Article from “Fotografia” nr.15 2004, Poland

Trinidad Carrillo – Maestro Papagayo

The moment of awakening is very unique-we live it everyday, when we finally come back to the real world and the memories of our dreams are still hiding behind under our eyelids. This extraordinary moment makes us believe in the existence of the subconscious.

Trinidad Carrillo has always been interested in telling stories from the borderland of parallel worlds, since even in her childhood she was trying to reach different reality. When she was thirteen she started participating in youth workshops where she discovered photography, as it turned out, a perfect means of visualization of her quest. In 1996 she decided to return to Lima for some time. Surely it was not a coincidence, that in the country where she spent her childhood, the beginning of the project Maestro Papagayo was born, even though most of the works were created later in Europe.

In her photographs Carrillo is constantly seeking magical moments in everyday life, in existence of which she strongly believes- short moments when the gates to parallel worlds open and unreal figures, they send us to the ghosts´world, known in every culture.

Carrillo balances on a very narrow footbridge, on which is difficult to find equilibrium. Tilting to one side or the other, she tries to blur the real contours of our world and show that we still oscillate between the conscious and the subconscious. Photographs ( just like our life) were suspended on the borderline between day and night, light and darkness, reality and dream…and it happens that even quite common situations, in which some characters where presented, make us feel uncertain in which of the worlds we happened to be. Those people live their own lives and, even if they look straight into the camera, we have an impression that they are somewhere else and their eyes do not meet the eyes of the spectators. Not surprisingly, since even the closest people who decided to spend their whole lives together will never get to know each other totally, there will always be something undiscovered…

Mixing the situations of everyday life with totally unreal scenes points out not only to the duality of our nature but also covers time order according to which we live. Transparency, movement or color are elements which causes these photographs to be lost in time. We do not know exactly why it happens but very often pictures by Carrillo evoque the feeling of insufficiency, as if the presented scenes had already happened or they were just to happen. They are never finished- we are the ones who are to tell the endings of those stories.

Ireneusz Zjezdzalka