10 Questions with Camila Rodrìguez Triana

Camila Rodríguez Triana (Cali, 1985) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Graduated from the Faculty of Integral Arts, Universidad del Valle, 2008, with an Honorary Master in Cinema and Contemporary Art at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR) 2019, where she received the Best Installation Prize given by Des Amis du Fresnoy, Panorama 21. Her artistic work has been presented in different places such as Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori (IT); Salon de Montrouge (FR); Festival PROYECTOR (ES); IVAHM (ES); Museum of the Moving Image (US); Kiosko Galería (BO); Galería No Lugar (EC); Museo La Tertulia (CO); etc. She was nominated for the Emerging Artist Grant Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (US), and she won the National Prize of Photography given by the Visual Arts Program of the Ministry of Culture and Switzerland Embassy (CO). Her first film, "Sincerely" (2016), was premiered at FIDMarseille (FR), where she won the Renaud Victor Prize. In addition, this film obtained other prizes like Best Documentary, Lisboa International Film Festival, Spring edition (PT), Best Ibero-American film in Festival Independiente de Cine de Lima, (PE), etc. Her second film “Interior”, premiered in DOCLISBOA (PT), was nominated for the Doc Alliance Award (CPH: DOX, Jihlava, DokLeipzig, FIDMarseille, Against Gravity, Visions du Réel, Doclisboa). Also, this movie was bought by WDR-Arte, Tënk, INDEWALL. Her third film, "En Cenizas" (2018), premiered at the Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam and received the jury's special mention. She is currently part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative as Protégé in Visual Arts for 2020-21. She lives and works between France and Colombia.

www.camilart.info

ARTIST STATEMENT

Rodríguez Triana is a Colombian visual artist and filmmaker. Her work reflects on identity, ancestral heritage, and memory through re-appropriation exercises. She is interested in the word "re-appropriation", which implies recognizing something past - a memory, an object, a belief - to transform it into the present. She wonders about the heritage we received and also about the legacy we will leave. She reflects on the position of the "mestizos" regarding ancestral heritage: they are not recognized as indigenous, as black or as white. The "mestizos" are orphans because they are not recognized by the three cultures from which they come, and they don't have access to all the ancestral knowledge of those cultures. The "mestizos" build their identity through re-appropriation exercises.

At the same time, Rodríguez Triana's work is building as a repair ritual. Every work is an attempt to repair an invisible identity, an absence, pain, a violent episode, etc., with the hope to leave a more human world to the new generation. She is interested in remembering as a process of re-elaboration in which what really happened is mixed with our fiction about what happened. Rodriguez Triana's work is usually born from memory, which happened indeed: personal story, family story, social histories. Usually, she works with the character who experienced it, narrating and re-narrating the story together, until it's blurred and contaminated by dreams, imaginary situations, thoughts about the story. In her work, Rodríguez Triana uses material linked with memory such as photographs, books, used objects, old cloth, wood, and recycled materials. She re-appropriates the thread, a material linked to ancestral culture, delicate and capable of building strong unions, capable of repairing.

INTERVIEW

You use very different mediums, like photography and installations, and you are also a filmmaker. Could you tell us a little more about your background? How did you start experimenting with these mediums?

My relationship with art began at a young age. As a child, my parents enrolled me in a school where art was central: we were taught about painting, ceramics, music, embroidery. I remember having a special affinity with stitching and embroidery in those early lessons. I later graduated from the Facultad de Artes Integradas at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and did some further documentary film and fine arts studies. For me, however, the best way to learn about making art is to work at it yourself on a daily basis. Through continual work, I began to have deeper encounters with the materials I use; I began to discover their limits and learned to use them in a way that expands my work rather than confining it.

At first, my work was very focused on film and photography. I posited cinematic creation as a re-elaboration or re-appropriation of reality, and my films have always inhabited a space between documentary and fiction. They are fictions constructed around stories that happened in reality. In 2017, I came to France to study for a master's degree in contemporary art and cinema at the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporain. Here, a professor suggested I do an installation as a second-year project. During that process, I had the opportunity to talk and share with artists that make installations, such as Oscar Muñoz and Gao Bo, among others. This experience helped me discover a new form of thinking, a new form of relating to different materials, and exploring editing and exhibition space differently.

