Carolina Echeverri

Carolina Echeverri was born in 1980 in Bogotá, Colombia, with schooling in the capital and all her free time spent on her father's farm far outside the city. The free and unruly nature became her playmate, who has then followed her all her life and shaped her view on the world.

In her early twenties, she moved to Amsterdam, where she began working in the music business with artists such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Mavis Staples and many others. It was also here that she began photographing. She found an interest in visiting cemeteries, both in the Netherlands and on the many business trips abroad, and she began to document the cultural differences in which we all say goodbye. In 2011, she moved to Copenhagen, where she has used analog methods to tell real and unedited stories with her photographs.

Carolina has previously participated in group exhibitions at e.g. Kunsthal Charlottenborg and Hans Alf Gallery, and the exhibition at NW Gallery is her first solo exhibition in Copenhagen. In 2019, she was featured in GUP Magazine “Fresh Eyes” as one of the best emerging photographers in Europe, and in 2021, the Latin America Photography Foundation and Enfoque Visual Magazine named her as one of 30 recommended new Latin American photographers .

Carolina Echeverri lives in Copenhagen with her husband and two children.

Interview by Dana Stirling

First, tell us a little about your journey with art and photography – how did it all start for you?

All kids start drawing, sculpting and playing with images since toddlers, and i guess i never really stopped doing those things, I’ve always had an inclination to work with my hands and tell stories. However i entered into a relationship with a camera rather late. The decisive point to use the camera as a medium was around my late twenties when was working at a record label and traveling all around Europe constantly for business. Those one-two day trips meant a lot of alone time in new places and cultures, and to kill time between meetings and airports i started documenting cemeteries in all the cities i would visit, and i did this for i think almost 10 years.

There is a point in most of our lives when you get rather fascinated with death, and that mixed with this constant exposure to different cultures is what sparked my curiosity to start recording the different manners cultures celebrate their dead. It’s something so private, so definite. Its personal, but ofcourse tradition plays a huge part, so it’s a very defined reflection of a culture and a society. The shapes of the stones, the fonts, the information of the loved one, the graphics, the design of the actual cemetery, the positioning of the tombs, it’s extremely fascinating to study. From there i quickly discovered i loved image making, but i didn’t connect with the digital expression, so on one of my trips to Switzerland i got a small pinhole that came with its little chemical set, and analog has been my medium ever since.

Can you tell us a little about your work “Like Purity, Like Gravity” and what was the inspiration that sparked it?

Nature plays a huge part in my life. I grew with quite some time in the city going to school (Bogota, Colombia), but all my free time was spent in the countryside, and Colombia’s countryside in that time was not just your typical western rural area, it had some fascinating wild and luscious nature. In my early 20’s i moved to Europe and lived in capital cities, yet once I became a mother things radically changed for me. Not only in the usual practical or emotional manner we all know, but having children creates a mirror into your own past and your own upbringing. I got shellshocked when i understood the impact nature had on me, followed by a grand questioning of what would nature’s role be for my children. And i dont mean this only in the climate crisis discussion which is impacting our physical survival in the longterm, which is ofcourse vital, but mostly in the impact nature has on our mental health, development, longterm evolution and even happiness. This lead into a philosophical realisation, which has then taken me into a path of continuous investigation on nature, its behavioural implications on our brains, and on power structures affecting nature, to try and understand how we have manage to fall so far from natural grace.

A french professor named Jacques Cauvin suggested that around the Neolithic period humans separated themselves from nature, seeing themselves above it and thus, being able to control it. This was in his mind the birth not only of the dominance of humans of nature (agriculture, which ofcourse changed everything for humans), but also of religion, the biggest eternal elephant in the room. We don’t pair religion and nature enough, but religion has had a huge implication on nature. And when i refer to nature i don’t mean only the flora and fauna worlds, but the naturalness, the purity of things that are when undisturbed. This lead me to do an image dance between what we all understand as pure (eg childhood) and natural landscapes. In the pictures we see a child in a dress being wild, pure, full of naturalness. We all assume its a girl but its actually a boy. Power structures are also skewing and framing the most simple of things, things as simple as garments. It’s taken women hundreds of years to be able to wear pants without judgement (until around 1940’s mind you), but the ironic tragedy is that in 2021 most boys and men cant freely wear dresses. Unless you are a priest or a judge ofcourse.

