Eye to the viewfinder: ailen suitcase

Ailen es diseñadora y fotógrafa. Entre 2003 y 2014 tomó varios seminarios y cursos de fotografía, entre ellos, el Integral de la Escuela de Fotografía Creativa de La Habana, con un año de duración. El Tokyo International Foto Awards la distinguió con una mención de honor en 2020. Tiene en su haber tres muestras personales; la más reciente, Ánima, de 2021, estaba prevista para la Fototeca de Cuba en mayo de 2020, pero por disposiciones sanitarias se pospuso dos veces y terminó en las redes y en el Estudio “Ailen Maleta”, mediante cita.

His work, basically self -referential, is very careful invoice.Self -knowledge, self -assessment and generic background give density to a path that, although it begins, can already exhibit notable results.

Photos of Ailen integrate the Mediterraneum Colletion (Italy) and the EWA Art Collection (USA).

So she tells:

I was born in Havana in 1984, within a multirracial family, of grandparents who reached the most at a 4th grade of primary school.My father studied at the USSR and developed a military career that ended early, when I was 13 years old.However, all my childhood passed as the daughter of a military, with the facilities and also limitations that this could bring.

When it was time for my mother to be linked to working life, there was no child circle due to problems of some breakage, so she had to look for a house where she took care of children.I grew up listening that that was a problem, since the person who found (my mother) and seemed trustworthy, with good recommendations, in addition, he was a Christian.This was a contradiction for a military family.But my mother has always had her character and won the malicious comments.From 9 months to 5 years, I spent most of my time with that beautiful family that practically assumed me as part of his own.While the children went and went, I was there 6 years.The eldest daughter (who cared for me), Tati, with whom I spent more time, made illustrations for the Sunday School of the Church.I remember the acrylic smell well, the characters in the Bible he painted on card.Maybe from there comes a little love for art and creation.Or maybe my father, who before studying an engineering was at an art academy, painted maritime landscapes, made galleon models and wanted to be a sculptor.When he retired, he dedicated himself to carpentry and cabinetmaking, to this day.So I learned to live between doctrines found and breathe in creation.

At home there were always cameras, thanks also to my father and my maternal grandfather, who had the habit of hiring the same photographer for family parties.I must say that he was not a fan of the good lord, or rather of his camera.I was afraid of flash, I don't know why;So in more than one birthday photo I was crying, just for that reason.What I did adore was the result.In many blackouts of the 90 I entertained me, helped by a quinqué, again and again the family photos, trying to build the story behind the captured moment.Already as a teenager, I knew that I would be a photographer and fabulated with the idea of being a photoreporter, nothing more distant from the reality that I live today.

When it was time to choose university career, there was no photography, so I studied graphic design.At 4 years of graduate and after spending several workshops, I knew about the School of Creative Photography of Havana (EFCH) thanks to a colleague from the University, and began studying there.Since then I live doing commercial photography in my study and developing, since 2013, a career as a visual artist.

My first photos were mostly details and abstractions.I did not feel comfortable invading the space of the other without its consent.Then I discovered, and I was fascinated in the photography history classes, the work of Cubans who in the 90s began working from their own body, such as Marta María Pérez Bravo, Cirenaica Moreira, René Peña and also other foreigners, women inmost, such as Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman or Shirin Neshat;The latter does not work specifically with the reflection of her body, but in the same way I felt identified.

In that search for a way of saying more, it arises in carpentry.Visuality came motivated from a visit to the "Guiñol" theater, in the Vedado, who frequented with my eldest son.He would be at that time for about six years, and the work (which we attend) was based on the aesthetics of Chinese shadows.At home I had the ideal stage in my father's workshop.In the morning he wore an orange canvas to sift the sunlight and in it the leaves of the Ciguaraya of the patio were projected from the outside.The first images I made were backward objects, and then I started using my father until I reached me.But to establish the coherent tool and body relationship I found the solution when telling my story.The series consists of photographs and a video made from fixed images.In it I speak of my childhood, adolescence and first youth.

