Blue

Blue, a collaborative process with women who have experienced postpartum depression. The director organises a cyanotype workshop for these mothers to create their own images that illustrate their condition: from their fears, dreams, and experiences through the different shades of blue.

'When my mother worked as an ultrasonographer of pregnant women in Cuba, I was a little girl who grew up surrounded by big bellies at the level of my head. Their fears and expectations in relation to the future, embodied in the figure of a new human being, became a subject of interest for me…

Postpartum depression was a topic I always wanted to address, because of the complexity of the subject, how underrepresented it is and the need to explore it. It is something that many women have suffered as mothers, but for which society is very unprepared to deal with and therefore the same mothers who suffered it, end up hiding it or not understanding what they are going through…

So, I began to publish posts on the social media pages of mothers, calling for those who had gone through this situation and wanted to express themselves through a collective film. It was very exciting to see the amount of mail I got the next day. Then, I organised an intimate workshop of cyanotypes in which I asked these mothers to collect memories, photos, writings, dreams, thoughts... related to that time. It was inspiring to see their limitless creativity and their openness and need to express themselves.

For two weeks I was giving this workshop in the darkroom of the photography department at our university and it was beautiful to see how externalising their condition in other objects helped them to open up, to play and to transform such a heavy experience into a creative process that spoke of their feelings without having to resort to conventional testimony.' - Violena AMPUDIA RODRIGUEZ