MILK

2020-2021

Video installation
Title of each film: Rumina, 7 min 39 sec,
Lindu, 6 min 52 sec, and
Nwt, 3 min 16 sec

Trinidad Carrillo’s three videos bear the names of goddesses: Rumina (an ancient Roman protector of breastfeeding mothers), Lindu (an Estonian queen deity that is at the origin of the Milky Way), and Nut/Nwt (Egyptian goddess of the sky). Well known for her photographic practice, Carrillo’s contribution to Comforting the machine is the artist’s first major foray into video work – and one that is epidermally personal. The production of breast milk, for many an essential act of the body during the first stages of raising a child, is seen by the artist as witchcraft, as painting, as poetry, as incantation – while she also examines how her motherhood is woven into her work as an artist.
By selecting goddesses who reference both the earth and parenthood, Carrillo aims to establish her body as part of a telluric history.

“Ideas about what happens with the body during pregnancy started coming to me as soon as I became pregnant for the first time in 2002. The second time, in 2013, those ideas came back to me, but they had had a chance to ripen, to rise and ferment, in a chain of associations and experiences – idea chains that celebrated the body and that pulled me back into an exploration of goddesses and of the way women are viewed.”
(Trinidad Carrillo)

Trinidad Carrillo is a Swedish-Peruvian artist educated at the School of Photography in Gothenburg, Sweden. In her visual world, magic is natural. Her photographs often depict the gap between dream and wakefulness, between the outer and the inner. Carrillo works with an indefinable eeriness that is at times difficult to dwell in. She has exhibited across Sweden, where she has also been commissioned to make permanent installations by the Public Art Agency Sweden, among others. She has also exhibited her work across Europe, the Americas, and Korea.  

Structured around the theme of the city as a machinery of the present time, Comforting the machine synthesised and gave its audience a tight and poignant grasp of truths in the raw. In preparation for the exhibition, the ten artists were also invited to submit something the curators called “Provocations”. The provocation to each artist was a task to expand themselves beyond the walls of the gallery by mapping traces of their work in the region, in history and the future, and to collate them as a string of continuations.

Nwt-

A song

Pulsing on an organic path
Imprinting the fractal pattern of nature

For the birds, her daughter created the Milky Way
Love is time

Nwt, Nunut, Nent, Nuit
Covered in stars
Imperishable as they caress every fine point of her body

From my mortality I pray to Her:

“Make of me the Sun and the Moon
So I may pass through you from day to night
From night to day
Forever beyond what I can remember
Breathing, dreaming, tracing, stirring”

She hears my prayer
As she holds a thousand souls
Shining every morning
Burning every night

“Protect me as I am living
Embrace me when I die
Let the wind whisper through
The perfectly crafted branches
Of your filigreed mechanics:
Every dream a heartbeat,
Every heartbeat heartening time
Time given gives back
To the source of pure white light”

*I would like to thank Justine Kirk for helping me to find my way through the english expressions in the texts.