Gabriele Schor: Ms. Ribero, you studied at the Academy of Art in Bogotá. How is an art degree in Colombia structured?
Laura Ribero: It takes four years to get a degree in art in Colombia; I chose to major in photography and alternative media. The photography of the nineteen-fifties was what excited me most, especially the works of Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman. I later switched to Barcelona, where the curriculum was much broader, embracing cultural history, sociology, and the theory of photography. That was exactly what I’d been looking for. Above all Marc Augé’s theory of non-places held a special fascination for me.
GS: Which other artists, apart from the two already mentioned, had an influence on your work?
LR: I like German photography most—the works of Bechers’ students for example, which were the reason I went came to Essen in 2004.
GS: Your degree dissertation is about very desolate and neglected districts of Barcelona—non-places, in other words.
LR: Yes, it really does have to do with desolate places, with transit zones, and no-man’s-land. The architecture in Barcelona is really beautiful—spectacular even—but between the various districts there are often little “pirate projects” where poor immigrants build without proper planning permission. It was these unplanned structures that I wanted to capture in my photographs. What I found later in Essen was very similar in some ways: lots of empty buildings with barricaded doors and windows—lonely, but magical, too.
GS: You included pictures of yourself in Electro-doméstica as well. How did you make that leap from pure architecture to self-portraiture?
LR: Electro-doméstica is reminiscent of painting, of classical portrait painting, isn’t it? Vermeer’s interiors were undoubtedly an important influence here. I wanted to generate the same kind of atmosphere, but with the medium of photography. The pictures are ambiguous: on the one hand, they were produced in a TV studio, using the sets available there; both these sets and my costume were being used for a Latin American telenovela—one of those never-ending soaps that are so important to the Spanish-speaking world. On the other hand, I wanted to play with the dividing line between reality and fiction. At first glance, therefore, these pictures look like scenes in the everyday life of a well-to-do family in South America. If you look closer, however, you can see that it is all staged—that it is all a fiction. The housekeeper I myself play is a staple of all such soaps. She’s always a poor, but virtuous girl working for wealthy patrons. She knows the house does not belong to her, but still dreams of having a better future and of one day being rescued by her Prince Charming. The same is true of Latin America too. We all dream of having a better future. Whether it’s America or Europe, being far away is always better. Incorrigible romantics, we still hope that some day, everything will be better.
GS: So who took the photos in this series—who actually pressed the shutter?
LR: I did—using a delayed-action shutter. A girlfriend of mine also helped me out a few times. I had access to the studio for a whole year and so was able to experiment with the spotlights and take lots of photos. It was a huge studio on the outskirts of Barcelona with fifty different sets just for this one soap! I studied the telenovelas of my youth very intensively and the melancholy maid is a product of this.
GS: Would it be exaggerating to say that there are certain parallels between your own biography and that of this girl? After all, you, too, are a “stranger” in your “own” home and in Barcelona, you’re a foreigner. Upon completion of your studies, your residence permit will expire and you’ll have to return to Colombia.
LR: While I was making this series, I was new to Barcelona and had to work as a waitress on the side in order to finance my studies. This is a fate shared by lots of students from Latin America who choose to study in Spain. You often have to suffer something unpleasant for the sake of achieving a higher ideal. So yes, viewed in this way, the maid really does have a lot to do with my own situation. But it is far more a work about how lots of people live. I wouldn’t be interested in a purely autobiographical work.
GS: Do you see any religious dimension to your pictures? You sometimes look rather Madonna-like.
LR: (laughing) Why not? Madre dolorosa.
GS: Mirroring crops up in many of your pictures. Is this deliberate?
LR: Reflections and mirroring are indeed very important to me. Here, the smooth surface of a fridge serves as a mirror, for example. It’s sad to see oneself reflected in a fridge, isn’t it? The cold world as a mirror image of a lonely existence.
GS: How should the title Electro-doméstica be interpreted?
LR: A doméstica is a maid and I called her electro because the kitchens of the rich in which she works are full of electrical gadgets.
Vienna, May 4, 2006