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 Relationships, loved ones: what it means when somebody shares the same blood as you. Interview with Ana Álvarez-Errecalde, by Daniel Gasol.

Ana Álvarez-Errecalde (Bahía Blanca, Argentina, 1973) wraps up her stay at Hangar after two years as an artist-in-residence. During this time Ana has been developing her work on the study of identity, how this is subject to metamorphosis, and the fragility of the latter.
When addressing these issues, Ana is engaged in personal investigation, in which we discover recognisable interconnections, parental relationships and affections, the poetic passage of time and the love we feel for specific people, thus defining our own identity and the way we establish ourselves in relation to the people around us.

Q: Your work Tallas (Sizes) is very socially engaged. The installation creates a connection between a clothes shop, a reality of images that don’t seem too evident in advertising aimed at women, and a type of identity for each of the people who want to try on a suit on a hanger. Can you tell us about it?

A.: Tallas is part of MORE STORE, a clothes shop that looks ironically at a society where absolutely everything is for sale. I photographed almost fifty women of different ages, sizes, skin-colour and countries of origin. I wanted not only to expose bodies that are normally covered up and negated because they don’t correspond to the so-called "model" woman, but also allow the viewers to form their own opinions on the body’s value both in terms of aesthetics and provenance. There were MADE IN Cameroon, Costa Rica, Russia, Iceland, the USA, Chile, Italy and many other countries. Unmarked, tattooed, scarred, burnt and wrinkled bodies... The women who participated wanted and needed to feel in some way represented. For me it was a very enriching experience. It was a very difficult project to undertake. I had never worked in three-dimensional photography, I learned a lot. At present a selection of those suits and the video are part of the exhibition 1M2 - Invasión Sutil traveling to Olot, Huesca and Tournefuille.

Q: I saw your short documentary on the work of your colleague Jorge Rodríguez Gerada, who paints portraits of people from a neighbourhood on the walls of its buildings, I saw people photographing the event near the CCCB  ...

A.: That was the first one. Very classical, an interview with Jorge, some shots of the neighbourhood and things that were going on in the plaza Valldonzella, which is quite picturesque. At least it was, because it's become very sterile. Then I did the second one in Madrid, but I only put the trailer on the Internet as it’s a long film. In that one I just let the people talk, they were very curious, and I tried to focus on that part in which people were telling the story. The questions and answers from people formed the back-bone of the work, and Jorge hardly spoke at all, except at the end.

Q: Yes, and in fact he talks about this in an interview, where he says that the work is not just the drawing on the wall, but the whole process, from the search for the person from the neighbourhood he is going to draw until that drawing disappears, the fact that it’s ephemeral and that the charcoal fades and disappears ... I think it’s a good metaphor.

A. In the Madrid documentary this is shown clearly. People discuss the presence of the person being portrayed and throw in comments such as: yes well, that’s life, it doesn’t last long, and it’s a workman telling you this. That’s what is great about it because these people are not involved in art and yet here they are interpreting the work. Amongst the whole chaos of the documentary, is this poetical quality, that makes it magical. I made another one in the Basque Country, it was very short. But it was quite a shock to us because people associated the image with something political.
Jorge had chosen a young boy from the neighbourhood, an anarchist type, with long hair. People thought it was Franco, it was crazy. That also taught us how difficult it is to deliver a different message when people already have a fixed idea.

Q: That’s very interesting do you think this idea comes into your own work?

A. No, not at all, that’s Jorge’s work, but I do find that when I’m making a documentary certain things come up from the time when I was studying cinema, it’s like another part of me. In fact I got into the whole artistic thing after the birth of my first child who has a very complex syndrome, a serious neurological condition, I could no longer work in a team, as I had to devote myself entirely to him. So I started taking photos as a way of channelling my creative side, and I started doing some portraits of him and my family. And that’s how the Egología series started, all this very intimate work, but I still feel passionately about documentary, which is what I started out wanting to do. In fact, I now want to start working with the footage I have of the drawing in the sand that Jorge did at the Fórum, but we want to try and get proper funding to make a good documentary, with a real budget and a crew.