Since that first installation, I began to explore the use of yarn, paper, wood, earth, and different objects that relate to memory, objects inscribed with the memory of particular events. Memory, for me, is fundamental. It's probably because I come from a country where memory has often been manipulated, erased, destroyed, hidden, selectively forgotten by those in power – all of which has condemned us to repeat history in violent cycles. Since that first installation, I've intuitively returned to yarn, to the act of stitching, weaving, and embroidering. In the process, I learned that weaving and embroidery are related to Latin American culture, to our ancestors. It's a way to dialogue with our origins. Weaving (building something resistant, a loom, from something fragile, the threads) implies a practice of care, which is the opposite of destruction. I like that in embroidering, the thread unites different points, creating strong constellations capable of withstanding. I like the idea of binding together, of repairing. I like to think that working with thread and yarn is an ancestral inheritance that I re-appropriate in my works.

Ejercicios De Memoria - Lideres Asesinados, installation, 250 x 250 x 330 cm, 2021 © Camila Rodrìguez Triana

Why did you decide to follow this career path, and how would you define yourself as an artist?

During my childhood and adolescence, I always felt uncomfortable in the world, as if I didn't belong to it. There were things about how the human world worked that I didn't understand or accept, so I had to use my imagination to survive. During recess at school, I would go to the library to read books. I also spent a lot of time making up stories, parallel worlds that I acted in as if I were in a theater. I spent a lot of time alone. In my bedroom, I made a mural to construct my own world and conceived figures to which I gave form with clay. They were difficult years because there was no way for my parents to understand why I did these things, which made them worry.

When I went to university, I got to know the world of art, and it was like a miracle. I was captivated by the diversity of thought and ways of being and conceiving oneself and the world. It was also a miracle for my parents because as I discovered that world, my rebelliousness found a creative place to manifest itself, and they began to understand better what had been going on with me. Since then, it was clear for me that I had found my place and unearthed what my soul clamored for: art. I don't know if I could say that being an artist was a decision for me; I don't think I had any other option. It was what I had to do. It was the only space I had found where I could feel happy.

Every time that I'm frustrated, that I feel that the road is too hard, that it seems too difficult to get a foot in the art world or be seen – especially coming from a country where artists have little support – I come back and ask myself the same question: if I weren't an artist, what would I want to be? And the answer is always the same: artist. So I keep going. The conviction is so strong that it overcomes frustration, exclusion, invisibility, and abuse.

RESPIRER, film, 25’27”, 2021 © Camila Rodrìguez Triana

You use different mediums, but you have recurring themes in your work, such as memory, personal and collective history, and culture. Where did you derive these themes from?

The continent where I come from has endured processes of colonization since 1492. During this period, a great part of our culture has been destroyed. Our languages, beliefs, and identities were taken away. We were taught that what we were was wicked, inferior, and savage. Most of what is commonly known of the history of this colonization has been told by the colonizers, as the histories told by the indigenous people and enslaved Africans were silenced. My continent is now "independent," but countries such as Colombia are faced with underdevelopment and the misery and inequality that have been left by years of exploitation on the part of multinationals, financial entitles, and powerful class interests.

Inferiority, servility, and submission have continued to haunt our minds. It takes time to heal a history of pain and violence, especially when memories are manipulated. I grew up thinking that beauty is blond, white, and blue-eyed; that being civilized was to act a certain way, dress a certain way, think a certain way; to be like Europeans or Americans. In school, I was taught that the Spanish discovered us and civilized us. But as I said before, I felt uncomfortable with all the conventions of what one had to be and how one had to be. It was inevitable that at some point, I was going to ask about my identity. I'm not indigenous, nor white, nor black, and at the same time, I'm all of them. I'm a mix built on different identities, beliefs, and ways of seeing the world. In that mix is where I search for my identity; I re-appropriate beliefs, objects, music that intuitively resonate in my body and in my soul. It should be understood that to re-appropriate is not to copy; it's to transform something outside of you using what's already in you. In my case, the transformation comes from the materials I use, from how I transform those materials, and how I create relationships between them. But you can't talk about identity without knowing the history that precedes you, without thinking about and reflecting on that history, without searching for the ancestors, without creating memories. In the same way, you can't talk of identity while ignoring the current situation in which you live, without opening your eyes to what surrounds you and becoming aware of what has changed in the world and how we are transformed from those changes. My work is perhaps a way to help me construct my identity and understand the mix that I am.

In your statement, you introduce two key concepts for your work, "re-appropriation" and "re-elaboration." Can you tell us a little more about these concepts? How do they influence your work?

I think that these two words are fundamental in my work and in my life. They go back to the idea of taking something that exists and making it your own. And in the process of making it your own, that something that already existed becomes transformed; it can't be conserved as it was. I've read a lot about the way in which we create reality or what we think is real. In our encounter with reality, we feel as if we don't even touch it, as if what is real were something intact and the same for everyone. I think that the reality is also our own re-elaboration of what is in front of us. When we see, hear, or feel, the stimuli we receive are interpreted in our minds according to our beliefs, paradigms, ideas, political positions, etc. The real is what is there in front of us, but it is also the fictions we create as our brain receives and processes exterior stimuli. This re-elaboration of what we see, hear and feel is part of the real. That's why it's so important to see and listen as if to ask oneself: who is talking? From what universe does that idea of the real come from? I know people that make up stories and tell them so many times and with such conviction that they themselves end up believing that that's what happened. It becomes real for them.

