Beehive
Artists in dialogue

The artist Anamaria McCarthy dedicates herself to photography exploring metaphors about the human condition through the nude and self-portrait, exposing both its fragility and complexity, from its own embodiment. Thus, she uses her body as a support to portray the existential condition of women and the political-social circumstances that surround her.

In 2007, the artist traveled to Buenos Aires as a guest artist within the International Residency Program during the International Self Portraits Project, which in its 3rd edition was held at Proyecto´ace in Argentina. In this context, she meets a group of women artists from different countries who had traveled to produce their self-portraits within this international project. In these circumstances, the artist establishes links that will become a new project related to the theme of portrait-self-portrait, long explored in her work. McCarthy invited each of the artists to make a work using the skin of their own back as a canvas, while she, in turn, intervened and photographed the artists’ backs. Metaphorically similar, in concept and in the way of constructing visual discourse, to the cells of a honeycomb, this collective work was finally called La Colmena.

In this way, La Colmena (Beehive)is a collaborative creation project that brings together pairs of portraits in which Anamaría’s body is related, in some way, to the body of the artist whose skin intervened, and also with the artists they left behind. its imprint on Anamaría’s back. This double semantic game resulted in a polyphonic work that expresses the voices and bodies of the artists who participated in the project. La Colmena was part of the official exhibitions of We, you, they , Festival de la Luz / XV Open Encounters 2008 in Buenos Aires.