Far Beyond the Silhouette
PHOTOGRAPHY, TEXT, CERAMIC TILES 160x220 cm
2024
EXCERPT FROM TEXT WORK:
– Dear Apartment 52, tell me about life before me.
Monologues were held for occasional listeners. There were always opportunities to speak but never one at a
time. Lies were truths, and my walls muffled the numbing music for the surrounding world. I embraced you
when the demons attacked and the scents from another life found their way to your nose, and you drifted
away — out, beyond the blocks, towards the sunset, towards the silhouette of prosperity with the rows of
balconies in the foreground. Your grandmother leaned towards your cousin’s ear and whispered — one day
this will be all yours.
EXCERPT FROM EXHIBITION TEXT
In Far Beyond the Silhouette, Isabella Solar Villaseca hones in on a photograph found in an album containing picutres sent by her exiled family to relatives remaining in Chile. In the photo a small girl is sat on a mauve sofa with a ‘million program’ tower block and its rows of balconies looming large in the background. This photo is one of few in the family album that does not capture a celebration or a gathering.
Here is a photo that immortalises a moment between joy and conviviality, that in its uneventfulness triggers affect that in turn can form the basis for deeper inquiry into the politics of memory. In the text that accompanies the photograph, set onto a background of brown tiles, it is the building that recounts anecdotes from a bygone era, creating a link between collective memory and personal experience.
Text by Karin Bähler Lavér, curator of duo-exhibition Real Realites for Real
Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen, 2024
Documentation from duo exhibition 'Real Realities for Real', Vermilion Sands
Photos by Kevin Malcom