Mar Caldas en Río Tollo

The artist Mar Caldas transforms the nursery of Camellia de Río Tollo in ‘The Last Supper’

Within the photographic series ‘Facedoras do Baixo Miño’, which aims to make visible the work of women in rural Galician

 

In Río Tollo we are committed to culture, art and the revaluation of work in the field. For this reason, we collaborate enthusiastically with visual artist Mar Caldas and his photographic series ‘Facedoras do Baixo Miño’, some images through the photographer show us his vision of the work of women in rural Galician, looking for “social recognition is necessary of the works they perform” in an original and unique way, with them posing with clothes, objects and elements of the work they perform, showing themselves “strong, powerful, proud, in control of themselves”.

The artist manages to match the strength of photography with an intense legacy of art history, turning her images into pictorial remnants that flee from the naturalist and documentary photo to obtain “more artificial, composite, staged images … that look like a picture more than a photograph”.

The perspective of flight

Touring the Tollo River, seeing “the perspective of escape from the nurseries and the cars of the plants” to Caldas, a picture immediately came to his head. This is how our camellia greenhouse was converted during one morning on the stage of ‘The Last Supper’ with 13 of our workers as protagonists. “I knew that there were a lot of women working in the nursery and that I could count on a large group for staging, something that does not happen,” Caldas explains.

The photo, titled ‘Nursery workers of ornamental plant’, picks up the compositional scheme of Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous representation of this biblical episode, but also the unusual physical contact between the characters that can be seen in the work of the painter Plautilla Nelli, a version more unknown to the public.

Together with our workers, the camellia is another of the protagonists of the photo because “it is the main and most representative crop of Río Tollo, besides being a very Galician plant, very much of the earth”.

Fotografía de Mar Caldas realizada en Río Tollo, 'La última cena'