The apparent banality and simplicity of these photographic images vanish once we learn that they are the result of photographing maquettes carefully constructed and lit by the artist, in which elements appropriated from nature are combined with other artificial elements. The directional lighting and the colour, which imbue the photographed ‘landscape’ with an eerie quality, are far from innocent, creating through their relationship of light and shade an element which demands not only a more sustained observation to be understood, but which is also emotionally suggestive and offers subtle indications of the shift from the reality that has been photographed to a limbo of the strange and the unsettling.

These images from the series To Turn Around were inspired by the artist’s wanderings through the forests surrounding Berlin and are, as Gabriela Albergaria has stated, essentially concerned with ‘recording the moment in which our interest begins to focus on what is behind us and not what is in front of us, the moment in which we wander through a particular natural environment at a particular hour of the day.’ This is in fact a complex piece about the representation of memory. A stage constructed by the artist on which she performs a recreation of her own emotions, in accordance with her stated interest in ‘reconstructing the mechanisms of feeling.’

JO

October 2011