Construct, construct oneself, re-construct a leaf, a thing, a museum, a society, a world, oneself. And start over, double the experience forever. To be in constant construction. This work involves symbolic actions: to build a building, a museum (in Marseille), a leaf that has fallen from a tree (in chocó), to be rebuilt either even here or there. 

The construction of a museum out of context, the reversion of time in accelerated mode, the transgression of space, tilting photography and its thought. The publication in the catalog * of the" Mois de la Photo Grand Paris" 2017, in the "Penser la photographie" exhibition, with the Diaph 8 collective, curated by Alain Bernardini, Pascal Beausse, and in collaboration with Julien Duc-Maugé from contemporary art center MMaintenant Synesthésie.

In construction (double)

"Hacedoras de Lluvia" (Rain makers) is the result of a residency in the Colombian Caribbean, at Plataforma Caníbal. The video is the story of a journey through the regions of Montes de María, encounters and folklore around Bullerengue, Afro-Colombian songs transmitted by women, their cosmogony and their persistence for food autonomy. 

"Hacedoras de Lluvia" it's a passage through this place known as one of the first free peoples postcolonial south america. A place where were found the palenques (fortifications built after the flight of the colonists) of the cimarrons coming from Africa and arriving at the port of Cartagena. All this seen through the prism of the artist who lives between two continents and who returns to ecological and feminist questions about the peoples and regions of his childhood.

Rain makers

This video is a sensitive journey which tells my son about the current situation of ecology, in a feminist and maternal way with witchy, pagan, and autonomous colors. 

The photographs and videos are part of my archives from 2012 to 2020, from trips between Colombia and France. There are quotes from eco-feminists, including writers and activists like Starhawk, Dona Haraway, and Isabelle Stingers. Referring to the latter in an article published in the Jef Klak magazine “Tierra del Fuego” in January 2021.

Finally, i give a ritual tool to my child Isaac to transform his bond to the land and to women, despite society.

Letter to Isaac

"The shortest way from point A to point B is not a straight line but a dream" Berber proverb  Natura’s is the extension of Oikos and Antlia, a path between Colombia and France. The origin is the struggle for land which degenerated into civil war for over 60 years. From the relationships between natural resources and the inhabitants of these territories - peasants, Indians and other damned of the earth, i travel a political and poetic path to tell the current relationship with the land.

Almanegra, a tree that becomes a dream, is its symbol of resistance. Dream of Almanegra arose from my photographic archives between disappearance and trace of forgetfulness, this tree evokes this battered territory, erased by the thickness of the fog. This image allowed me to create the performance "Aux paysannes vaincues et aux autres", composed of the text Imagine! and an installation with a peasant rake.

Almanegra's dream

IMAGE TRANSFORMATIONS FOR A STOP, LOOKING AT OUR WORLD 
On the review "Point Contemporain" 
By Pauline Lisowsky, art critic and exhibition curator http://pointcontemporain.com/ana-tamayo-antlia/

Ana Tamayo observes our way of looking at nature and our relationship to habitat. Originally from Colombia, she questions the gap between the direct link with the land in her country and the rhythm of flow in the city. From images, she creates works that invite us to ask ourselves questions about the perception of the world, our gestures and what we do but that we no longer perceive. 

At the "L'épprouvette", a micro art center, she presents three works that create connections between them and invite back and forth gazes. A large photomontage Antlia or the pneumatic machine presents at first glance a map of the sky, a constellation which inspires to dive into a place of the most distant. As we get closer, we discover that these stars are in reality objects, a whole which reflects the consumer society. Antlia, meaning pump in Latin, refers to a constellation initially called the pneumatic machine, in homage to the invention of Denis Papin. 

During her urban wanderings, Ana Tamayo was captivated by the multitude of objects in the streets. She takes pictures of them and constitutes an archive of these traces of presences, testimony of a state of the world. (...) Photography here becomes material, a module for proposals that arise depending on the location. Ana Tamayo says she wanted to create a "stop on the production and distribution of images". His works evoke our relationship to objects, their overproduction and consumption that colonizes our habitat. 

The artist explains: “Sometimes people can skim through images quickly without realizing the temporal layers involved. It is a matter of perception, only the most curious will be able to appreciate them, dream and philosophize around them. It is not the same when viewed from a distance as it is up close, it is not the same when viewed on the web as in places of physical exposure. It’s also different from left to right or the other way around. It is also this multiplication of points of view that photography can convey and that I make visible through several forms. "  His exhibition condenses several states of the image, from the shooting of an observed object, to its fold, to its reduction and then to its transposition as a construction material. 

For Ana Tamayo, "It is about deconstructing in order to build and rebuild with sensitivity, humanism, eco-sophism, consciousness, memory and aesthetics". The artist encourages us to take the time to look to grasp what is hidden behind this quantity of images of objects, an overflow that now implies a need to slow down and pay attention to small beings and to nature, in upheaval. 

Antlia & Spaceships

Mestiza & Autónoma is an installation around ecofeminism exposed in 65e Salon de Montrouge (Paris).

Text by art critic and gallery owner Cecilia Bécanovic. 

THE LEAF AND THE BLOOD

In a short 2015 video, Reconstructing a Leaf, we see a close-up of the hands of Colombian artist Ana Tamayo, busy reconstructing a tree leaf in the manner of Cocteau in Le testament d'Orphée, when he by a fascinating backward movement resuscitates a hibiscus flower. Ana Tamayo takes two minutes to unite the leaf blade fragments around the midrib and its secondary veins. In Cocteau and Ana Tamayo, this gesture defends a divergent and utopian time. It is the image of a transformation: that of the encounter with reality glimpsed from the angle of destruction switched into something soft and soothing. If Cocteau mixes his blood with the bright red chalice of the flower, Tamayo takes care to raise a meaning by mimicking the eternal return of what we sought to make disappear, that is to say the eternal return of the "leaf" - symbol of miscegenation for the artist - as an active overcoming of any attempt to inferiorize or amputate. 

A photograph of papaya skin marked by a knife that has divided the flesh of the fruit into regular rectangles is a plus sign. Each existing form revisited comes down to evoking hands in the earth, indigenous cosmovisions and traditions that preserve dreams, memories and emotions. Ana Tamayo uses an assertive energy as a woman and her ability to relate to assess the ecological context and connect with food self-reliance movements emerging from the "first free peoples" of South America. The video Letter to Isaac, addressed to his son, resembles the stick in the wheels advocated by Henry David Thoreau. Held by ever-increasing hands, it could well stop the machine.

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