Nicephora

Nicephora is a work that rustles, an echo chamber where we sense the footsteps and words of feminine presences murmuring their refusal to let themselves become trapped inside their own representations. Rising above the archetype of the female as a sexual object, a woman of strength, a romantic woman, they tell us that they have existed nonetheless: similar and different, rich, complex, alive. Listen to the reproduced images and you will hear the voices of an athletic champion, an ancient Greek heroine, an anonymous young Berber woman, a female television presenter. Moving amongst them is a masculine presence, that of Nicephore Niepce, the inventor of photography.

In an attempt to contain them all, the motif of the amphora returns, in image and in volume, linking Antiquity to our time. The amphora and its curves, container as well as screen, symbol of femininity and vehicle of narration: the amphora tells the story of the portrayal of women throughout history. The one who brings them together here in this dizzying conversation is Anglo-Mexican artist Alinka Echeverría. Born in 1981, winner of the 2015 BMW Residency at the Nicephore Niepce museum in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, a residency of which this work is the fruit, or rather the rhizome, so many are its ramifications and its persistent vivacity, only asking to develop further.

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The context of realisation is essential here. The artist takes the museum that welcomes her for the creative residency as the anchor point of her thought and its illustrious figure, Niépce, born Joseph and who renamed himself Nicephore, the Greek name for “the one who carries the victory”. The name also refers to an African butterfly, like those Alinka collected as a child. Photography–antiquity–collection, and between the three, Alinka Echeverría, a woman explorer who went to collect specimens. The artist does not flit from one idea or source to another. She collects and accumulates heterogeneous materials, letting their history, their context decant. From the butterflies pinned and arranged in a box from her childhood to these Berber women depicted “laid down” on the paper of Combier postcards at the beginning of the 20th century and found in the collections of the Nicéphore Niépce museum, a first echo is formed in the rhizomatic spirit of Alinka Echeverría. That of a beauty subjected to the dull violence of its capture, of the fascination for the idea of exoticism, of the desire to categorise, to possess, that the image and the photography would come to fill.

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In Nicephora, the artist brings together photography―a contemporary vehicle for images―and ceramics. Returning to the sources of the photographic medium, she examines the different photographic and printing techniques which have marked its history over the 200 years since its invention by Niépce: heliography, glass plate, collotype, photogravure, solarisation, photochromy, offset, anaglyph 3D, televised images and silkscreen printing on enamelled terra cotta. With the aim of achieving this fusion of the ancient and contemporary forms, the artist takes several pieces from the museum collection that she digitally inserts on vases previously photographed on a colour background.

Her research work has manifested in the gallery space through three complementary installations, revealing the threads of her thought process: a collection of collages assembled as a leporello allowing her visual field notes to reveal their inevitably subjective and fragmented nature; a three minute animation composed of thousands of archival images weaved together with Alinka’s voice over, screened on the backdrop of a dark space alluding to Plato’s cave. They are joined by boxes assembled as mosaics and displayed on the wall: a scenographic construction echoing the mediatised construction of Serena Williams. Finally, the centerpiece of the installation, within which she presides on a victory bearing amphora, a screenprinted Serena Williams, at the dawn of another of her achievements: “an amphora for Nicephore”, an impossible object because it does not tread upon any of the marked paths, at the crossroads of the ancient and contemporary worlds, exactly as Alinka Echeverria had foreseen.

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Journey in the archives

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i.

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I wanted to see Another
Another time
Another place
Another gaze
Another point of view
But still I found Her
Timeless, ageless, placeless

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ii.

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The Heroine with a thousand faces
Reflected, Refracted, Projected, Invented.
Sculpted by Pygmalion
In the service of desire
In chambre noir of his mind’s eye
With the world upside down
To draw Her
Perfect Otherness

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iii.

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The Heroine with a thousand faces
Wild woman
Captivating and captured
Head high, gaze fierce
Naked
Vulnerable
Seduced, seducing
Aware, unaware

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iv.

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Images and images and images and still I
found Her.
The Heroine with a thousand faces
Replicated and reproduced
Nicephore’s desire
Pioneer of revelation
Dreamer of fixation
Tormented to discover
Would he have carried on?
To tussle ....
To find her waves and particles?
To conquer Her colour?
To capture all Her dimensions?
To Render Her real?

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v.

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Collected Worlds, Worlds of women
Images and images and images and still I
found Her.
Everyday Heroine
A thousand faces from the same breath
M/other
Vessel
Carrier of emptiness
Form around formless
Holding space
Hollow but not void
Cavernous chambre
To nourish
To bring
To give
To carry on
To pass on
Myself, Herself

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vi.

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This is the time of the Gigantic
When woman must write woman
Neither feminine, nor masculine
Our story
From the edge of the world
From the brim of consciousness
Ni noir, ni blanc, ni inexplorable
Atomos Activa
Nicephora
Bearer of Light

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Alinka Echeverría, 2015

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