In all cultures, memory plays a fundamental role in identity processes. Contemporary discourses and artistic practices are nourished by different forms of archives, the family photo album being one of these. With its particularly personal and intimate qualities, it constitutes a socio-historical document, whose characteristics differ significantly regarding the individualism and narcissism of today’s digital photographic archives.

For the exhibition titled Laura, Gómez Machado continues her exploration of family photographic, documents in the quest for the female lineage, questioning how certain characteristics, values and other cultural expressions are passed on generationally, while at the same time challenging her own imaginaries as an artist. Femininity, motherhood, gender, and similar concepts interact in questions that the artist asks herself personally, in relation to the story of an emblematic great-grandmother, whom the artist never met. The ‘apparently simple’ fact that she gave birth to ten children is what is known about Laura and that “when she died of childbirth, she was rapidly replaced by another woman, who could take charge of bringing up the children”.

From a perspective clearly identified with contemporary feminism, the artist expresses the following:

“This revision of the personal and familial makes evident gender situations such as the de-eroticization of the female body as we age, upbringing strategies that affect the feminine through subtle actions of behavioral control, different types of violence towards women such as psychological, patrimonial and economic violence that can play out in the subtleties of the home and over time become normalized.”1

Her consideration of the family album introduces us to a set of values and representations, the patriarchal family hierarchy being particularly notable. Avoiding a literal reading, Gómez Machado pays attention to the details that seep through the cracks in the pictures: second shots, blurred faces, costumes or other residues of the image.

By bringing these memories to the present, stylistically in flat colors, absence of shadows, predominant shades of grey and blue, the works are somehow transfigured into fetishes that condense temporal strata with their own relevant experiences. Hence the self-portrait or the series Teléfono roto (telephone game), indicating with this title the impossibility of fidelity to history, the gap between memory, uncertain and diffuse, and the present. Female self-affirmation in Machado’s work, achieved through the investigation of family history, the recognition of the meaning of other lives, at once courageous and anguished, points to a path of introspection, personal growth and the search for true female identity today.

Ana Patricia Gómez
Bogotá, 2024

[1] Gómez Machado, Isabel. Flores para tu altar: Encontrar y crear otros imaginarios femeninos a partir de la recolección, análisis y deconstrucción del archivo familiar. Investigation proposal, 2024.