Text: "Lo que no es"

If I write about Elfie Semotan, it is ultimately because I identify with the elusive nature of her work and the reserved character of her person.

The first time I encountered her work—without even knowing it—was when I was living and studying in New York in the mid-1990s. At the time, my partner was studying at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), and each week the most relevant fashion magazines of the moment circulated through our apartment on Christopher Street. Within their carefully constructed and seductive pages, the advertising campaigns of designer Helmut Lang stood out for their sobriety and elegance. They consisted of a double-page spread whose background varied between red, sky blue, gray, or white; with his first and last name centered across the entire width, and a black-and-white photograph in the upper right corner, like a postage stamp. In that space was precisely Semotan’s work: a portrait of the American neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer.

There were other variations and formats, such as the iconic frontal photograph of Lang himself, Halbporträt Wien 1993, leaving exactly half of his face out of frame—an image that would be revisited in 1997, this time with the German artist Martin Kippenberger (Semotan’s longtime partner) modeling for the invitation to his exhibition Window Shopping bis 2 Uhr Nachts. There were also portraits—like prison mugshots—of the model Marie Sophie wearing sunglasses: Marie Sophie, New York, N.Y., SS99. The campaigns also featured images from Robert Mapplethorpe’s archive, such as Untitled (boot and jean, blurry) (1973), or the French artist Louise Bourgeois in a black fur coat holding an enormous phallus: Louise (1982).

William S. Burroughs said that “The step forward must be taken in silence.” During the many years I lived outside of Mexico, the multifaceted work of Semotan maintained a consistency that gradually won over my complete interest. Who, ultimately, is Elfie Semotan? What exactly does she do? That rare quality of presence / absence in a practice that is above all realist, subtle, and complex—one that does not impose itself but rather slips into our attention.

It is precisely the small deviations from the obvious that escape categorization which are best suited to test our ability to perceive, differentiate, and define. Like her compatriot, the Austrian photographer and filmmaker Friedl von Gröller Kubelka, Semotan’s images operate with a promiscuity that resists easy assimilation and comfortably navigates diverse territories without committing to any one in particular. Both artists clearly choose, above all, their creative freedom, far from the conformism that an easily identifiable and exploitable position offers.

Semotan explains in an interview that when you are not paid a cent, or are paid very little, that is when you can do whatever you want, because no one can tell you otherwise. This resonates with my own trajectory and that specific moment in the late 1990s when, at the height of my career as a fashion and advertising photographer in London, England, I managed to overcome fear and escape the seductive trap of conformism in order to take the photographs I enjoy taking—without instructions or approval from anyone.

In my experience, the most fecundly creative and political space is the inner universe, as Michel Foucault would elaborate in detail in his Techniques de soi (technologies of the self), also known as the hermeneutics of the self.

“Techniques that permit individuals, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, on their own thoughts and conduct, in order to transform themselves.”

Foucault, Michel. In L’origine de l’herméneutique de soi. p. 11. Vrin, 2013.

Foucault’s thought always maintained a problematic and difficult relationship within philosophy. The photographer who, like Foucault, maintains a problematic relationship with photography clearly reflects an inner universe capable of transforming the outer world and reinventing it according to its own rules and point of view, without betraying its mysteries.

“—Sir, sir… Could you tell me what love is?

—But miss, how can you know what love is without first knowing what it is not?”

(Dialogue between Anna Karina and a philosopher in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Vivre sa vie.)

More often than not, it is precisely by what we are not that we define ourselves. Elfie Semotan: Color and Flesh at Galería Campeche was one of those rare moments in which Semotan clearly makes us conscious of—and responsible for—what we see. A mined visual field filled with contradictory readings and meanings in process, where we always run the risk of seeing what is not.

IMAGE

I am an image

Not in demand; for this I speak.

I am an image, and every gesture is

Difficult for me.

My life is the silence of form.

From beginning to end I am a gesture.

I am so old that I no longer age.

At times, men in the night

Raise their candles before my face.

And see only what I am not.

Drowsing in the corner rise

My heraldic animals.

The greyhound rises like the heavy visors

Of helmets, closed in silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Bidis, p. 30. In: In und nach Worpswede. Insel Verlag, 2000.
(Translated from the German by M. Guillén.)