Q: Regarding your work, you could say it’s difficult, it really turns cliché on its head, the stereotypes we often have surrounding our human condition and the history behind it. The photograph Viaje de familia (Family Trip) really moved me. Is it a personal portrait? It reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect, where you see the image of a beggar, that of a piece of bread and then the beggar again, and so we understand he's hungry.

A: These photos weren’t planned in advance. And I didn’t want to take those photos. That’s one of the ways I work, it’s very organic, like the photos of the birth. When I was pregnant I used to dream every night of a photo of the birth where my baby was still attached to me by the umbilical cord. I never thought I was going to show it as art, it was a personal need. Then when I saw the pictures, I wanted to show them for several reasons. I didn’t feel represented by the maternities I had seen up until then, I wanted to show that there was a different kind of birth to the one I had learned about, which seemed to me like a manipulation of women. And I wanted to give voice to my own experience and say: yes, things can also be different.
With Viaje en Familia, what happened was that we were invited to give a talk, and on the way there, we had an accident in that car and it was a write-off. The whole thing was very dramatic, we had the children with us, the ambulance arrived, we were taken to hospital ... those unexpected things that make you go into shock and leave you feeling out of control. There is a before and an after the accident, we lived, but it could have turned out differently. Then I bought a disposable camera to take pictures for the insurance. I continued taking pictures on the same roll. Having lived through the accident, I found it hard being back home, we had to do something else, celebrate life. We decided to go for a picnic in Montserrat. When I developed the photos they seemed perfect for the Egología series because they really show who I am and I consider that episode to be an important part of my story.

Q: The roll was like a chronology of life from a starting point with a before and an after.

A: When it comes to placing them, it’s true that the accident came first and then the picnic, but I liked what you were saying about whoever looks at the photograph makes up their own history. It’s an autobiographical fact, I'm still alive, yet at the same time, those who don’t me know are left not knowing what happened to that family. In fact, what I really want to do is challenge the preconceived idea that we have when it comes to putting together the family album. Nowadays, in the digital era, it’s a bit out-dated, but we’re still editing images to project an idea of who we are, like on Facebook, where we put ourselves on display. Is that you? The one who is happy with your friends having a drink? Is that you all? Or are the things and events that don’t appear in any imagery, that weren’t photographed or which were discarded in the “editing process”, the ones that really make you? My work tackles that: what we show ourselves to be and what what we are.

Q.: The truth is that we live in a time where it is difficult to know who we are, don’t you think?

A.: Well that’s a bit like what I'm preparing at the moment. I was awarded a CONCA grant for a project which might seem not to have much to do with my work up to now, because I am portraying other people, who are not from my own environment, yet it still deals with the same issue. I’m portraying immigrants, focusing on the expectations they had in the past and the reality, it’s a bit like what you say when somebody says, how are you? - great, fantastic, as if we were the personification of success, whereas the truth is another reality that is hard for us to admit and show.

Q: I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about what we purport to be, the expectations we had and what we really are. In your work, as part of the Alquimia series, there are photographs of a wedding dress that describe the idea this dress carries, a dream discarded by a couple we know nothing about.

A: In the end it’s all closely linked, although the materials used are very different, you could say it’s a documentary, even if I don’t treat it the same way, it’s more dreamlike.

Q. I see two strands in your work, the first strand where you introduce personal things like this example from Alquimia, and then there is the more feminine strand, which is something only a woman could do, although I’m very interested in your work about your personal life.

A: This last one also belongs to Egología, the trigger was the death of my sister Bany Sol. She dies and I want to work on something in collaboration with her. To show her work. Alongside that, I was really trying to figure out how to photograph absence, because I needed it and I couldn’t find it. I took a poem she’d sent me by e-mail called Me abrocho al deseo (I fasten myself to desire), in which she talked about the things she wished had been different in love, about what changes in a relationship when everything is overshadowed by the weight of routine and daily life ... One day I was in a Humana shop and I saw loads of wedding dresses, bereft of all those brides, some were dirty with wedding cake stuck into the material. What happened to all these women? Some had died, others had got rid of the dress and the husband ... the puzzle started coming together, so I decided to use the verses of her poem as a way of suggesting images to me. I was able to work in collaboration with her and I could photograph her absence.

Q: What does Egología mean?

A: The word doesn’t actually exist, but it could mean something like the study of the ego, the study of the I.

