Karen Miranda Rivadeneira

In the mouth of the mountain jaguar, everybody is a singing hummingbird

2016 Photographic Residencies

In his foreword to the essay In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Charles Moore wrote: “One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us and to which we belong.”

For the museum’s Photographic Residencies programme, Karen Miranda Rivadeneira returned to the land to where she traces her origins to take photographs of the people of Ecuador’s mountains. She chose to focus her work on the Bolívar province — an arid and volcanic landscape, where Inca traditions can still be found — and on the Loja province, the land of Saraguro people. While she claims to be familiar with these regions, she admits that she has never looked at them through her lens. Her work is therefore about rediscovery, an attempt to explore her perception of reality through the prism of her origins and her relationship with nature.

The photographs taken by Karen Miranda Rivadeneira combine factual and fictional narratives, and are steeped in a form of magical realism with a porous boundary between conscious and unconscious aspects. The photographed subjects change over time and space, and respond to concepts specific to their region that transcend the intellect and belong to the realm of mystery.

The act of taking a photograph — very often impromptu and coincidental in Karen Miranda Rivadeneira’s approach — is designed to help her capture these mountains and explore their inhabitants’ intimacy and identity, two challenging fields that have been at the heart of the artist’s work since she first started as a photographer.

Series produced between 2016-2017.

Karen Miranda Rivadeneira : In the mouth of the mountain jaguar, everybody is a singing hummingbird