In her photobook Oneiromance, the Peruvian-born, Gothenburg-based artist Trinidad Carrillo turns to the vegetal world with the same dream logic that has long shaped her practice. Plants and herbs with magical or sacred significance, photographed mainly in Peru, appear less as botanical specimens than as intermediaries in a liminal dream-space where the living and the dead communicate. Made between 2015 and 2020, the series began when Carrillo was entering what she has described as a personal storm—a passage that led her to plants and to the ancestral plant knowledge of Peru. Across the book’s 144 pages, images and texts cultivate a mood that publisher Skogen förlag characterises as a combination of foreboding and play, an atmosphere inseparable from her attempt to portray beings that are both ordinary and numinous.
Carrillo’s approach here is inseparable from music, text, and performance, disciplines that have increasingly merged in her work and that give Oneiromance its particular texture. The book is structured around the trinity of plants, dreams, and song: plants are understood to communicate through dreams and music, and the camera is used to find what the unaided eye cannot. Long exposures and multiple exposures recur, allowing time’s simultaneity to leave a mark and lending the portraits of her subjects a vibrating, doubled presence. The volume includes an afterword by Jorge Villacorta, with design by Eric Dahl Palmér.
For collectors interested in how photography approaches the unseen, the book is an extended exploration of a difficult subject: the relationship between plants, death, and landscape, and the ways in which photography can participate in ritual. Its quiet, strange sequencing and the deliberate slowness of its making give it a coherence that is not merely thematic. The 2024 release from Skogen förlag, in a first edition of 300 copies, belongs in collections that follow contemporary Nordic photobooks and the transdisciplinary turn in lens-based art.
Because Trinidad Carrillo’s practice is increasingly collaborative and performative, Oneiromance is best understood not as a hermetically sealed portfolio but as an extension of an ongoing project of images, songs, and installations. Its significance lies in that continuity: a body of work that has found a form equal to its subject.
