NAU NUA: XIOMARA BENDER

Portray the invisible

Portrait Xiomara Bender, photo by Andreas Bender

What is life? Among other things, the title of a magnificent pop song by George Harrison released in 1970. Actually, the song wonders what is life without love, and as I have been discovering the work of photographer Xiomara Bender, the song sounded in my mind with more intensity, and even more so after having the opportunity to interview her. Xiomara Bender, a photographer born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1987, seeks knowledge of human nature from respect, such is her work philosophy. As she well defines her work, she moves with harmony between the visible and the invisible, through the light, the material that she sculpts to turn it into a photograph, portraying the inner light of the people, without prejudices.

Her work will be part of the exhibition KOEBL . WENDERS . BENDER / Three Photographers - Three Generations scheduled at Berlin Photo Week from August 26 to September 3, along with two other renowned photographers, Herlinde Koelbl and Donata Wenders, at the Arena Berlin. The Leica exhibition includes works by those three artists complemented by texts and videos.

How did you decide to become a photographer?

After graduating from an English boarding school in the Himalayas in India I came back to Germany and didn't know exactly what it is that i really want to do in life. It took a longer detour in the hotel business before I realized that I really want to be free and independent. So it was more of a coincidence that I discovered photography for myself. I come from a very cosmopolitan family in which there was a lot of political discussion going on. From early age my parents both allowed and encouraged me to look at the world with my own eyes. So I found myself in my mid-twenties in search of something that enabled me to make my passion and longing to travel into a career.

In contrast to my father, who has been traveling this planet for 45 years and who has been describing and questioning the world with language and words all his life I have found the medium of imagery for my own personal language. Hence, photography is what allows me to travel the world today, to observe it, to examine it, to capture it and at the same time it enables me to tell my very own version of a story.

I keep asking myself how participation can be organized and indifference could be overcome. I believe art has the power to provoke the viewer to form an opinion. A creative process of reflection needs to be set in motion. This can bring participation, which leads to social dynamism which is the mainspring of my work.

You define a successful photograph as the copy of a relationship. What should have a good relationship in your opinion?

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's ideal, according to which the highest art of photography, is to make the essence of a human being visible when taking a picture is still a secret that only reveals itself in very rare intimate moments and even then it remains subjective. I guess for me it´s the pure moment of approaching each other without prejudices, humility, an open mind and curiosity. In this order.

We could say that you seek to understand yourself with light and communicate through it. When you take a portrait, how do you connect with the interior light of the person being portrayed?

Photography is a language for me, it's over 200 years old and you have to be able to listen and be awake in order to understand.

Of course, as a photographer you're always looking for a new approach, a new perspective, the perfect moment, but that's not the most important thing to me.

The people or landscapes in my photographs are ambassadors and projection surfaces at the same time. My empathy when taking the picture, the emotions captured by the photographed and the emotional horizon of experience of the recipients are my working triad of a photo and thus an indicator of a successful or less successful picture. I try to listen.

Let me congratulate you on your project "The power of dreams". Before talking about it, what power do dreams have in your life?

Thank you Juan.

As long as I can remember my father used to write me in letters or postcards arriving from distant countries or telling me in emotional or weak moments that „You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.“ Only years later I read that this quote was from an American author named Richard David Bach. Dreams for me have the power of becoming a reality especially if you are patient enough.

Regarding the project, how was it born?

A photograph of Nelson Mandela by Jürgen Schadeberg was a major inspiration for my work in North Korea. In the image we share the cell of a prison. A black man at the window. The hair is white. Captured in half profile. The gaze wanders into the distance. Thoughtful. The face is drawn. Conveying an electrifying power that the viewer cannot escape. Nelson Mandela is the face of overcoming the South African apartheid regime. In 1994 he returned with the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg to his cell on Robben Island where this photo was taken.

Over the years I was more and more interested in the individual, to address them with the photographer's gaze in search of hope in their faces; looking for signs of change that could end in overcoming a seemingly grotesque system; the elimination of a regime that based its rule on repression, like South Africa once did.

Apartheid. Considered insurmountable for decades, actually accepted by a community of states that exhausted itself in rituals of indignation. Ultimately overcome by the people who were discriminated against. By countless initially the smallest steps that resulted in a movement that the state, built on repression, ultimately had nothing to oppose.

