Maite De Orbe’s photography explores ritual, sensuality and sacred spaces

Maite De Orbe, a Spanish-born and London-based artist, finds herself immersed between London’s queer strip-club scene and the half-forgotten ceremonial residues of rural Mexico. Her latest show, A Moment Opposite to Blindness is not a retrospective, nor a collection of images, but a kind of séance. Held in Miłośc Gallery, the exhibition opened with a performance featuring two people embracing each other under a white cloth, which De Orbe traced over with coal, imprinting the bodies. It wasn’t a static performance, but more of a development. “Like a photograph in a darkroom,” De Orbe says. “The image only appears because you stay. You wait. You witness.”

De Orbe recalls her father’s informal photographic practice, which sparked her interest in the art. She remembers sneaking into his cupboards as a child to look through his photographs, archiving her family life and childhood. Borrowing from the organic nature of photography she grew up around, her work resists commodification (one of the central pieces in the show is notably not for sale). Featuring an image taken during a ritual in a ruined Mexican ceremonial site, the artist recalls how a circle had been drawn in the mud, the ashes of the fire still warm. Despite asking permission from the site, when she took the picture, the camera broke. The surviving image became, in her words, charged. “The space rejected being recorded. So I honoured that. The photograph is here, but it’s not owned. It shouldn’t be.”

This refusal to commodify, to protect, to explain shapes the entire exhibition. Photographs are raw-edged, tacked straight onto the walls, unframed and exposed. “I didn’t want protection,” De Orbe explains. “Life is precarious. So the image should be too.” There’s a vulnerability in this gesture, echoing the unarmoured exposure of queer bodies at work and in ritual. The show invites viewers not to consume images, but to co-sense them.

De Orbe does not construct or stage scenes, but instead archives what already exists in the world. “Life comes first,” she says. “Art just traces it.” De Orbe’s photography functions less as representation than as invocation. What results is not a fixed narrative but an unfolding presence, a kind of ontological hospitality extended toward the fugitive, the erotic, the sacred. De Orbe’s work echoes Ariella Azoulay’s call for a “civil contract of photography,” wherein the photographer, subject, and viewer are all engaged in a shared, ethical field of responsibility. 

Much of De Orbe’s practice emerges from her background as a photographer embedded in London’s lesbian strip club scene – an intimacy that refuses objectification. In the current political climate, with the UK government reviewing legal frameworks around sex work – including discussions of adopting the Nordic Model, criminalising sex work and endangering sex workers – De Orbe’s imagery stands as a quiet but potent act of resistance. Rather than reinforce dominant narratives of commodification or fetishisation, her work insists on nuanced, relational forms of representation. It aligns with decriminalisation efforts by centring agency, interiority, and care in the depiction of sex-working lives.

Cars also appear frequently in De Orbe’s work – crashed, stalled, half-lit on film. “I’m obsessed with them,” she confesses. “They’re always about suspended violence. The moment after impact. Or the one just before”. These images evoke a kind of Warholian seriality recharged with emotional voltage. Warhol’s car crash silkscreens – part of his Death and Disaster series – repeated scenes of fatal collisions until they lost their singularity, becoming a kind of numbed ritual of capitalist violence. In contrast, De Orbe’s vehicles are not mass-produced icons of catastrophe, but intimate portraits of suspended violence. Each car in her frame is specific, weathered, charged – not only with the physical remnants of impact, but with emotional residue. They sit half-lit, stalled, caught in a moment that stretches the instant of collision into something prolonged and unresolved. If Warhol’s cars embody the aesthetic of repetition-as-desensitisation, De Orbe’s hold space for repetition as haunting. The repetition is not mechanical but mnemonic – a return to what cannot be resolved. These are not images of spectacle but of suspension. Aesthetic theorist Laura Marks might describe them as "haptic visuality”: inviting a kind of tactile looking, where the surface of the image refuses clarity, drawing the viewer into a sensual, uncertain proximity.

Against the pressure on works of art to explain themselves, or to symbolise an already formed argument, De Orbe’s works exist: which is akin to the characters, queer, intersectional, and magical, that the works represent. Whether in a Dominican ballroom, a crumbling ritual site, or the backroom of a strip club, in moments that demand legibility, identity, and explanation, De Orbe’s work opts instead for presence. 

Maite De Orbe’s A Moment Opposite to Blindness runs until 1 June 2025 at Miłość gallery.