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To the south-east of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico is Mercado de Sonora. It is a sprawling, heady mix of all the usual things you might find at a large city market: fresh produce, homeware items, clothing. But what it’s really known for is what’s sold around the periphery. Towards the end of the market’s longest thoroughfare is where you will find traders in Mexico’s traditional medicine and the occult.
It’s a place where pre-Hispanic, Mesoamerican traditional practices overlap with Catholicism. Judas figurines, intended to be burned or otherwise disfigured, sell in large numbers, as do decorations related to Day of the Dead celebrations. You might find dried snakes to treat cancer, or dried skunks to “strengthen” the blood. Crucifixes made of sweet-smelling Ocote wood hang beside chains of garlic to ward off evil. And deer’s eyes protect against the evil eye. It is a place where people of all ages and classes brush shoulders with one another, and where there remains a thriving, illegal trade in wild animals.
Its position on the fringes and overt criminal activity make it an almost impossible place to make pictures. But that was no hindrance to Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein, whose latest work brings the dark magic and incense-laden promises of the market back into the enclosed, personal spaces she has become known for.
At the heart of Franco Klein’s multidisciplinary practice is an exploration of modern anxiety. Her deeply researched, elaborately staged photographic worlds are rich in psychological drama and existential dread.
Now based in Mexico City, she worked abroad for years. Travelling alone and living a nomadic lifestyle made it difficult for her to cast models for her immersive, cinematic work. But it also removed a potential anxiety. “I’m a recovering people-pleaser, so it makes things easier,” Franco Klein says. “I always have this inner fight when I am creating a character — trying to please the person in front of me — and I eliminate that conversation from the work in self-portraits. I didn’t want to deal with other people’s ideas of how the work should look in the universe I was creating.”
Whereas previous projects had seen Franco Klein photographing herself in transitory, liminal spaces such as trains and motels — hinting at ideas of metamorphosis, as well as escape and isolation — Mercado de Sonora is set in a domestic space, explicitly in Mexico. And it isn’t herself she’s cast in front of the lens, but rather her mother and grandmother.
Arguably, this is a form of extended self-portraiture. One that examines heritage, womanhood, nationality and her inherited beliefs and traumas. “The way I work is intrinsically related to my biggest fears,” Franco Klein says. “Growing up in Mexico as a young girl in the 1990s, I experienced a creepy world. I was born to be hyperaware. As a five-year-old girl, if I saw a man look at me, I thought, ‘He wants to hurt me.’ I had such a vulnerability to the world when I just wanted to be contained. With my work, I realised how much this translated when people would ask about my interiors, the feelings of collapse and containment. I thought, ‘Oh, I guess all of it came from my fears.’”
The interior worlds she creates are indeed creepy and claustrophobic, pregnant with symbolism, much like the mise en scène of filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. The psychological drama and interior conflicts of their characters are made manifest by the chosen colour palettes. Here, dark reds, greens and yellows feel oppressive, nauseating even. Shadows are heavy and darkness creeps in from the edges of the frame.
The fragmented scenes that we are presented with feel hallucinatory and nightmarish. Dislocated body parts appear, a lock of hair. Rituals are played out. A voodoo doll full of pins lies garrotted by red cable, an egg is drawn over the black-wigged head of a woman as part of a limpia, a traditional healing practice to remove negative energies. There are animals. A piglet (presumably alive) stands on a red table, staring down the camera, cornered by red walls. A crocodile (presumably dead) brushes up against a green velvet sofa. In every frame there seem to be clues, signifiers of something otherworldly.
“We spend our whole lives trying to bridge the gap between ourselves and the world,” Franco Klein says. This search for connection is at the heart of her artistic practice, and within the intimate world of Mercado de Sonora, she seems to be reaching back — along her ancestral line, through her mother and grandmother, and back through her country’s pre-colonial history. The result is a set of images that are fraught, tense, expressive and poetic. They hint at how our lives have become ever more isolated and fragmented, while we still strive for attachment and deeper meaning. “My main character is always emotion,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from. You know how it feels to be anxious, you know how it feels to feel lonely. In the human condition, we can experience solitude, but we don’t have to feel alone.”
“Mercado de Sonora” and other work by Tania Franco Klein can be seen at the ROSEGALLERY booth at Photo London
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