Soledad Córdoba and transcendental motherhood

Madrid,

The photographs of the Asturian artist Soledad Córdoba have been characterized until now, and continue to be, by achieving narrative character through two means: creation in series, in her case successions of shots that place us before processes of a poetic nature, and the use of one’s own body as a fundamental element of these narratives, which we can also understand as fragmented stagings. The most common themes in these stories have been pain and the study of identity, frequently immersed in broad landscapes that play significant roles.

The identity that Córdoba associates with motherhood, which it describes as displaced identityis the center of the exhibition currently presented at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, under the curator of Zara Fernández de Moya: “Mater oblatio”. It is a set of installations and photographs in which the author investigates, from an evidently sentimental perspective although not only, in the experience of giving birth and raising, relating her vision of this matter with those that appear in works from the collections. of Lazarus, as well as the Flemish maternity wards and the marble Sitial Virgin, from the 16th century, which can be seen in room 17 of the centre.

Córdoba has referred to the birth of his son as a tectonic plate shift which involved an experience close to rebirth, an internal struggle, a welcoming ritual for the newborn and another ritual, incidentally, for his mother; He has transferred these sensations and experiences to images that are both self-portraits and visual poems and that combine, precisely, rites and symbolisms. Although she starts from herself, she has also proposed these works as a tribute to women as creators (and, therefore, as a social foundation) and with the aim of granting, in the context of contemporary art, the deserved importance to the processes constants of guiding, raising and caring; It underlines the generous beauty of this vital change, but also the new pain, fears and exhaustion that it entails.

Soledad Córdoba. Velum protector II, 2024

The exhibition tour begins with Protective Velum II. garden mother in the Portico Room; This is the name of an installation conceived for this space and made up of a large photograph on paper that spreads like a cloak, like the one that covers the mother and son in the image, with clearly religious echoes; In front of her, a circle of cobalt blue crystals has been arranged, empty inside, understood as a protective space that protects both of them. We will find this format, of photographs that could be compared to fabrics or cloaks, throughout the journey: the series Cyclus Lunaris Vitaeinstalled in room XIX, is made up of snapshots displayed on Japanese paper in which Córdoba offers poetic visions of the cycle of life and the changes that both motherhood and the course of one’s own life imply over time: desires, uncertainties , responsibilities or the nearness of the end.

The third of its facilities, the one most obviously linked to the physical efforts of breeding, is dairy and is shown in room X of guest art; refers to the loss of physical and emotional control on the part of the mother, while, specifically in dialogue with the aforementioned flamenco pieces and the Sitial Virgin, which has a skull on its reverse, we will contemplate Ex Uterusa piece related to emptying after childbirth and the cycle of life and death: it is a vessel-womb turned ghost-womb, or perhaps amputated, that is stripped of its pearls.

The tour ends, in the anteroom of the Portico, with four masks placed on the tables in this space: previously made to be used in photographic actions in Córdoba, each of them was executed by hand, sewing or embroidering elements that are part of this exhibition and its symbolism linked to generating and maintaining lives: pearls, blue crystal tears, protective veils. Some of these pieces are reminiscent of votive offerings halfway between the transcendental and the sinister, but in the exhibition as a whole the angles have disappeared in favor of soft curves.