THE NEW GEOGRAPHY SERIES: Digital Photographgic composed drawings
By Veronica Riedel
Veronica Riedel manages to denounce with great visual precision ecological injustice, hypocrisy, religion, television... the injustice of the human hand over time, almost like a kind of archive that is con- stantly being renewed, synonymous with creation, with crisis, fire and ecstasy. This justice where a word is always installed over great visual aesthetics and that defines the artist and her emotions as constant ambiguities between the “good” and “bad” of humanity. In the intimacy of her home, which she calls her refuge, tears and laughter absorb each creative process. Each story captured through film and photography accumulates in thoughts like a wide range of photographic paper, to become energy and emotion in motion. The versatile art of this exciting artist is a proposal that has a great sense of responsibility, since it makes us reflect, a personal promise that proposes us to follow a correct path, which has been violated not only in the country of the cradle of artist, but throughout Lat- in America. In his work, we find images that are characterized by marking rawness and honesty, a reality that bleeds in his composi- tion, montage, in time and space, in his reflections, in spaces abused by human misery and hostile sadness that it refuses to empathize with universal rights and our own. The artist leaves us with a con- stant exercise towards doubt, the past, the present and of course the future. The passage towards these inhospitable landscapes is an appeal to urban reason embodied in small fragments, as a sample of black humor and irony in the portrait of everyday social practices that seem unusual.
Guatemalan artist Verónica Riedel, photographer, set designer and filmmaker, with the work Neo Geo-Grafía. A photographic insta- llation that challenges us from the entire space assigned to this exhibition. If it is true that the images think, they seem to think the relationship of man with nature, of man with his environment. Mountains of rubble, dry vegetation, garbage on which vestiges of the hand of man appear, stand as monuments that indicate the ephemeral nature of all things and the irrepressible destructive will of the human being. Remains and traces of natural catastro- phes, of wars caused by men and the devastation of nature that they produce in their desire to get rich.
Michel Serres, well-known historian of science and philoso- pher, says: “Until 1945, when we evoked death, we thought of our own death or that of some civilization, but when the first atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima, we suddenly had the revelation of a new death, which is neither individual nor collective but global. On the other hand, we are beginning to see new technologies that make us postpone death, and technological advances in communi- cation that allow us to be in contact with the most distant people on the planet. All this causes a new relationship of man with the world, with life and with others. When one changes human life, human death, the relationship with the earth and the others, he must recognize that he is in the presence of a new era”. Verónica Riedel seems to say with images what Serres says with words: “We have already transformed or exploited the world, the time has come to understand it”