Karla Hiraldo Voleau – Another Love Story

Another Love Story is the story of an intimate wound, transformed into a determined act of creation. Initially conceived as a romantic tribute to her former partner (referred to as “X”), the project is profoundly reinvented when, at the end of a year-long relationship, the artist discovers that this man is leading a double life with another woman (“Her”).

In an attempt to repair this trauma, Hiraldo Voleau brings out all the vernacular photographs from the failed relationship, at first to inspect them, then quickly decides to reproduce them, identically. With the help of an actor she hired for his incredible resemblance to X, she returns to the places and moments that made up a year of lies. Fiction seems closer to reality, because this time everything is true, it is she who is in control.

Presented in the form of grids that recall an Instagram feed or a smartphone photo library, the work invites reflection on the staging of love and on the slippery role of photography, the favored medium of memory and pretend, which nevertheless will never truly capture the truth of a couple. The transcription of the phone call with “Her,” during which the two women realize the betrayal, is ultimately more symbolic of love and respect than the rest of the story, and punctuates the reading of the series.

Karla Hiraldo Voleau reinstates the scene of pain without shame or modesty at the heart of the creative process, turning it into a living, almost therapeutic material. The discovery of X’s double life does not leave her devastated, but forces her to find in art a way to reclaim her voice and her power.