Madre is a photobook by Marisol Mendez, made in Bolivia, her native country. Across its pages she interrogates the whitewashed, phallocentric and colonial representation of womxn in Bolivia. The project explores the feminine as it wrestles with religious and cultural interpretations that are dogmatic and reductionist, confining womxn to either the image of the holy Virgin Mary or the sinner Mary Magdalene.
Weaving together Andean folklore and Catholic iconography, the book spotlights the complexities of contemporary Bolivian identity and reflects on the country’s diverse and multifaceted culture. MADRE also includes archival images from the artist’s family album depicting female relatives, on which she intervenes to subvert their original meaning or add a new layer of symbolism; ultimately, the archive functions as a bridge to reconnect to her matriarchal lineage.
Situated between fiction and documentary, the images paint a world interconnected by physical and mythological elements—a dance between the upper and inner worlds of Incan mythology. Here, womxn experience change, loss, decline and death. Preconceived biases or prejudices about the womxn in the portraits are challenged by their piercing gaze, which returns that of the viewer. Mendez spent hours conversing with her subjects about patriarchal and one-dimensional representations of womanhood, and collaborating with them on how they would like to be photographed. The outcome, she writes, is a protest in the face of unjust depictions that erase the nuances of what it means to be a womxn in Bolivia with an inherited past of colonisation, patriarchy and interlacing faiths and religions.
Published by Setanta Books in 2023, the book is a handmade softcover with French flaps and hand-sewn kettle-stitch binding, 25 by 17 centimetres, 84 pages and 44 images. It is a limited edition of 250 signed and numbered copies. Texts are by Elisa Medde (English) and Cecilia Pavón (Spanish). A special edition with prints is also available: each print is in an edition of 15 numbered and stamped copies, signed by Marisol Mendez on verso and printed on Hahnemühle Matt FineArt at 25 x 17 cm with a 0.5 cm white border.