After these images, which at the time had a good criticism of the people who could see them on the black wall of the Cuban art factory (FAC), and as it just started, I conditioned the new creations to my body, but I was looking for a different visuality.I started working black and white, and looking for elements that had meaning for me.I did not work in a series this time.Altar is one of those images.I remember that he had left near home and a flower seller passed;He had those beautiful white lilies.As a child, my parents took my sister and me to museums.In that of Fine Arts, Universal Art Building, once I noticed that the paintings of religious themes sometimes had as a common element the lily.And then, in my student time at the university, as we received semiotics in the race, I worried about looking for not only the meaning of specific colors and signs, but also that of every element with symbolic load like this flower.I must also say that in high school I decided to go to church as part of a personal search need.I just went for a year.I studied the Bible, and then entered into a certain contradiction, especially with the human being and its way of perceiving spirituality, and the role of women from the vision of religion.So seeing the lilies in that cart saw the photo in the same way and I ran home to do it.

In 2014 I had put my own business, a study to live completely from photography, my only source of personal income, with a 7 -year -old son.Then, I left my second daughter, who was born in mid -2016;My entrepreneurship also grew in demand and I was forced to look for workers.They were two years of great stress.On the one hand, the joy of seeing something created by one grows, all the effort that entails doing it here in Cuba and that pays fruit, but at the same time all the time I stole from my personal life as the mother of two children.In 2018, due to other problems that staggered the stability of the study, I decided to close it.This was an emotional unbalance.The only thing that would save me was the certainty that I needed to spend more time to mine (I have its support) and that photography would be there in any way.So I return to my career as an artist.In that year I started a series called Purification, only with objects, in a search, more than anything, of calm.Then I make another image from my body that is the daughter of ..., the wife of ..., the mother of ... and is on the point where one becomes the person of another, identified as such to the point of losing thebelief in the individual self.

At this time I share a little more with other artists from my generation, not the age but that of work time, my partner included in this group.And studying more thoroughly other referents in other manifestations, I begin to create a new series: Ánima.It took me almost two years, and passed in the house where we lived.It is a description of my emotional response to the last two years, an inner search that I did dedicate time for the visual result, but it is tremendously visceral.At some point in this series I decided to change the speech because I was no longer in the same circumstances.I share one of them because it is at the midpoint of the entire process, and for this reason, rather than looking for it, I saw it.I talked to my partner and realized that our time ended and just like that I felt.However, one thing is the reason, another the visual solution to that motivation and another the process.I keep a nice memory because that day I needed, we were all four at home and while my partner clenched the shutter, the little girl spinning all over the place, until hiding between the sheets with me.And those other images were reminded.

This series has given me professional satisfactions.My second personal exhibition was with her, and several people from national and international have met me for this work.For a moment I thought it would take me more time.My work is self -referential and I prefer, if I had to classify it, that it was so, although I know that there is a gender approach implicit in much of my work.

Non-place is the most recent work, even in process.In this new series the photograph predominates, but there is also video.I would like to be able to intervention in physical spaces.The common element in each of the images, to create metaphors, is the globe as an object, which brings implicit the ephemeral in its meaning.There are some of the images where the human being is absent, but here I share one where I photograph myself again.

The breath was the search for a second solution to another work that I did, a video entitled The Discolo.After my son's last birthday, a balloon fluttering everywhere was at home and the wind took him to a tangled balcony.I documented the fact and tried to reproduce it aesthetically.But after engraving I decided to investigate to know if there were referents and found one in a precisely Cuban artist, who had done something similar, but as an installation, 20 years ago.As the artist told me, he could not materialize it at the time because of the ephemeral of the globe.Of course, I discouraged, and although I had already asked an excellent musician and friend to collaborate with music for my video, I hesitated to keep it.So I thought about how to say the same in another way, and that is how I get to the solution of the breath that, for me, it was totally different, and I am very satisfied.However, after a while I realized that the Discolo is my work, it is in many aspects of the referent found and is part of this series in process.