I started this work 5 years ago during my annual travel to Colombia.
After the death of my grand father 28 years ago, the departure of his glorious soul stopped time in the house. He was a celebrated champion of billiards across Latin America.
When I was visiting my family I started this project spontaneously taking portraits whilst having soup with my grandmother. In time I began to realize that this process of taking pictures was steadying itself as a daily ceremony, liberating the inhabitants from a past that had hindered the present. ‘To remember’ was translated systematically across the prism of the camera, confusing the time of memory with the instant itself.
This became a photographic cycle with three strands (symbolizing ‘tres bandas’, the type of billiards my grandfather championed, meaning ‘three bands’). There are the antique photos of my grandfather performing billiards which were celebrated imagery throughout the house. There are then my mute images of a house without age, and its inhabitants. Assuming the past glory of this subject and the present reality represents my effort to constitute a new iconography of future collections, giving freedom from a lost past to a new future.
Karen Biswell (28), Colombian, lives and works between Paris and Bogota.