All this newly acquired information just exploded in what is a series of about 22 images, full of naturalness, but captured in grainy black and white 35mm film. I love having color as a variant in my photographic language, but in this series i wanted to speak to all generations, and its clear to me that i have learned my history through black and white grainy pictures, so i wanted to hold that formal expression that commands a statement regardless of what generation the viewer is part of. It makes my statement more true in some conceptual way.

Can you tell us about your choice to make the final images as diptychs? Why was this important to you?

Pairing the images and the conversation between them is what makes this series. Without the conversation between them we dont have the assimilation which I’m trying to create with this body of work. Making this project was all about transferring feelings we have from one image into another, very much in a therapeutic way. The more you assimilate the feelings of pureness and wilderness, and take that empathy and care you feel for that child into the images of nature, the more I have succeeded. I want us to reset out relationship to nature. I want us to have empathy for it. I want us to let it be wild, let it be pure, let it be disorderly, as we would let a child be all those things. The conversation between the images is everything.

You speak about this work, and you mention a connection to religion and faith and our connection to nature, can you elaborate more about these notions? What do they mean to you and how do you hope this work communicates it to the viewer?

We touched a bit before on it, when discussing the theories of Jacques Cauvin, thats on the archeological aspect of it. Personally I grew up in a very religious household where catholicism played a mayor role. Not only in the iconography that surrounded me, but also the sense of being “watched” and “judged” was very present in my culture, and it has taken me a long time to shed free from it.

With time I have lost my belief. Certainly the belief in the system of the church, and the belief on the narrative of a bigger power has mutated dramatically where its morphed out of recognition to the biblical stories i was taught. My faith now relates more to energy than to any particular figure.

All this has made me looked at religion and its history with distrustful eyes, specially when it comes to nature. So although religion plays a vital role in my culture and tradition, and its in some ways continiously coming out in my expression and artistic language, i actually see them (nature and religion) as opposites.

I can only speak about my own religion accurately ofcourse, but its a fact that Christianity has played a mayor role in financing the destruction of nature throughout time, not only in colonising times, but also through vast agriculture in Europe, and thats not even touching on the connections of the church with political roles enhancing climate crisis today. Additionally, its effects on what is natural, or naturalness, when we lean more towards identity, gender roles, and all the limitations that have come with the rules imposed by the church are also heartbreaking.

Dont get my wrong, i love and appreciate the social support and ritual aspects of religions and their traditions, but they come at the very high cost of judgement and acceptance of what can not fit into their rigid boxes. So though i touch a lot on religion, its more aimed at reflecting how it has led us astray, and not a celebration.

Can you speak about the experience of photographing your son for this project? How was that dynamic and overall experience? How did he feel while taking the images? How involved was he?

As many great things it started as an accident, which then lead into a breakthrough. My boy’s clothes got wet on a summer day in the countryside, we didn’t have extra at hand, so i passed on his sister’s (too big for her still) dress to just cover him. He looked at me as if i was completely mad, “a boy cant wear a dress”.

“Of course they can” I replied, and we had a conversation about it, which at the age of 6 stays rather concise.

Once the dress was on though, he thought it was so much fun. I could actually see he enjoyed the freshness and softness that you can feel when having something which wraps you, while feeling the freedom of the skin in your legs actually touching. Its so airy and soft right? He started running around and i innocently took a holiday picture.

When i got the images back from the lab it changed everything for me, and paired with all my other studies about nature it just clicked. From there, once in a while in the weekends he would take a dress on and just run around being himself in our property and i would just document him. Me being behind him or his little sister with a camera is far from new for them, they are part of many of my projects because they are constantly under my motherly loving eye.

Its important for me to say that I couldn’t have made these pictures and exhibition without telling him i was doing it. I have been honest with him openly talking about the aim, and what people know (he knows that people know its him). Both my husband and i are artists, and we have moved in artistic circles all our lives, also within music, so i think that has opened his mind to many things, which other people will consider maybe a bit unordinary.

When I looked at all of your projects as a whole, it seems that your work always has an undertone notion of sadness, of loss and the search for this type of peace within it. Could that be an accurate assumption/read into who you are as an artist?

This was a bit of a hard question to answer to be honest. I never consciously assimilated sadness or loss with my work, but ofcourse i had to sit and try and understand why this is the tone my works have given you.

I realised that you are probably rather on point with this assumption. Anyone who has left their home and planted roots elsewhere will always carry some sense of loss. The earth under your feet doesn’t feel the same, the mountain that used to guide you in nowhere to be seen, and the smells from your surroudings and your loved ones are not there to keep you safe anymore. We are creatures guided by our senses no matter how evolved we think we are, and all the information i have from the first 21 years of my life is no longer there.

