The project Another Love Story is based on a personal story; Karla Hiraldo Voleau presents a series of photographs and texts that reconstruct and replicate the last months of her relationship with a man she has chosen to call X for the sake of anonymity. The artist recounts a major change that took place during their relationship, namely her discovery that her companion was leading a double life. This revelation was made during a conversation between the artist and X’s other partner which she chose to transcribe and present in the exhibition. What to do when you find yourself dispossessed of your own story?
Karla Hiraldo Voleau decided to reappropriate this story by replaying different moments of their relationship and identically reproducing personal photographs the couple had taken in the past. She established a protocol for the shooting, becoming artistic director, going back to locations that served as a decor for their moments together and hiring a model to assume the role of her companion. The choice of a “stand-in” was both a means of legal protection and a remarkable way for the artist to free herself from her former lover. Both performer and photographer, Karla Hiraldo Voleau offers a mise en abyme of her own story and makes palpable the social codes attached to the couple.
Another Love Story proposes a reflection on the photographic medium and its place as a silent witness of our lives. Here, images fail to capture the truth of a relationship, bending instead to our desires, to our wishes, to reveal the feeling of love even when it ultimately remains elusive.
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Karla Hiraldo Voleau, born in 1992, is a French-Dominican artist who lives and works in Lausanne (Switzerland). She graduated from ECAL, Lausanne, with a master’s degree in Photography in 2018. Her artistic work focuses on intimacy as a critical space. Gender, sexuality, emotions and the body are all subjects she tackles in her photographs in order to reveal what is played out beyond appearances.The artist stages herself in her artistic projects, thereby blending autobiographical narratives and fictions.
