Carolina, can you tell us a little about what you do and about your family?

Of course! Im a Colombian artist living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. I work mainly with analog photography, the very painterly kind, but I also enjoy diving into other disciplines like prints and sculptures. For a large portion of my life I have also worked with music in a very diverse range, so from working on Tom Waits album campaigns Europe-wide, to setting up a remembrance show for Jay Reatard in Copenhagen, to teaching at the Danish Rhythmic Conservatory. These days I am also on the board of Another Life, a non-profit organisation focusing on working with representation of all genders and minoritized people in the Danish music scene. I am a bit all over the place and my interests are very wide, but I enjoy both doing my own creative projects, as well as working with artists in various fields. Yet all within a creative and (in many cases) unconstrained or rebellious contexts. In 2011 I moved to Copenhagen from Amsterdam, together with my Danish husband (and Brixton Ambassador) Anders Scrmn Meisner. He makes the most beautiful and color-rich paintings out there, full of romance and irony, just like his persona. He is a great inspiration for me and a fantastic playing partner in the arts. Together we run a collab studio called TRBL Studios, which is a playroom or experimental playground for our artistic development. With him, almost ten years ago we had our son Samuel, and three years after that our little boss Antonia. They are as different as night and day these two, but they both have my Colombian brown eyes and Anders robust temper, so I’m the luckiest woman in the world.

You recently published a photobook and did an exposition about motherhood called: Because a mother never stops bleeding. Can you tell us more about how this project and where you got the inspiration from?

Thanks so much for asking about this! It’s been quite a ride with this project. Like most projects it started with personal exploration, I was desperately trying to understand the person I had become after I had my children. I am ofcourse myself, but how I experience the world has gradually changed drastically in these 10 years. By this I don’t mean practical things like time, priorities, responsibilities, etc. Those were a given and I was ready for them. It was deeper than this, its how your senses get spiked to levels above the norm, how fear creeps in you and you cant get it out, it was so alien, and the very brave and fearless woman I knew myself to be had disappeared through my fingers. Since the birth of Samuel I had been making very altered photography, never accepting the real tones of what I saw, even though my subjects were the usual ones. And I failed to understand why I did that, I just did it so instinctibly. So being the science lover that I am, I turned into neuroscience for the answers. I wanted facts to explain the emotions, not the other way around. Thus for the last two years I relentlessly sat and read over a hundred studies, talked to neuroscientists, been in an operating theatre seeing a human brain work, and listen to too many podcast to try and get some picture of what had happened, biologically speaking. With this knowledge I slowly curated a small publication where science, mundane poetry , women’s brains and candid photography meet to help paint the picture, or lets call it draw a doodle, of the maternal experience. Fx Did you know that a woman’s brain shrinks with pregnancy and some parts remain shrunken for at least 6 years after the birth of her child? or that almost twice as many mothers than fathers in Denmark needs psychiatric help after the baby is born? that in the UK, 18% of the deaths of mothers after a year of birth are by suicide, and over 20% by overdose/psychiatric? We know everything about our baby from conception, but we know nothing about ourselves and the neurological changes we go through. While doing the research it also quickly informed me how little science is done in women’s health. How little is invested in it, how diminished the value of a woman is compared to that of her child though the eyes of those who finance research, and how systems are painfully just not built to support the weight we women carry for society. It was devastating and heartbreaking. So what started as an idea to make a book, ended up as a publication that resembles more a newspaper format. This was a choice, because I could only touch up on the headlines, the real book of motherhood still needs to be researched to be properly and fairly written. About 80% of the women worldwide become mothers, and all 8 billion of us have come out of a woman’s body, we can not talk about anything close to equality until the cost of motherhood in women is properly addressed.

How do you balance mom life, personal and work?

To be honest I dont ha ha! But I try. Its a continuous and evolving exercise, and it changes also with the stages of your children’s age I think. I had to give up artist management when we had Antonia. It was my choice, I felt both like a poor mother and a poor manager, because I couldn’t do both things as I wanted to do them, in my own terms and with my own expectations. So I stayed with music but in a more arms length-traditional schedule way, which has been great, because I still give back to musicians and feel I make a difference, but I don’t have so much responsibility towards them, plus it gave me way more time for my own art. Both Anders, the kids and I love routines and flexibility, so our family values and goals revolve around this paradigm. How to be there for each other and involve each other in the different aspects of our lives is very important for us as a family. Our kids travel a lot with us, go to openings, do sculptures with us, dont flinch when I take pictures and take part in a lot of the creative freedoms we have. But in all honesty, I don’t know if there is ever a balance. In reality is more of a dance, sometimes I lead, sometimes my family does, but in the end we all move to the same rhythm