Q. Ego as a metaphor for the artist who talks about the world that surrounds her?

A: More than the artist’s, my vision, things that happen in my life. I try to not fragment who I am: we all go to Jorge’s projects, the children are there at the base of the crane, I often bring them here to Hangar ... I try to avoid this thing of an artist me and a non-artist me. I'm everything that I am. I start off as something integral. For example with these photos (shows pictures of a naked man). I want to take pictures of a man, and I realise that, in truth, I want to photograph the man I love because he’s the one who encouraged me to ask him what it is that I want to photograph, and it wasn’t going to be easy to photograph just anybody. From a very personal perspective I like to create these images for their aesthetic value, these photos seem beautiful to me, this is what I like to look at. On the other hand, I want to share them, because, politically, I see that often women have not been allowed to photograph a naked man, and when we see naked men, either they’re self-portraits, or are from a gay perspective. I don’t find a view that represents me and that is where my need to show my own photos comes from.
That is why my work today may seem outdated, because gender no longer matters, yet there are still things to be done. It’s fine transcending gender, but it's like race, the day there’s no racism we’ll have transcended everything, meanwhile, there are plenty of people who don’t have it so easy.

Q: You gather crumbs, analyse them and what’s going on around you.

A.: Yes, that’s right, although before my first child I didn’t have such strong opinions. I’ve ended up taking a road where I’ve assumed various responsibilities, so, when I create an image, I feel that I also have a responsibility, I think that’s why I don’t have a vast body of work, because I feel that everything must have a reason.

Q: I like the idea of responsibility for an "image", that it’s not fortuitous, and of your own social responsibility as a mother, woman and artist. I think it’s the best metaphor to describe your work, you must be responsible for your environment to be able to create.

A. Yes, I think so. An association called "El Parto es Nuestro” (Childbirth is ours) (www.elpartoesnuestro.es) recently got in touch with me because they liked the work El nacimiento de mi hija (My daughter’s birth), Tallas and some other work I’ve done. They’ve asked me for some photographs for a book on caesareans, which often are not necessary, and are done just to accommodate the doctor. I like the idea of working on the visible scar and also inquiring into the emotional scar, which is a latent idea in all my work. Someone living through pain and someone has the strength to se up an association that provides information to other women so that they don’t have to go through the same thing. So I’m working on that at the moment, I want every woman to have an unique photograph.
I'm very enthusiastic, I think it could turn out very well, be very strong and very motivating.
 
Q: You seem very excited about this work.

A: I'm very happy, two things have come up, the one for CONCA and this. One day I received these two emails and I began to hold on tight as there are always up and downs  ... I have already had my share of one, now I want the other (laughs)
Now it’s time to enjoy this, because they are two very different projects, but I see them as very close to my work. The CONCA one on immigration, because I lived in New York as an illegal immigrant for seven years, and I’ve been through that talking to my parents thing, and assuring them that things were going well when in fact things were going badly, I hadn’t got into this yet, and also, hearing those stories, in both works, enriches you a lot.

Q: Listening to these people is the best way to remember them and keep them in our memory.

A.: Yes, that’s so true, listening to them also gives them an opportunity for those experiences and/or needs to have an effect on other people and in turn generate new things.

Q. What has Hangar has given you on a professional and personal level?

A. Again, the professional and the personal is exactly the same.
When I came to Hangar it was such a surprise. I had never had a workshop and at first I was afraid of not being able to make the most of it. However, the fact that they give you a vote of confidence is very encouraging and I’ve created a lot more work than I could have imagined. I became more confident when undertaking projects. I consolidated my interests. Putting my work on line gave me a lot of exposure. Several of the people I met through this residency will stay on the road with me.

Q: Tell me about what you plan in the future, apart from the CONCA grant and the work about the immigrants, do you plan to put on an exhibition, or take a rest ...

A.: In late February I will begin to show the photographs of the stories of each caesarean. And as soon as I take on a workshop, I want to continue with MORE STORE, using Tallas to do photography and make videos of people wearing the suits that have already been made.
I have material to edit a short film that will be part of the Egología series. And I have several ideas to continue working on. The hard part is accepting that things also have a rhythm of their own which is usually not in sync with our own time ...