The Art Corner: Beauty, Boogie and Belonging
A conversation with the multidisciplinary artist, and Photography Director of Atmos magazine Laura Beltrán Villamizar.
Invitation by this month’s artist to listen to this song whilst, before or after, reading
I write this with a fan blowing on my body, sweat dripping down my chest, and it’s 6 pm. I would have written this morning, but it was too hot. So, as my climate anxiety rose, I pondered what to do about it. Reading the news just made me angry, I reject the fearmongering feast where joy and beauty have no space to enter. So, I did what the next guest of Art Corner told me to do, and I chose pleasure and beauty. I put our printed interview in my bag, made a sandwich, and went to the beach.
Laura Beltrán Villamizar is a wise soul with the sensitivity of a child whose creativity has not been stunted. She is a dreamer and a sufferer all in the same, pleasure-loving, curly Colombian ginger vessel: photographer, musician, painter, climate activist, and the Photography Director of Atmos magazine.
“Everything is in tune,” she tells me when I ask her how her heart is. The day before, she went to a performance art by Lina Lapelyte`called The Mute. A group of people with no musical training sang and played violins, out of tune of course, in a room decorated with weeds and musk. “I mean it was horrible, but it was also beautiful. Their violins sounded like they were going to break, the flowers around them wild and ugly. But it felt like everything in that room was in tune.”
To make beauty out of anything is the job of the artist. This week, Florence Welch, accepting an honorary degree at the College of Arts, said “The essentialness of art can never be denied. It is a life-saving force, capable of making sense of the senseless and expressing the inexpressible. Please never forget that as you move out into the world. It needs artists now more than ever.” Behind this thought is the root of this very column.
“I cannot be in environments where beauty is not celebrated.”
Beltrán Villamizar and I speak about how art brings beauty into this world; “the world is intense you know?” she tells me “just having beauty around me is something necessary, and that poem arrived like that” she says referring to a poem I wrote. The first time I heard her voice she was in tears, they were happy ones. I had written a poem inspired by a conversation she had had with a colleague of mine on the We Walk The Earth podcast, he sent it to her and she replied with a wonderfully emotional voice note. Our first connection was therefore very intimate.
As we speak, I notice that Beltrán Villamizar seems to be on a quest to reclaim the narratives of her life. She says that this is the first time she’s been in Paris reclaiming this city as her joyful creative space. Previously, her experiences had not been positive, but now her narrative is in her hands. Narrative reclaiming was also present in her life in 2016, when she founded Native Agency. This is a photography agency elevating underrepresented photographers.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to go on our knees in front of the big agencies in the industry and ask them for a space on the table. We need to build our own table.”
As a young photographer from Colombia and living in the US, Beltrán Villamizar noticed that white men dominated most agencies, with the occasional token of African and Latin American photographers. “I thought Oh My Gosh! All photos I see are taken by white men from New York, Paris or Milan, going to Congo, Mexico and Colombia and portraying their own idea of what our regions look like.” This was unacceptable, she says, and she thought “It doesn’t make sense for us to go on our knees in front of the big agencies in the industry and ask them for a space on the table. We need to build our own table.” This is how Native was born, with the intention of building a bridge between local photographers and global audiences. The launch of Native completely jump-started her career. “This was before diversity became hot,” she says. When it launched, “I had had so many interviews, especially in the US and Europe, where journalists would ask me ‘why do we need Native? Why do we need photographers of colour?’. And I found these questions racist and problematic. Why do I have to explain why I should exist?”
“There’s actually space, love, and creativity for everyone”
Conversations in the public space have been approached in a binary way for so long, that we are not taught to think in nuances. This is also why there is such a huge fear of otherness in this world. We are somehow taught that we need to fight others for our well-being. “It’s troubling because we’re thinking from a deficit perspective. But there’s enough space for everyone, there is enough abundance for everyone. The point of diversity is to not use the same tools as the oppressor but to look at it from a place of abundance.” I hear Audre Lorde’s teachings in her words, “There’s actually space, love and creativity for everyone,” she concludes.
I see capitalism as those continental buffet breakfasts where you think you have to grab as much as you can as if you won’t eat ever again. Capitalism is like the carrot in front of the horse, it breeds a mentality of scarcity. A perspective that welcomes diversity and nuance is one that speaks of abundance for all. “Yes, we’re fighting crisis with more crisis” she adds.
After working at Native for many years, Beltrán Villamizar felt the weight she had put on herself to “save the industry”, she tells me she felt a responsibility as a white-looking person with access. It almost burned her out and she had to quit. This is when we delve into speaking about Pleasure Politics, a book by adrienne maree brown that infuses poems, essays and exercises on how to fill our lives with pleasure, and of pleasure as an act of liberation. Beltrán Villamizar and I begin speaking of what is erotic for us, in the Audre Lorde sense, what gives us pleasure and beauty? She says that her music is a channel through which she can continue having a political voice whilst spreading pleasure. “I cannot be in environments where beauty is not celebrated”.
Before we part ways and I leave her to write the rest of her Parisian narrative, she tells me a story about beauty. She tells me about how Van Gogh was obsessed with… the burnt yellow colour of the sunflowers he painted. Sunflowers reminded Van Gogh of gratitude and brought him comfort. Not being able to access sunflowers in Prague, he moved to France and began painting more and more with this yellow. But still, it wasn’t enough. “So, he was like: `This is so beautiful, and I need to have it in my system. And he ate the paint!” says Beltrán Villamizar with light in her eyes. “People thought he was crazy, but I think he was just so sensitive, asking himself `how am I going to carry this beauty in me?` and sometimes I think ‘ I really need to eat this moment, somehow”.
With this poetic thought, we begin speaking of how this type of sensitivity is lacking in our world and that we would be better off if we allowed ourselves to feel all the nuances of life: the beauty, the ugliness and all the frequencies. “If everything is connected, then we are taking full care of ourselves in our entirety. And then we are in full care for yourself and for all” she says. This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a friend where she told me that she is teaching people to listen and take care of their whole system. It made me think that the system we are living in is crying for a change of guard, a narrative shift, it needs care. I believe one way to do this, is to remember about Beauty.
Thank you for reading this month’s Art Corner! This is a monthly column, and a passion project made a reality by New Media Advocacy Project.
You can follow Laura’s work on her Instagram page.
