Raisa Galofre (b.1986 in Barranquilla) is a Colombian-Caribbean artist, photographer and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. She holds a degree in Communication Sciences and Journalism from Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla (COL) and a M.A in Photography from University of Arts and Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle (DE). She was recently awarded with the Goethe Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore Artist-in-Residence in India in collaboration with the photographer Marvin Systermans and was shortlisted for the 2019 Lucie Foundation Fine Art Photography Scholarship awards. She was also nominated for the New Talent Canon awards 19/2. In her artistic work, Raisa draws on the narrative characteristics of Latin American magical realism in order to question prevailing – mostly Western influenced – visual representations of gender, identity and historical events by developing new narratives. In this doing so, her photography, embraces the coexistence of the opposites: the real and the fantastic, the rational and the mythical, the possible and the impossible. Since 2017 Raisa is part of the Berlin based independent art space SAVVY Contemporary. The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, founded and directed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, where she has assisted in the curation of exhibitions and worked as curatorial researcher.
In the Beginning was the Sea
Modernity is a set of tales from which we, Latin Americans and Caribbean, mostly get what is left. The tail of the progress hits us leaving behind erased memories, rivers of plastic, plates full of sand. And still, we, here, in these lands of former and new colonial treasures, haven’t yet learned to look at ourselves sincerely, genuinely.
Praising the images that foreign eyes make of us, we copy their exoticism, objectification, sexualization; we are exotic to ourselves, we are a fiction to ourselves.
How can we, Caribbean, visually articulate the mixtures, contradictions and encounters that are
constantly influencing our many identities and stories? What images can we imagine and create that dare to counter-narrate fixed repeated narratives about ourselves?
“In the beginning was the sea” engages in a search for visual imaginary of mixed mostly contradictory stories from the Caribbean coast of Colombia, with the aim of revealing the signs of coloniality that surround it.
To view more of Raisa Galofre’s work please visit her website.