This idea is an important departure point for my work, and that's why in my installations and films, I talk of re-elaborating real stories, of re-elaborating memories, of re-appropriating beliefs, objects, and ways of conceiving the universe. I tend to work with people that are directly related to the story I'm telling. I re-elaborate that story with them over and over, and out of that re-elaboration, my works are born. Sometimes I start with objects that relate to the story I want to tell: clothes used by a certain person at a certain moment in time, objects saved or kept for years, books where the story is written, etc.

What is your creative process like? Where do you start, how do you choose one medium over another, and how does your process unfold?

When I hear that question, I feel expected to provide a recipe with established steps to follow, but I still haven't found any formula that always works in all creative processes. For me, the only ingredient that is always there is the disposition to tend to the person, object, or material with which I'm working. To tend means not just to do with the material that you had previously imagined; to tend is to dispose oneself to understand another world, another way of seeing, another way of existing at the risk of changing your original idea, at the risk of changing your original idea being questioned. To tend is to dispose oneself to question, to try different paths, including making mistakes and starting again. To tend is to be open to the possibility that the way in which one had imagined things may not be the best and to look for other ways through the person, material, or object you have in front of you. When we tend to something, we are conscious of our limits and are able to turn those limits into sources of creation. In that attention to the material, person, or object, one finds the path and resolves the questions at hand - what technique to use, what color, how, etc. In my case, it's a path of many repetitions that requires time to mature. Normally, my initial ideas or attempts do not become the final result; they are not the things I like best. But in that first thing I do, I always find some hints that I later re-work, that transform my idea, and that continue to transform it multiple times. This transformation is generated from attention and tending. Sometimes I work for weeks on something that I realize should be different in the end, so I start all over again.

Latinoamerica II, installation, 300 x 300 x 200 cm, 2020 © Camila Rodrìguez Triana

Where do you find inspiration from your work? Do you look at other artists, or do you draw inspiration from everyday life?

In everything.

Every morning I go running in a park close to where I live. After running, I sit for a few minutes to observe and to listen. I marvel at the yellow and white flowers that grow in the meadow, at a dog that approaches to say hi without knowing me. I marvel at the rustling of trees in the wind, at the song of different birds and ducks that together make an orchestra, to the stranger who smiles and greets me, at the forms of the trees. Some days I talk to my parents or friends and marvel at their gestures of profound generosity, empathy, and beauty. I marvel at acts of resistance that I read about, people who risk being themselves or fighting for what they believe through difficult circumstances.

But pain, indignation, frustration, and fear also become a source of inspiration. For example, a while ago, I read about how during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, 6,402 peasant youths were assassinated at the hands of the military in order to be presented and counted as enemy casualties in the war against the guerilla, so-called "false-positives." They would murder innocent youth, dress their corpses in guerilla uniforms and take pictures of them to present as proof to the country that the heavy-handed security policy of the government was working. This news impacted me deeply. I was filled with pain and terror that something like this could happen, that someone could actually order these actions. I had to transmute this terror into something, portray it, articulate it, inscribe it somewhere. Sometimes art becomes the way to frame something so that time doesn't erase its memory.
For me, inspiration comes from being open to the world, touching you, cutting through you, amazing you, or making you feel pain. The world could be an event, a person, a thought, a sound, a story, another artist's work, a texture, an animal, etc.

You have exhibited extensively, and you have participated in various prizes and residencies. Which of your projects or exhibitions has given you the most satisfaction?

I don't have a favorite project or one that I could say has given me the most satisfaction. All my works have been favorites from the moment I made them, and all of them, whether they were exhibited and won prizes or not, have given me satisfaction. A few years ago, I made a film called 'Sincerely.' The film narrates the story of an old-age couple that falls in love in a nursing home for homeless senior citizens and begin to save money to be able to spend a night together in a hotel room. The day I presented this film in the theater, this couple came with me. They were very moved when the film ended, and the audience gave them a standing ovation because they are persons who have been abandoned even from their own families, and no one had ever applauded them. The emotion from both of them that day alone made the whole effort to make the film worth it. There is always a moment that arises that makes the time dedicated to each work worth it, and it's not necessarily a prize or an exposition, and it's not necessarily related to the final product.

