Unfamiliar Self-Portrait

Text by: Ricardo Resende. Curator, Bispo do Rosário Museum of Contemporary Art. 2021

UNFAMILIAR SELF-PORTRAIT, THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE UNREAL

Taking photographs today is very easy: all you need is a cell phone with a good camera, within reach – which is usually the case – and at the disposal of the desire to photograph. This desire has become a banal gesture, and the dissemination of the images produced has also become commonplace, via social networks. It's all very easy. However, for a work to have creative quality and stand out for its photographic aesthetic quality, it will require the creator to have technical skills and visual knowledge to address contemporary themes such as identity, gender, feminism, violence, racism, decolonization, and many other themes dear to contemporary art. In other words, the photographer must propose a disturbing narrative universe that causes estrangement.

Dariane Martiól's fantastical photo essay, featuring her and her mother, includes staged and dramatized portraits in which photographer and mother theatricalize their conflictual relationship. This tumultuous coexistence was exacerbated by the confinement imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged entire countries and ruined family relationships in 2020. People no longer knew each other and were forced to share their living spaces and lives in close proximity. Others, who isolated themselves completely, also suffered and still suffer from a new form of loneliness: self-imposed loneliness.

The photographic essay "Unfamiliar Self-Portrait," as the title suggests, problematizes the relationship between mother and daughter. Through its unsettling and strange narrative, the artist explores two "bodies," viscerally exposing forms and deformities in seemingly agonizing situations, in a kind of mutual suicide. A staging that suggests torture and mutilation sessions with moments that seem to bring out affection versus hatred. This appears to be what guides the scenes recorded by Dariane Martiól.

In the essay-recording of the mother's body alongside Martiól's, the scenes are clearly orchestrated by the photographer, who acts in front of the camera itself. They are ambiguous images that speak of love and hate, of reality and fantasy.

An only child, the relationship with her mother was conflictual, according to the artist, but with the help of the camera, she gained a new perspective and, through it, reinterpreted much of this mother-daughter, daughter-mother relationship. Through photography, mother and daughter reconnected and were thus able to exorcise hatred and experience harmony with intimacy and, of course, more affection blossomed.

The affective bond seems to have been re-established. The photographic image began to function as an umbilical cord connecting the two bodies, in an almost symbiotic relationship.