Serie: How Beautiful My Father Was - Untitled - Mexico City, DF

Oweena Camille Fogarty

About this series Oweena Camille Fogarty comments:

‘I am very grateful to the "underground" visual artist Prando Pedroni to have allowed me to share in the experience of his homage to his father (Serie: How Beautiful My Father Was, 1989). To see a human body in that process of death/life was breathtaking.

‘The work consists of 6 pieces of which Prando, Francisco Toledo (I won a Bienal in Photography in 1993 with this series and these pieces ended up in his collection) and myself had copies. I later had an exposition in San Francisco, California, in which I showed this work and it eventually ended up at the Annex Galleries. The series are vintage silver gelatin prints.

‘So that you may understand the context of this historic period in Mexico and have some insight into my "persona" I offer the following synopsis:

‘I descend from the Franz Boas lineage with an intuitive form of entering into dialogue with my subjects/participants. We form a "reciprocal genesis" of being together to enrich our lives and to exchange points of view from different perspectives on "being".

‘I remember those afternoons with Prando. All began as an ordinary afternoon in the studio of Michael Tracy located in Mexico City behind the Cathedral on Lic. Verdad street in the late 1980’s (Tracy was an American artist from Texas who created a super buzz in the artistic community around him with his projects, talent and amores). I was photographing some pieces of his work and Prando came by for a "cooperacha" to pay for funeral costs for his father’s death. Soon we left Michael’s studio and headed to Prando’s home to make this homage, How Beautiful My Father Was. A natural death with an "eternal silence" accompanied the 4-5 sessions to conclude the process of the homage - from the moment of death to the cremation.

Later I showed this work in a performance piece called "Project X" in San Francisco with René Yañez. Many people in the audience could not support the directness of the work and chaos ensued.

So it was...'

My doctorate was connected to magical-religious processes in Afro-Cuban Crossed-Spiritisim from an aesthetic point of view, working from a theoretical standpoint on collective memory and its transmission in the construction of altars. All the work you have is based on magic realism, taken from religious references in Mexico from 1980- 1996. In 1992, after working for almost 10 years with artistic groups in Mexico, I decided I needed to understand more about primary cultures and both Mexico and Cuba preserve cultures of great "traditions", I disappeared from the artistic scene from 1996-2002.'