PANDEMIC!!! UNABLE TO MOVE

MARIANA CALISE

// Mariana is a photographer from Argentina. She rediscovered photography over the past several years. During the lockdowns of the pandemic, it was also a way for her to discover still life as a way to represent the state of affairs. She photographed flowers confined in ice as a symbol for her own feelings.

Mariana has been studying photography for several years, first in 1984, but after moving abroad she got busy with other things, including raising a family and her job. Once her children grew up she found that she again wanted to dedicate herself to her old fascination with photography. She takes her hobby seriously. “I have always been very strict with myself so I studied for some more years with different teachers in my country and different schools here too. I take new classes every year, especially in contemporary photography and editing,” she says.

Mariana considers participating in photo contests useful to go on learning about the world of photography, more than winning prizes. That has never been her aim, her principal goal is to show beauty. “I consider all the images are art and that is what matters.”

“There is no must in art because art is free.”

Wassily Kandinsky

What draws you to the arts?

“I am constantly trying to learn and keep something new in my eyes every day, which leads me to investigate and discover art.”

What do you like best about your frozen flower series?

“By freezing plants I was able to bring out my feelings during these past years of my life.”

Because of the global Covid-19 pandemic and government efforts to control its spread, in many countries around the world people had to remain indoors for extended periods of time. It had large repercussions, not least on the art world. Interestingly, it also inspired new works of art that dealt directly or indirectly with the themes of the pandemic. Mariana found lockdown a very hard time to live through. “I heard some people saying that it was a very good experience because one could be with oneself and discover one ´s inside, I had never agreed with this hypothesis because I felt it was not my way of seeing it. But I made me think. What I felt was that we could not move, that the word had been frozen by the virus.”

So she decided to spend her time producing images to express what she was experiencing, what she felt people were experiencing in their homes. In still life photography she discovered a photographic genre that is especially suited to what she wanted to express. “By taking commonplace objects and turning them into interesting works of art, still life photography was the perfect way to show what we all felt.”

Mariana´s work is conceptual. By freezing plants she was able to bring out her feelings during these past two years.

Click on the photos to see a larger image.