Dejala Llorar

For Claudia Nicholson exhibition:

If the Mountain is Burning Let it Burn

at Sydney University of Technology Gallery

Memories are organic, and ever-changing things. They visit us and morph and unfold as we get to know ourselves in the world. They help us gain insights into the time in which an event took place as well as filtering the world and time at which we recount it. 

Claudia and I talk about memory as we look through her new series of photographs. They grow new layers of colour and texture each time we meet. There are warm depictions of beautiful panoramas or groups of people gathered, other images document more of a political context for example in a  photograph showing the perforations gun shots have left  on a government building. 

As we chat, I think through my own layered memories of my own Central American country of origin. An empty street, no cars, no shops open a smoky and noisy but empty street. Around 300 - 400 people walked through the two-lane road with each person carrying homemade white flags, all together in sombre silence. The group of people were trying to flee from one end of the city to the other. This moment remains in my mind frozen. A photographic still of sorts. My mind has traced and retraced this image, caressing it, trying to understand it, and evaluating it for its significance to me now and at so many junctures in my life. Claudia mentions to me sensitively that her video work for the show ends in a scene of white flags Our images layer together in shared solidarity.

We exchange Colombian music, big emotive songs that speak of landscapes, of relationships, of hardship sung by women, their elegant voices expansive, emotional and resonant. Indigenous melodies and African drums, a product of colonisation, accompany voice in elegant compositions. Claudia asks me what I think the lyrics mean and I translate the words to a song titled ‘Dejala llorar” which, I tell her, is infused with a particular drama only Catholicism brings.

Some of the photographs include stickers, much like in Claudia’s previous works aesthetically quoting the teenage girl act of adorning photos. 

Being uprooted as a child to another place requires in us sense-making. An attempt to understand and form connections between our own intimate and complex lives; through separation from friends and loved ones, war, adoption, new lives, as well as having to reconcile how this process inevitably fits into bigger historical and socio-political narratives. These narratives are beautiful, fragmentary, and also fraught. 

Claudia tells me about how the photos she took of people at a protest in Colombia feel ethnographic. I challenge these feelings as we discuss why these photos are important for her. I see her gaze as a search to find, wherever she could, someone who looked like her, whom she could identify. 

Each of Claudia’s photographs functions as an individual composite from a process of careful selection and is revisited, abstracted and added to. Claudia is tracing and recontextualising—rather than recollecting— memories by visiting her family’s albums. The finished works are empowered by a refusal to collapse into simplicity. They confidently articulate the irreducibility of an experience shaped by the forces of disconnection, grief, anger, and the joy of finding comfort in familiar and unfamiliar spaces. 

Lucreccia Quintanilla