"In the daily exercise that we artists do, of recognizing ourselves in images that often emerge from we don't quite know where, there is always the option to jump. To yield to the void and give everything for something we don't even know if it exists. To renounce forgiveness for such an absurd task. To treasure the darts that hit our head, scale pain and defy solitude, passion, love, anguish, joy, to go out to meet them. Scale beauty like a cursed summit: the abyss in front of which we can no longer turn back without losing." Guadalupe Plaza Petersen reflects on all this, paraphrasing artist Verónica García, while savoring a coffee at the bar.
This Argentine visual artist, currently based in Barcelona with her husband and two children, has honed her skills in cultural settings as diverse as Spain, Argentina, Indonesia, and Italy; she has exhibited in galleries around the world and has work published in headers as different as Time Out Hong Kong, Al-Tiba 9, Pupil Sphere, L'oeil de la Photographie or El Mocla.
A lawyer by training, one day she decided "not to feel in my comfort zone" and sought to deepen her contact with nature, looking for "an emotional understanding of it" through images. Thus began a long creative process "that I believe has a lot to do with exploration and self-knowledge, to create from a certain abyss and void. A personal exploration with a certain fragility and intentional ambiguity, which speaks of the feeling of abandonment, of separation, of time and how the state of things is about to explode."
Based on these premises, the artist uses images as a necessary element "to reflect on the real, the habitual, and the imaginary that sustain our world, our desire, and our pain. And on the connection between certain milestones such as adulthood, life, death, and the way to order them, scrutinize them, generate a change, a mutation, a regeneration that sometimes comes involuntarily."
In search of the lost symbiosis
With an approach to her work much more experiential than didactic, the parishioner questions "humanity's separation from the environment" through her ambitious series Return to Paradise. "My photographs, especially those in this series, function as a meeting point, to make us reflect on the climate urgency, generate environmental awareness and responsibility towards the planet that contains us and that we inhabit." When was this connection between man and his habitat lost? How to reconnect with an environment whose symbiosis seems to have been lost and that seems to be about to burst?
"Many of the images are empty landscapes. Photos taken in South America, in some places in my homeland where you can feel the purity of the landscape. That feeling of absolute, immeasurable solitude, which I haven't perceived as much in other places while traveling. And, from that feeling, tell a story," explains the artist who in her images recreates "the scenarios, the environments, those immaculate, untamed natural territories, the virginity of the landscape, the destruction of nature, the threatening demography, merging between the fantastic or almost unreal."
The ethical objective is a collective change of course, "to successfully face the transformations of the planet that affect us all." A transformation that goes through processes that our species is the only one capable of reversing.
---And how do you approach your work?
---I like to work first from a concept or idea. And it is in that process that it becomes transcendental and fundamental for the production of my work and for its transformation.
Affection and respect
Proud "of my perseverance as an artist, of my resilience and of the unconditional support of my family," the parishioner has been in Barcelona for just under a year, with which she maintains "a relationship of affection and respect."
In love "with the city's cultural offerings, its architecture, its almost perfect streets and layouts, the beaches and mountains, the people and green spaces," she is swept away by the magnificence of Catalan Modernism "with its own modern personality based on the idea of breaking with past forms and creating a new art. It is an architectural trend that breaks with traditional criteria and seeks new ways of building that, in parallel, give great relevance to aesthetics. It is cultured and sensitive to art and has given us great geniuses such as Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch and Antoni Gaudí."
---And what are you working on here?
"I was working at FotoNostrum, a photography art gallery, which has been a very nice and gratifying experience for me," replies Guadalupe Plaza Petersen before pausing for a few seconds and then resuming speaking, with a brief and intense glow in her eyes and a frank smile on her face:
---And I continue working on my art, of course!
---And may it not cease!!