VIENTRE

Vientre (2013-2018) explores the links and contrasts between beauty and cruelty, between desire and the many facets of appetite in the context of our relationships with animals, with our families, with the earth and with memory. La Mixteca, Mexico, is the site of this journey deep into the den that is the womb, the first refuge, the wet home of instincts, emotions and roots. Modernity and tradition collide in the middle of the field, and while the desert advances and the bodies dry in the sun, I submerge myself and store the squeals, the movement and the stillness under the wide open sky, under tile or cane roofs, so close to the limits of being, to the raw extremes. 

"The cover of Nadia del Pozo’s Vientre sticks out on a crowded table of photobooks. From afar, it looks like a dense swirl of textural hair, but then you reach to grab it and it reveals itself as bumpy, the cover not flat but interrupted by ripples and mounds that give it a tactile, three dimensional quality. It is then that we notice that the hair isn’t naturally red, but is instead covered in dried, darkened blood which has matted the hair into this whorl of color, and we begin to understand that this isn’t a normal publication.

Vientre continually walks the knife edge of being alluring and revolting, and it is this deliberate dissonance that gives the photobook its punch. Even in its most grotesque and unnerving moments, it always returns to delicacy and unexpected grace, the brutality of the process recast within the natural and enduring cycles of life. Vientre asks us to put aside our squeamishness, and rewards us with a richly visceral and memorable visual experience. By forcing us to grapple with instinctual complexity in ways that aren’t always easy or comfortable, del Pozo gets inside our heads, and the churning emotions and reactions found there make Vientre very hard to forget."

-Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily