live. Some girls are different or the same as how they appear in the images. They’re women and girls, but here they’re some girls. (The gender isn’t the burden, some girls appear different in these images, some are themselves.) In these images the cold can be felt and a certain apathy. The posture of a hand can be seen. A certain scream that catches your eye. An action is perceived and announced. The strength of the gesture, in a vulnerable state can be read.”
The fragment belongs to the text written by Romina Resuche, curator for the Macba program that focuses on women artists throughout the year. The title, Adriana says, belongs to the Rolling Stones. It was playing when she and her “guardian angel”, as she likes to call her friend and accomplice Gabriel Diaz, chose that “some”. There’s something of rock in the choice of the slowness at the beginning of the tour, a certain melancholy that captures you and then you’re sent off dancing toward the end, hoping it won’t finish. “I didn’t want a dense title and I like the one we chose because we’re all girls, the 4 year-old and the 80 year old. That’s how we see ourselves. We get together with “the girls” even when we’re mature and stumbling. That’s what we’ll always be. When you need to be rescued, to share a laugh, when you need extra strength, the girls are there with the every day language you share with friends. ”
Among the photographs of Some girls are images of different series and periods. The oldest date back to 1986, the last to the 90s. The Infant-Juvenile Hospital, Adolescent Mothers, Women in Prison, Mothers and daughters are the titles of the series one after the other, that went deeper and deeper into human relationships and the artist’s investigation into her own female nature and relationship to other women. She’s shown them often since then but that hasn’t taken away their moving warmth. She’s not tired of finding in them what they have to give. “I don’t see them in the past, I see them in the present, beyond the anecdote. When a photograph is alive, it encapsulate a simultaneity of time”, says the artist. “What happens to me when I look at my photographs is that I feel that I love the fact they they exist, beyond the fact of who took them. I don’t feel I’ve taken them at all. It’s as if they have their own life and through their life they evoke something in mine. It makes me proud, not for me but for them, for the road they’ve travelled.
What is it? How does it work? What makes and image come alive?
“An image that’s alive is the unity of two energies, the one from he/she who sees and the one from what is seen. After that image has a life of it’s own, independent from those who were in front or behind the camera or the experience of making it”. answers Lestido. It’s enough to allow yourself to be wrapped by the textures of her photographs in that cement room that overflowed with people on the day of the opening or see it any afternoon in the silence the museum offers leaving outside all the city’s agitation inspired by the desire to go on battling, insisting on rescuing what remains of the waves of life. It’s a never-ending search and lesson. But these images must have some secret, something cooked up between love and desolation, between energy and lethargy, with the body always in the foreground, the available caress, a hug as its destiny. Perhaps it’s as the artist says, they’re alive. So that’s how they make you feel. With all the pain being alive implies. To breathe, eat, defecate. But also to love, seek, fight, dream, design a possible future, in any circumstance, against all odds.
Some girls, until May 1st hasta el 1 de mayo
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires, San Juan 328,
Monday to Friday 12 pm to 7 pm and Saturdays and Sundays 11 am to 7.30 pm.