Minimum Exercices for a Winter Garden

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Inés Molina Navea's first book, Ejercicios mínimos para un Jardín de invierno (Minimal Exercises for a Winter Garden) attempts to think about the work of art in relation to the historical event.

Starting with the chance encounter of a photographic triptych in the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, composed of three portraits of three women posing according to the rules of nineteenth-century anthropology, which sought to make its object of study visible: the savage. Everything was in place to make these photographs scientific documents: the three women pose naked, arms at their sides, staring into the lens, all except for one detail: the background. The palm trees in the gardens of Acclimatization smile not at reason but at the imagination. They are the backdrop to the outside.

This image is probably the first representation of the Cárites in a photograph, but more important is this: it is the first image, and perhaps the only one, to depict the three Graces as three black women.


From the manipulation of this image and other similar ones, the author carries out various exercises in digital and analogue photography, photocopying, photoengraving, engraving and experimental techniques that mix these processes, to question the topicality of the representation of the savage of the 19th century and the validity of colonial history in contemporary aesthetic and political thought in the West, delving on the one hand into the modes of transmission and formal significance of the figuration of the savage and the Graces and, on the other, into the symbolic and allegorical value of the palm tree in today's culture.