Continents too narrow for their content: bodies trapped in glass boxes, feline fierceness fading in black cages … The bars jail, like the panthers, were no more than shadows of a deep dream of Paloma Navares, shadows that throughout her life has been veiling appearances, so she has been forced to grope what is not apparent. The idea of confinement that upholds her artistic work is probably a reflection of the fear of being trapped […]
The uterus is a restless animal, which if not fertilized in time it moves through the woman body causing havoc wherever it goes: palpitations, seizures… It was that simple the diagnosis that doctors and philosophers such as Hippocrates and Plato attributed to what they called “hysteria”, a Greek term referring to the womb. And centuries go by… and psychoanalysis continued to relate unsatisfied female sexuality with “hysterical” disorders. Actually, the bizarre history of the uterus […]
Whether we are more or less moviegoers, the filmic imprint has been storing in our subconscious. Maybe if we close our eyes and grope in our psychic archive, we will find an endless list of open files where childhood obsessions and footage from films that marked our lives seem to have been emulsified in the same bobbin. Although it would be absurd to pretend that we can discern between what we really lived and what […]
Despite the truths embedded in Theodor Adorno’s statement that it’s impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it’s equally true that in the face of horrors and traumas of war, lyrical beauty is often the only avenue of catharsis. When Hayv Kahraman recollects episodes from her childhood in a besieged Iraq, she recovers the human warmth that drove away fears while seeking refuge in anti-aircraft shelters. During temporary cease-fires, children left their hideouts and challenged each […]
Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]
In a state of nature, man is a wolf to man according to Hobbes, so it was necessary a behavior agreement. The social contract was born of the fear that we inspired each other. But living in society, the survival instinct is added to competitive anxieties and an aggressiveness inoculated by the system that makes the man a wolf with a tie, to men and to women. So, where are we going?, Gema Rupérez asks us in […]
Between the frivolous perfection of a mannequin and the tenderness of a handmade doll would be suggested an ample range of extremes and dualities. With one and the other Cathy Wilkes builds domestic scenarios where stereotyped models of femininity are just as or more fragile than those papier maché family groups. On the one hand, we walk among beautiful mannequins pushing strollers that in the mind of a window display designer would be arrange to […]
Poor is the prince who tries to take one of the shoes that Anamusma distributes through her revisited tales, because he runs the risk of being attacked by a vagina-dentata or of the clog rotting like beef in his hands. The shoe is one of the fetishes that Ana Vázquez (Anamusma) has managed to transgress the submission of women to aesthetic conventions, establishing linguistic and conceptual parallelisms between the stiletto heel and the surgical punch or the butcher knife […]
