The narrative obfuscate me, the words confine me, writes Fito Conesa. Music, on the other hand, offers unsuspected cadences, tones and interior intensities that can be modulated by unconventional overlaps between image and sound, between present and past, presences and absences. Conesa has given musical form or of instrumental composition to naval battles (Fantasy and fugue for Tsushima 2015), to suburban sunrises (Ouverture 2011), to the routine going up and down of an elevator (Chamber […]
The transition from a gray reality to a fantasy realm, from a windowless room to an infinite and lysergic nature, from cultural oppression to instinctive liberation, is a common denominator of children’s tales like The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Pooh where the child transforms his o her relatives (or stuffed animals) into extreme beings subject to the whims of sleep. It is not surprising that Henry Darger was fascinated by the tornadoes, thresholds […]
Those who ask for money in exchange for sexual services are defined as «prostitutes», an illegitimate or illegal status, while those who pay for sex are rarely differentiated from the male population in general (Gail Pheterson, The prostitution prism) Virginie Despentes, in King Kong Theory, rescues this fragment of Pheterson’s book to reflect on the cultural construction of stigmatized femininity. The clients constitute a varied population (in terms of social extraction, age, motivations…), while whores […]
Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery demands non-ordinary consciousness (Hakim Bey, TAZ). Who mostly explored the incendiary effects of mad love were the Surrealists, but the paroxysm of passion that embodies this concept does not adhere to a time and place. It vibrates with different chords every chance. Its poetic possibilities has been plumbed as a way of short-circuit of established order by freeing the natural being of any social tie, so often […]
To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez. The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which […]
Everything is circular until is not is the title of Rosana Antolí‘s video, and at the same time it could summarize her vital philosophy, ergo, her artistic work. Dancing the hula hoop until it falls to the ground, trying to repeat again and again a few strokes on the paper knowing that they will never be the same, involve in that stroke the whole body transforming the canvas into a dance floor … The lucidity […]
Intimacy is the highest degree of exposure and risk we can reach, it is pure inhospitable exteriority. Unlike the private, which we can lock in, the intimate can only be experienced in relation to others. We just feel naked and vulnerable when someone looks at us. I borrow from Jose Luis Pardo this semantic revision to better understand the work of Abel Azcona, because I recognize that when first time I met it generated mixed […]
Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum (…) In one beautiful frozen images of Venus, Judith, Susanna, Juno, Lucrece, Salome and other heroines; in the other, living women in their traditional garb, with their stereotyped gestures and phrases. In both, you are in a sense under the sign og archeology; and if I have always loved whorehouses it is because they, too, participate in antiquity by their slave-market aspect, a ritual […]
