Our latest showcase is Lua Ribera, one of the three Jerwood/Photoworks Awardees. We look at the work predating the award ahead of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards exhibition launch, January 2018.
Noises in the blood is a photographic work, inspired by the Jamaican dancehall ritual, that I started to produce in 2015 in the British city of Birmingham. The work reflects on the representation of a different cultural expression, embracing the impossibility of fully understanding it, and dealing with the limitations of photographic representation in this pursuit. The result would be a collection of photographs fruit of a cultural collision and collaborative process between myself and a group of British Jamaican women.
I became inspired by Dr Carolyn Cooper´s transgressive vision in Jamaican Dancehall. Following her ideas as well as my own experience, I found in the Dancehall celebrations a spectacular representation of Jamaican identity, where performance, ritual and self-expression reach high levels of sophistication. I do not intend the images to explain this ritual, but to become the ritual itself. It is an aura of particular mysticism, an idealization of the colours and the power of their transformations, the reasons why women are more innovative and provocative, with manners that often clash with Western ideas of femininity. Mythological powers, the concept of female divinity and sacredness in Afro-Caribbean culture, were very present in my visual search. Finally, fed by their folklore and my imagination, universal subjects such as birth, love, death and sex are becoming fundamental to this encounter.
Lua Ribeira (b1986, Galicia, Spain) studied Sciences of Information at University of Vigo and Graphic Design at Bau, Escola Superior de Disseny, Barcelona. She graduated in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales, Newport in 2016. Lua’s work has been awarded the Firecracker Grant 2015, Ditto Press Scholarship 2015, and the Reginald Salisbury Fund 2016 and she was recently shortlisted for the Bar Tur Photobook Award. Lua has participated in The Independent Air Residency, Denmark 2015 and group exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Germany.
For more about the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, click here.
For more of our showcases, click here.
For more of Lua’s work, click here.
