In a childhood memory, the Swiss photographer and researcher Mirjam Wirz (1973) tells how, as a child, she broke the silence that reigned at the train stop and started curious conversations in front of older people, which was completely unusual in Unterkulm in the 1980s. , a community that is usually quiet and reserved. This same curiosity was a constant in Wirz’s life, something that made her feel out of context in much of Europe, but which also led her to openly explore other latitudes and personal interests with an overarching approach between the To connect the artistic and the artistic anthropologically.
He came to Mexico City 13 years ago to explore one of the musical styles he likes the most: cumbia. During his time in this work he encountered the sonideros, the neighborhood, the night and the people who articulate these and other popular sounds. The result of this trip was the publication of five books as part of the Sonidero City project. The last, Ojos Suaves (2019), was the result of his first travels in search of the origins of cumbia in the lower Magdalena River in Colombia.
After the publication of Ojos Suaves, the Swiss government awarded Mirjam Wirz a research fellowship in Colombia and she embarked on a journey lasting more than four years. The result, published this year, is the Cuadernos Verdes project, a series of printed booklets in which he records his visual and textual experiences.
Matuya and El Patio de Betty Ochoa, the first two titles in the series, maintain the imprint of Wirz’s books, which, although derived from comprehensive methodology and field research, maintain in their final version a free narrative that crosses archeology and fine art navigated. For the booklet “El Patio de Betty Ochoa”, the photographer reflects on the conversations without neglecting the balance with intimate images, in a narrative mix that shows us his protagonist, an artist who became known as a composer and singer, whose Songs were originally performed by the city’s musicians, including the now world-famous Andrés Landero and Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto.
For the author, who sees her work as a constant translation, Cumbia, despite being the protagonist of her research, has taken the approach to her research object to other areas where human contact and its context are more important than the result itself.
“It’s a slightly different project. In Sonidero City the theme was always cumbia, even if it was linear: one thing always led to another, it wasn’t planned. Well, as the name suggests, Green Notebooks are small copies of 50 pages, the result of what I call micro-research where I go to a specific location – it can be a house, a farm, a sidewalk or be a business. — and it can be about a specific person and I do a little research in this area. This material comes from conversations that I later edited and intertwined with other topics from the region or the city, I combined it with the photos and now with more text. “It’s a little more literary, let’s say,” explains Wirz.
An image from the book “Green Notebooks”. Mirjam Wirz,
Being in the heart of Cumbia, one of the photographer’s first surprises was that this style was far from the most popular in the region (Valenato was) and that the proximity to her subject of study distanced herself from it, somehow. It was then that Wirz decided not to seek cumbia but to inhabit it, as she explains on the back cover of Cuadernos Verdes: “Cumbia never exists in isolation, it is always connected to its context.”
This type of expansion gave Wirz a kind of confusion that, far from discouraging her, pushed her to go ahead, immerse herself in the tropical dry forest of San Jacinto and even settle there permanently after a stay of about three years (from 2019 to 2022). ). ). “The idea is to build an entire forest because that is the region. I’m clear about that and there’s freedom with this idea that I can open up at any time.”
Back to Mexico, back to Cumbia
For the author of “Ojos Suaves” and “Sonidero City,” the astonishment lies in realizing that her original intention was never to live on the paths of cumbia for more than a decade, despite following her in her home country and in others countries have brought her inevitably back to Mexico City, with the people she portrays in her books and whom she considers her most important “editors,” since they are the first people to see the book, and the first Places where she presents them: “Here I am Do the research. If the people who appear in it or with whom I work do not accept it, for me it is a failure because it is primarily about and for them, not about a specific market or another environment,” explains the Swiss artist .
If one takes a look at Wirz’s books – which achieve a precision of vision thanks to their openness and freedom compared to other local works of a much more academic nature published on the subject – the topics he addresses are, present, albeit always beneath the main skin of the people and the environment they join.
“In San Jacinto, for example, I entered a context that I don’t belong to or that I don’t know, I’m not from there, I’m very far away and I can’t plan things well. This leads to me being as open as possible and then building connections with people in a way that I feel is fair and okay for both of us. “In addition, I think it is important to focus more on the people, their identity and their composition than on the movement or the topic in general,” says Wirz.
With the openness that the nature allows of Cuadernos Verdes, a project that, according to its author, aims to be an entire forest, in addition to some presentations and projects in Mexico, Wirz admits that the way he presents his books ( sometimes without). Titles on the spine and on the cover, in others separated by the captions and credits of the photos) is also part of a way of perceiving the world in which the devotion to the physical is also an invitation to discovery, to life in mystery and to enterprise of a new person represents adventure that can lead to unplanned places.
As she says: “The book is an object that I publish, but it has its own journey. Sometimes I go into a house and look at my copies alongside other books or records, also adjusting the TV, which is also good; It’s an object that adapts and I like that. There are formats in art, for example exhibitions, but for me this is more exclusive, it creates a different kind of dialogue and perception. It’s true that there are a lot of things I do that aren’t visible in the book, but for me that gets people wanting to know if there’s interest. I also see the world like a book.”
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