Raquel Bravo Iglesias (Spain, b. 1981)

Berocoan

2016

Berocoan initiates my long term investigation into decolonisation and relationships with cultures that, despite being the foundation of my society, are silenced and ignored. From here, I explore patterns and moments which are feared and repressed, those we refuse to recognise.

Modelled on the familiar format of a photo album, this essay combines photographs my father took during the seven years he spent in Mato Grosso, Brazil, before I was born, with others by my mother when I was a child. His accounts of the tribes he lived with gave me a blueprint to hunt and gather, celebrate life and death, and commemorate the dead through their significance to the living. In short, my life lessons via my father originate in a remote culture that was once colonised and threatened with extinction. Ever since my father’s death, when I was still a child, that world has frozen into an unreachable place, existing only as a lost paradise.

In this essay, the past makes sense only retrospectively, by splicing together the two worlds that were all I knew and understood during a crucial period in my life. Reorganised here, they reveal the Oedipal challenges of a hidden narrative and allow me to accept the foundations of my own personality.

Raquel Bravo Iglesias was trained at Blank Paper School under Fosi Vegue and Federico Clavarino. She has participated in workshops with curator Marta Dahó and photographers Adam Bloomberg, Oliver Chanaring, and Michael Ackerman. A member of Graphic Collective Tronquis, she was featured in GYF (Género y Figura), La Mono Magazine, and Revue Camera in 2015, and published by African Photography Initiatives in 2016. She is currently working on a project about decolonisation from an autobiographical perspective. Raquel lives in Madrid where she teaches photography.