Interview by Georgina Vardy

Maite d’Orbe is a London based photographer and performer. The images she makes often transcend the separation between photographer and subject, evoking an embodied representation and tangible sense of intimacy.  Maite’s solo exhibition “A Moment Opposite to Blindness” is currently showing at Milosc Gallery in Haggerston. Taking its title from a quote in Ann Carson’s book “An Autobiography of Red”, the work on display is a personal odyssey that spans years, countries and subjects.

Georgina: If you had a time machine and you could travel to any place at any time, where would it be and why? Mine would definitely be New York in the 70s/80s.

Maite: Oh God. I need to think about this. One of my favourite artists of all time is Pedro Lemebel, who was a queer artist making work during the dictatorship in Chile, which also sort of coincided with the AIDS crisis. It’s kind of horrible to think that you’d like to go back to a time that was so tough, but I think the work that was produced during that time just feels so special. So I think I would go for a similar time, but probably in Latin America.

Georgina: The idea of art that is produced in these moments of intense historical and cultural strife reminds me of the description of your work from the exhibition blurb as “a gesture of surrender to the grief of the world we live in.” How do you connect to this notion in your practice?

Maite: I think it’s kind of tricky to speak about grief, because I feel a lot of people don’t want to talk about it at all. We are definitely in, sort of like, a society that blocks that out but also generates a lot of it. Because yeah, I mean, the world that we’ve made isn’t the nicest one for everyone. For me, it speaks more to a philosophy on how to go through life than to coping with something specific. It just comes to a point when you decide what it is that you want to like, love, or pay attention to, and how you are gonna find soothing in that. This specific body of work, a moment opposite to blindness, is very much that. So that’s why it doesn’t really tie to a specific project or specific location — it’s more like a bit of world-making.

Georgina: It’s definitely clear in your images that you have really personal and intimate connections with your subjects that kind of transcend this dynamic of just active artist and passive muse. How do you go about navigating this relationship that can become tricky in the general ethics of photography?

Maite: I think that photography is deeply problematic in so many ways, and I try to take that into account a lot whenever I’m working with people. I feel like the way that I photograph is always very consensual, and generally, the attitude I have with my work is that life comes first. When there’s no relationship and you’re taking the photo, it could be a beautiful image, but maybe it will feel a bit empty. We have a culture of images that is very dubious, and since the start of photography, representation has always been a problem, so I try to take that into account as much as I can. One thing that I try to do with my work is to destigmatize, in that I’m not interested in photographing people doing something that you would expect them to do because they are queer, for example. There’s something really powerful in photographing someone in a way that subverts society’s expectations of them.

Georgina: One of the things I love about your work is that a lot of it is really centred around this feminine ferocity and kind of prowess, whether it’s drag performers or athletes. What do you think draws you to capture this quality in your subjects?

Maite: I think that it might just be a bit of a self-portrait. I feel that, in a way, all your work becomes a self-portrait. Essentially, what I’m interested in is people who are just bold and unapologetically themselves. I think that there’s something about that which is very powerful. Whenever I work with people, whenever I take photos, I feel like I always try to find that side of them. I think that’s when the self-portrait comes in, because I don’t shoot people that just have one specific character or personality, but I always find within them something that I resonate with.

Georgina: Do you think there is any kind of feeling that you are chasing with your work, or any kind of underlying essence that connects all of the pieces in the show?

Maite: When I started to work on this specific exhibition, I realized that I had been chasing feelings without knowing it. I think that’s the reason that I was taking photos. One of the things that became clear while I was putting together the show is that there are certain photos that will always be taken, no matter how many times I’ve taken them already. It goes back to the title for the exhibition, which, in the context of the book, is when Geryon [the protagonist] and Herakles [his love interest] see each other for the first time at a bus station and they experience “a moment that is opposite to blindness.” The description of that is just so beautiful because it’s a moment when two people look at each other and all of the background noise and everything around them stops. There’s this emotion suspended in the air that’s mixed up with a bit of adrenaline. For me, that is a feeling very close to experiencing truth, in a way. Without getting too philosophical, I do think that there’s something of that feeling present in a lot of the work that I do. So I guess if there was a feeling that I was chasing, it would be that — but again, it’s something that I only realized after I was putting together the show.

Georgina: I know you did a special performance at the opening of the exhibition. Can you tell us a bit about that and explain how it fits in with the rest of the work?

Maite: I did this performance with two friends, Mahsa Salali, who is Iranian, and Moran Khoury, who is from Palestine. They started by hugging in the middle of the space. When everyone went silent, I covered them with a piece of fabric. Mahsa sang bits of a song in Farsi, and then they both started speaking aloud in conversation — Mahsa in Farsi and Moran in Arabic. So, each of them was communicating in a language that the other didn’t speak themselves, but despite this, it was this intense moment of intimacy and understanding that transcended language. While this was happening, I started to trace their hug by outlining their bodies with chalk on the fabric. The idea of tracing hugs actually came from the problematic representation in photography and trying to figure out if there is a way of creating images that reduced the distance between the subjects and the photographer. When tracing, the image reveals itself in the fabric, in a similar way as a print reveals itself in the darkroom — but it happens in front of everyone’s eyes. Tracing brings an element of physicality; we look at how things feel, quite literally. A moment opposite to blindness is a body of work that is about understanding without necessarily understanding and seeing everything, surrendering to the fact we can’t. So in that way, I feel this performance really complemented the intention of the show. After the performance, we took the fabric and wrapped it around one of the columns in the gallery so the essence of it remains in the space.

Georgina: What was the last piece of art or culture that really made you feel something?

Maite: Julia Fox’s autobiography Down the Drain

Interview by Georgina Vardy @poodleinatiara
Maite de Orbe @maitedeorbe
Images courtesy of the artist and miłość gallery.@miloscgallery, miloscgallery.com