THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Gabriela Garcia-Luna, an artist, photographer and an avid traveller, finds a strange sense of belonging every time she visits the port city of Kochi, rekindling the spiritual connect that she forged with the city since the first time she had set her foot here in 2000.
Fifteen years on, the city undertakes the role of the muse, showcasing for the first time a series of the artworks by the Canada-based Mexican artist at Kashi Art Gallery, Fort Kochi.
‘Talking with the Walls’, an exhibition and a residency, is an intersperse of two seemingly different entities of work: ‘New Territories’, a series of colour photographs of fragmented layers of patterned and shredded wallpaper (in the process of being removed from an 1910 Canadian Prairie home) and ‘Ode to the Sea’, a combination of images captured along the coast of Kerala along with tightly framed shots of walls found in and around Kochi.
The paintings abstain from descriptive qualities of a place and instead evoke the feelings pertaining to it, opening up a state for wonder, discovery and imagination.
The documentation of an old house in Canada as an exercise in capturing ephemeral materials in space and time led Garcia-Luna to discover a new avenue whole together. She found an astounding beauty in the apparent ugliness and a melancholy surrounding the dilapidated walls that reminisce secret voices that once reverberated with them.
With an ability of finding the extraordinaire in the ordinary and to lead the observer to a more complicated, visionary landscape, she describes her artwork as being a bridge between the inner and the outer existence through textures and layers of history that one finds entwined in the local architecture.
She hints at a rare association of cultural and natural environments encouraging a possible shift in the viewer’s line of sight and discovering in one’s self whole new worlds, beyond the known and the seen.
During the residency, Garcia-Luna plans on exploring and rediscovering the streets of Fort Kochi, that boasts of heritage architecture deeply rooted centuries back through its walls and intends to capture them as a fleeting moment frozen in time.
Through these photographs, she aims to bring back the historical significance and cultural heritage of the city that can be identified through colours, smells and people before it is forgotten amidst the realms of technological expansion.
The dissecting of the cultural layers and then abstractly rebuilding them along with the creative research will form the pedestal of her time in Kochi and will conclude in a body of work that will explore the sense of exchange.The exhibition, first previewed on 20 October, will continue to be on display on the walls of Kashi Art Café till 10 December.