The corpus of the narrative deals with a resilient visual testimony, where the photographer conceives -through complex and saturated frames- a portrait of the marginality and injustice of an urban character that is invaded by her daily life. In the project we meet Terry Holiday (Mexico City, Mexico; 1955), a vedette that Andrade repeatedly portrays. We find in her a social icon, that critically depicts gender construction paradigm. Holiday, as a vicarious model of learning, rebels herself against the impossibility of developing her own gender identity. Andrade, as a voracious witness of her time, captures her first performances. Her lens served as an example of struggle for many people who found repression in response at the end of the 1970s, such as the illegal raids in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City.
Yolanda Andrade reflected in Holiday the development of an apocryphal world, continent of her early passion for set design and acting. In the masquerade of the contemporary, the rigid terms of worlds that do not allow differences are diluted. Holiday and Andrade recognize each other in that mirror, both through the construction of themselves, with the disidentification that they find in the normativity surrounding them. The shots that the author takes of the vedette emanate admiration as well as great closeness. In this sense, it seems to exist between the two, an identification honed by an evocative and tremendously sensual reciprocity. The images transcend autonomously and a sense of timeless empathy. Due to their clearheaded and certainty, they can be snapshots of a stage of advanced consolidation in both careers. Paradoxically, at the time these artistic exchanges take place, neither of them were in their thirties.
In all likelihood, these collaborations meant a strengthening for both artists in their subsequent creative hunches. Yolanda Andrade’s career as a professional photographer shares a parallelism with the character to whom we dedicated her first individual exhibition in Spain. Terry Holiday and Yolanda Andrade, belonging to the same generation of artists, share this devotion to the liveliness and intensity of the city night show in the Mexican capital. The scenery of the nocturnal world unfolds shamelessly in a baroque way, making room for the multiple possibilities of identity. Terry Holiday develops in the show, and it is through it that he transmutes his own identity, how she becomes transformer. In these cabarets, she strengthens her being as an artist and as women, two sides of the same coin. As herself asserts: Terry, she always felt like Terry (...) I always had a special taste for the night (...) Night is the most wonderful moment in life, when all the mundanity, the banality and the superfluous disappear and only we are left with lights, sequins and a quiet life.
In relation to the historiographical establishment, two exhibitions have promoted the positioning of Yolanda Andrade’s work as a spokesperson for a personal perspective that universalizes other considerations of counterculture and activism. One of them is Latin Fire, the Anna Gamazo de Abelló Collection at CentroCentro Cibeles, in Madrid, exhibited in 2015 as part of the PhotoEspaña. As the curators Alexis Fabry and María Wills stated:
The mob, the swarm, the human conglomeration with its queen and its monsters make the city a constant theater. Latin American cities, from the middle of the century, assume their own personalities, and there is a very particular imaginary in the potpourri between the vernacular, the imported, the popular and ̈the other ̈.
The second of these curatorial projects took place in 2017 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles curated by Connie Butler: Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, where Andrade was presented along with more than one hundred fundamental women artist to carry out other readings of contemporaneity; some like Ana Mendieta, Lygia Pape or Marta Palau.
For all of the above, Galería Memoria joins the review of this constellation of artistic and resistance activisms that allow establishing new revisions on this critical and radical period in contemporary art and Latin American visual culture.
Alejandro de Villota
Director and Founder of Memoria