I have ofcourse grown new roots, even new branches here in Copenhagen, but there will always be something that i had, which made me who i am, but which is no longer with me. So like a loved one thats’s gone, you carry the ghost and the love, but you miss the touch and the embrace.

I guess this mourning is the loss and sadness you are picking up on in my work.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced so far as an artist? How did you find yourself overcoming them?

I think time has been my biggest issue, i just never have enough time for all the ideas that flow through my mind. This can be slightly demotivating because you feel you arent productive enough, but also rather frustrating as you know you aren’t bringing all the ideas to light and all gets slowed down and bottle necked. This has taken me some years to get used to, and I just had to learn to have patience with myself, time manage differently and also realise that some ideas actually get better by simmering a long time in your brain without actually being executed.

Confidence is also an issue that comes and goes ofcourse, i think its even more true when you decided to take art later in life and without a formal art education, but my stubbornness has always held my hand through to the other side. I read once taurus folk are meant to be stubborn by nature, maybe its the stars that are helping me overcome ha ha.

You currently have a solo show at the Copenhagen photo festival – congrats! Can you tell us about some of the choices you’ve made for this show in terms of presentation of the work and how it fills up the space? What is your favorite part of the show?

Thank you! I have had this show in my mind for almost two years now, so its gone through various phases. My starting point was making sure that the main aim was to make people feel something when they entered the space. That was it.

So my reference was, going back to religion, how intense images on walls can encapsulate the viewer just by their pure scale, and thats exactly what i have done with two of the walls where the diptychs are printed on rolls of paper draping from a bit below the ceiling all the way to the floor.

Initially all walls were planned to be like this, but the gallery, though its two rooms, is still a rather intimate space, so it suddenly got overly saturated really fast with imagery. In the end I kept just one large scale version in each room. Like an altar, one diptych drapes each room while facing 2-3 small scaled framed diptychs, which also allows the viewer to get closer and follow a story.

To bring the big draped images out from the white walls, i framed them from the back with gouache painted cotton canvas. This is not only a formal choice though, the colours that I’m actually using make reference to both the colours we identify gender in most parts of the world, but also nod back to the colours in which all the religion imagery i grew up seeing in all my family’s homes. Francisco Pacheco, a Spanish painter, formalised around the 1600’s that the Virgin Mary should be clothed in pink and blues, and its like her uniform in all posters, sculptures and paintings in Colombia. They are very powerful colors filled with meaning and are also explosive to the eye’s when put together.

I also built a small handmade wooden swing thats hanging in the room over a pile of sand, and thats just to acknowledge the power objects have in their physical form, also in terms of how they trigger memories. And to finish, I covered the rooms with sounds of nature and free layered musical compositions on a constant loop.

When you enter the gallery, though a balanced and perceivably a quiet show, im still taking over all your senses and demanding your attention to what im trying to communicate, and that has been my aim all along. I cant really pick a favourite part, its the whole thing coming together in cohesive way that gives me so much gratification. I’m rather lucky that i could do this show in this particular gallery (NW Gallery), which is a really playful space owned by the Norwegian artist and curator Nina Worren, who really encourages untraditional depictions of very personal stories.

As we add more days into this global pandemic, I wanted to ask if it has changed anything for you as an artist? Has it affected your work in any way?

Absolutely. Patience has been the quality that has been challenged the most during this period. Once you get pushed to what you thought was your extremes, you do become better and better at it though. So although it has been a massively stressful period trying to combine work, family life with small children and a time of intense uncertainty and fear, it has made me accept that I can only do what i can at that particular moment, and its ok that things sit in a shelf a little bit longer. I think this has ultimately made my latest work better, because as i mentioned before, sometimes letting works or ideas simmer just makes them more concise and relevant.

Lastly, what is next? Any news you would like to share? Book events or exhibitions we should expect in the future?

Next up is making a small book of this exhibition, i want it to live further in peoples homes so i’ll be making a very limited edition handmade version of it, and thats incredibly exciting. In the fall we will also be doing a small show at TRBL Studios titled “Still An Animal”, where i will have photographic works but also a few ceramic sculptures.

And parallel to this I’m continuously working on my current Polaroid series “All Great Symbols Are Empty”,
which i cant wait to share with the world once completed.

I will be a participate in the Festival de Fotografía Artística Fronteras/Fronteras Art Photography Festival in Tucuman, Argentina with my series “All Great Symbols Are Empty”.