What gives me satisfaction is the process of dedicating my time and energy to do the work that I love, which is art. I put my life into each project. I do it with discipline, hard work, and sensitivity. I always put forth the best of me, and often I collaborate with other artists that I know give the best of themselves. I commit myself to grow. Every day, I study a lot and work a lot, and reflect a lot to move ahead with that commitment. I want to be the best artist I can be, and in every work I made, I've been the best artist that I could be at that moment. Obviously, experience and daily practice give you more tools. They help you see and understand things you didn't understand before and transform your work. Transformation is crucial to growth. In the end, I think that satisfaction lies not only in the finished product but also in the process. The prizes and recognition come afterward, and I am grateful for them and celebrate them, principally because they permit me to continue advancing because they permit me to continue dedicating my life to art.

Over the past 12 months, we have witnessed a growing number of online exhibitions and live events. What do you think of the recent changes in the art world? Do you miss the art world as it was before the pandemic, or do you see more opportunity now?

I think the pandemic has shaken things up for everyone, like a big wave that swept through and tumbled us around and kicked up the sand while also taking down structures and stripping us naked. And this process isn't done. We're still in it. The virtual world existed before the pandemic and was already proposing changes before this crisis.
Personally, I think that many things are lost in virtuality, as there are also things that are gained. In terms of fine art, the physical contact with the material is lost. Feeling is lost for how the artist wove the yarn or how her brushstrokes caressed the canvas. Freedom is lost for walking the exposition space in the order one chooses. In film, one loses the experience of the theater, of sitting in a dark hall submerged in images and sounds. In both cases, one loses access to details. But on the other hand, a virtual exhibition can reach many people from different countries at the same time.
For those of us who make films and installations, it has been quite sad that the audience can only relate to our pieces through a computer, without direct contact with the work and the materials. There is a sensation that the computer is destroying things, and this is undeniable. I believe that art that has been made to be seen in an exhibition space or theater should have the possibility to be seen in an exhibition space or theater. Seeing it on a computer should be an option, not a requirement.
Even so, I believe that the question of virtuality is something we have to face; it's part of the historical moment and world we live in, and we can't ignore it. But I don't think that the virtual can ever or should ever replace the in-person, the physical, because it's a different experience. The virtual should find its own art. I think it's possible to conceive work to be presented in the virtual world, recognizing in the creative process the limits of the medium with which one is working to transform those limits into something more.

We all miss a lot of things from our lives pre-Covid. But is there one thing that you have discovered over the last year that you will keep with you in the future?

The greatest thing I learned from Covid is to value life every day. We spend a lot of time worrying about being successful, getting ahead, making money, buying a car, a house. We live with pressures and anxiety to belong, to be accepted, and our life gets lost in this. When we finally open our eyes, the time has passed, and we're not happy. We didn't even enjoy what we liked to do most. We constantly forget about the fragility of life and that the life we have to live is now. We put off what we like to do for tomorrow to do what we have to do today – that which will bring us money, recognition – and perhaps tomorrow never arrives. The pandemic halted the haste in which we lived and gave us the possibility of seeing beyond it; to stop looking to the future and look at who we are today, where we are today. We were even witnesses to how nature began to heal itself during this pause. And nature is also a metaphor for our interior being.

I thought a lot about a quote from Walter Benjamin on the revolution in his essay "On the Concept of History." He writes: "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race is grabbing for the emergency brake." Covid has been something similar: an emergency brake for a society that travels full speed towards the abyss. It's been an opportunity to see what doesn't work, to see what we were doing badly in our lives. But it's up to each person to allow themselves to see it.

INTERIOR, film, 87’07’’, 2017 © Camila Rodrìguez Triana

And finally, what are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I'm currently participating in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative as a protégé in visual arts, and this has allowed me to get to know American artist Carrie Mae Weems and, through her, artistic practice with a strong social and political commitment. I've learned that the value of art lies far beyond its plastic and formal qualities while also deepening my understanding of the social function it performs in processes of transformation.
At the same time, I'm working on the development of a new film and an installation. The film is called 'The Song of the Auricanturi' and produced by Mutokino (Colombia) and Gema Films (Argentina). The installation is called 'Exercises for Memory' and collects different moments in the history of my country that I have had to frame so as not to let them dilute in the stream's memory. To forget would mean to continue to be condemned to the cycles of violence in which we have lived: the forced displacement of thousands of families by armed groups, the daily assassination of human rights leaders since the signing of the peace agreement between the FARC guerrilla and the government of Juan Manuel Santos, the 6,402 "false positives" during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe and the killings and disappearances of young protestors at the hands of the police and military during the national strike that began on April 28th, 2021.

related interviews