melanie
isabel
garcía





National Gallery of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Sarajevo Photography Festival 2026  | 3 – 30 June 2026
Exhibition text by Melanie Isabel García
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“When Carmina was born, I thought I could kill for her. I did not recognize the woman who had this thought. Following her birth, I repeated the same action for months. I would visit luxury retail stores. I spoke to sales assistants. I asked for high heels and an outfit. I accepted the glass of champagne. Then, I entered the fitting rooms with her. I registered our actions in the mirror. It became a sustained search: procedural, almost ritualistic. Within these rooms, a friction emerged. An environment designed for a controlled, idealized image of femininity was confronted by the raw demands of my baby. I displaced the intended use of that liminal space. These images are the record of that intrusion.”

–Carlota Guerrero



Carlota Guerrero
2026-03-30 12:18, 2026
Inkjet print on Dibond
460 x 345 cm 
Carlota Guerrero
2026-03-14 11:43, 2026
Inkjet print on Dibond
300 x 225 cm 
Carlota Guerrero
2026-03-20 12:21, 2026
Inkjet print on Dibond
300 x 225 cm 


Look at the Lights, My Love



They say we are all born with intuition, even though no research has been able to trace exactly what it is or where it comes from. In an attempt to simplify its complexity, one might say that intuition is the sum of feeling plus memory plus experience. Then there is, of course, desire. That which moves us into action. Many of us who have felt the pull of intuition might compare it to an animal tracking a scent. Mysteriously dragged in a certain direction, zig-zagging, without necessarily being able to put into exact words what one is pursuing. The depths of consciousness where intuition lives are not necessarily accessible to the intellectual mind. Following our intuition somehow inexplicably becomes the object of our desire.

For the first few months following the birth of her first daughter, Carmina, Carlota describes a shift that would take her over in waves, a fierce need to protect this baby at all costs. Lost in the threat of this violence, she had to find herself again, to discover a new way to inhabit the world with this new appendage. As she doesn’t have a full-length mirror at home, Carlota went seeking her own reflection and ended up in the mazes of self-image that are couture flagships. Cosplaying a wealthy woman whose husband could buy her the entire store, a character started to form. She would announce, “I have an important event in June”—and after trying on many off-runway statement pieces—“I took a lot of pictures, let’s see what he says when I get home”. The important event is this event: her first exhibition in Bosnia & Herzegovina. The photographs are these photographs. 

Sufficient repetition can make something feel like a meditation. A heightened sense of perception emboldens the smallest details and delineates the subtlest emotions. Setting up her tripod and letting Carmina just be for the longest possible stretch of time, they brought intimacy and creativity into a space where “real time is absorbed by the inert presence of objects”. These are the words of Annie Ernaux, who chronicled a year of repeated visits to her nearby supermarket. Her impressions later became a book titled ‘Look at the Lights, My Love’ after a phrase she overheard a mother tell her child in the store, as if to say “distract yourself with the spectacle of consumerism, look, Christmas lights!”   Similarly, Carlota’s images are registers of one particular action. In a way, they are reminiscent of the work of Sophie Calle, known for going on scavenges, rigorously following a set of arbitrary rules, almost looking for the artwork as if she would find it somewhere. Of course, more than just in the results—Carlota’s photographs, Ernaux’s book, or Calle’s text and image pieces—the artworks are found in the exercise of repetition. A cross between performance, sociological experiment, and postpartum ritual (serious, practical, mysterious, fun), Carlota’s images are her impressions. Shot like evidence but charged with the complex smells of newness: not just new clothes but new human, new mother. These photographs are teeming with the fantasy of a game of dolls, of childlike roleplay: “I’ll be the mom, you be the baby”. 

As a child, Carlota used to go shopping with her mother. I did it with mine too, and I am sure we are not alone. After all, the needs of a mother and child must align with the mundane needs of a household. The time of the crying, sleeping, playing, hungry child can be seen as at odds with the one-track pace of a market that never stops. But such is life. Opposites are often held close. 

In these scenes apparently ruled by the time of things, the time of mothers and daughters rises and falls—resting, breathing, alive. Not pictured, like a presence not seen but felt, are several different timelines hidden in the reflections of the reflections—the child that Carlota used to be, and her mother. The most astonishing and profound truths of feeling, memory, and experience do not require years of scientific research. The very truths that make the world go round lie right underneath our noses. Like the fact that a womb is everyone’s first home, which is true for every single person who has existed. Or the fact that, at its core, the world is simply made up of mothers and their children.


–Melanie Isabel García


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