It would be presumptuous to try to relate the image of the free Nelson Mandela, for example, to the unknown North Korean woman whom I captured sitting at the window of a bus in Pyongyang. But in her eyes I see the longing that has always united all people. The longing for a fulfilled and self-determined life. Anyone who takes the effort and looks will therefore see more than a totalitarian system.

Xiomara Bender
The Power of Dreams 2011-2019
Kim Il Sung Square 2015
copyright Xiomara Bender

For the rest of the world, North Korea is a hermetic world and far removed from what we could consider beautiful. However your photographs are beautiful. What were you looking to portray of North Korean society?

In less than a generation, North Korea has undergone an enormous transformation towards more market, more diversity and also more modernity. But it remains hidden from most of us because its result seems somehow normal and therefore hardly worth mentioning. What you usually don't get to see is the everyday life of North Koreans. Despite all the friendliness and the increasing colorfulness of the country it is still an ideologically founded one-party dictatorship with a leader cult and the persecution of politically dissenters, without freedom of travel and freedom of the press. I think it is wrong to reduce North Korea to just this aspect but it would be just as fatal to overlook it.

I keep searching to find people beyond the uniformed masquerade, to break through the dramaturgy of state staging, in order to use my pictures to destroy the local arrogance and ignorance of a country - not a system - that is more than a “baby dictator” and a nuclear weapons program. With my work and my pictures I would like to encourage people to travel to the country and thereby force change.

Like i said before, a noticeably new era has begun. The country is changing. People are starting to emancipate themselves. Timid. Carefully. At first only a few. There will be more. The fact that we do not notice any of this is also due to the isolation that the system operates with bizarre perfection. But it's also up to us. Thats what i am trying to capture and document over the years.

We do see a lot of order in the images. Parades, uniforms, demonstrative choreographies ... what feeling has remained of your experience there?

There is no better way to describe it than the FAZ journalist Jakob Strobel y Serra originally wrote in German: "North Korea is the peculiar, strangest, incredible, most exciting travel destination on earth, a stray in history, a ball lightning from the alchemist's chamber of ideology, a country that one believes is impossible until you've seen it."

I’ve seen it every year since 2011 and in 2019 for the ninth time in my life.

Anyone who takes the trouble to look at their own and the rest of the world from Pyongyang, as Goethe once recommended, i.e. consequently assigning a point of view to the changed geographical point of view, not only understands this state better, but also discovers a civil society that has a right not to be attacked but seen. A society, proud and self-confident, which, despite permanent state control, has also created niches for personal enjoyment and togetherness. All these feelings of what is right and wrong, incomprehensible and comprehensible are constantly clashing while traveling through the country.

Did you have any impediment from the authorities? Or perhaps self-censorship against possible restrictions.

There are a few rules but I believe they are very easy to respect. For example you should not take photographs of individuals of the military or police or even construction sites. In Israel, the USA or many other countries you are also asked not to do so. Of course after so many years of traveling to this country there is a certain kind of trust. I would say there is no one in the tourism industry in the DPRK that has not heard of my name. They probably love and hate me at the same time.

In other projects one can see a passionate and respectful approach to nature. What does the natural world bring you, either to your artistic activity and to your life in general?

The best thing about traveling the world for me is the expansion of consciousness when you no longer know where you are coming from in the first place. I always have to keep moving. Beyond our geography and calculation of time people live in self-chosen isolation who have retained themselves a natural intelligence as nourishment that is in stark contrast to the predominantly calculating logic of western societies. All this helps me questioning myself and my environment in a healthy way and therefore secures me with a strong bond to my very own roots.

For whom nature is a force of inspiration, of life, climate change and the political and economic decisions in this regard should be lived with sadness. Is there any hope?

I need to believe that. What else can we do? Past, present and future. They are all the same, because the day after tomorrow the today is already the day before yesterday. Time to change is always now.

Could you advance us any future projects?

I am continuing to work on my heart and long-term project “North Korea. The Power of Dreams ” and will hopefully be traveling to the DPRK for the tenth time in 2021/2022. The work on a second book is in progress and further projects all depend on this extraordinary time we all live in right now.

Returning to dreams, could you explain us a dream you had while sleeping?

Imagine you travel around the globe in one direction. At some point you will reach the point of view that you initially turned your back on.

An interview by Juan Carlos Romero

Portrait Xiomara Bender, photo by Andreas Bender

For further information please visit www.xiomara-bender.com