Ellas

Text by Sophie Boursat, visual artist, writer and curator.
ELLAS*, the exhibition that Karen Paulina Biswell presents to us today at the Intervalle gallery, is an important exhibition. It is important for Colombian photography, because it affirms the vitality and creativity of silver photography in the presence of prints of exceptional quality, but above all because it confirms the artistic dimension of Karen Paulina Biswell's images in their performative quality, while she constantly pursues research that digs deeper and deeper into the problems of existence of the female gender.
In the introduction to their joint book "Thinking Anew," philosophers Lucy Irigaray and Michael Marder write:
"We must also return to our sexual identities and learn how to inhabit them as a framework, starting from what we can relate to our environment, to others, and, above all, to ourselves. Rather than resorting to an external equipment or "Gestell *" of technique, we can approach the whole from the place of its morphology that corresponds to our sexual identities, without letting these be reduced to an individual "whatever they are" neutral, we can by this way keep and cultivate our natural energies. Moreover being sexualized provides us with an additional energy that allows us to resist our subjectivizations of an undifferentiated technological energy and to build a human relational world capable of ensuring coexistence between us without any domination or exclusion of other living beings."
It is in this same perspective of investigation of sexual identity that Karen Paulina Biswell has made her own for several years that she weaves deep links with the plant world and that she uses it today fully as an ally of her work. For, like female sexuality, the plant world has always been surrounded by mysteries. "Vita in plantis es occulta" said St. Thomas Aquinas, which is why, explains Michael Marder, these occult memories give rise to totemism and fertility rites. But Karen's works, far from the archaisms, open especially on the "arches" of a new feminism which would consider itself today more phenomenological than societal.
Because ELLAS* is them and more than all of us, her models, Karen chooses to photograph them always displaced in an exterior, free of any sign of sociological assignment, of social classification. No pressure is put on them so that in this "here and now" the reality of their power can manifest itself. Heroines of all possibilities, divine women in the sense of a divine without beginning or end, here they are photographed as queens enthroned by this centered immobility where animal intelligence and vegetable knowledge merge, simultaneously offered and ready to take over the world and the hearts of men, fatal because of this latent capacity to accomplish these instantaneous changes of state where the song of Eros begins.
Karen Paulina Biswell associates this generative power with that of the bees, so the honey flows in this exhibition, a manifestation of exchange and the power of giving that belongs to the natural world. A fusion takes place and the bodies themselves become vegetalized. The sumptuous "cathedralization" of the bellies unfolds, where a plant life whispers and shudders. The solidly planted bones become "arches", the point of origin of a sacralized architecture in a movement of spiritual verticalization, while out of our sight, but still turned towards the light, passages are made, brazen strategies far from all common knowledge. What we know about women's desire is often that we know nothing or so little about it. Paradox of the luxuriance of the corollas and of a culture of silence where the bodies secrete and the sensitivities bloom by the constant work of a desire at work. A desire to be considered with the greatest seriousness and the greatest respect because today it is a question of our very survival. Mutatis Mutandis, if the things that need to be changed are changed, then the secret of the plant remains the whole secret of the plant, behind the silence of women lies the key to the future of the whole of humanity. Thus, the attempts of objectivizations of our positivist sciences will not be able to make anything there, it is hardly if we will see by a half-opened mouth, the germination of a truth revealing itself in a half-darkness.