laia arqueros - gynopia cerinea - le bastart

Dancing tongues. From Laia Arqueros to Nancy Spero

In Ancient Greece, while the wise and not-so-wise philosophers argued in their endless symposiums, reclining among soft cushions, their wives frolicked in the field, dancing naked, ate cakes shaped like phalluses and sesame vulvas. The truth is that much of their time was spent indoors, but when they left home, they messed it up. Or so we like to imagine it. Robert Graves defined the Athenian Thesmophoria as agricultural orgies, and Laia Arqueros reinvents, again and again, […]

sukran moral - hamam - le bastart

Sükran Moral, demolishing rancid traditions

Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]

David wojnarowicz - untitled - le bastart

Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. There is no time…

Pasolini recalled from his student days an occasion when he was contemplating with friends a fireflies’ dance a night without moonlight. That experience was recorded in his conscience as a premonition of a nearby decline. Two decades later, he would confirm the “disappearance of the fireflies” in an Italy drowned in the fascism of the media, that in his opinion was more terrifying than the one established by Mussolini. Speaking metaphorically,  the fireflies were for Pasolini bodies […]

cosey fanni tutti - scarlet - le bastart

Cosey Fanni Tutti and other scarlet girls

The fragile boundary between art and pornography has always worried scholars, museographers and guarantors of morality, which from the mid-nineteenth century, when the category “obscenity” assumed a legal status in England, gave rise to countless proceedings, committees and reviews of the illicit. In the midst of the sexual liberation, what happened inside the courts seemed insulated in a bubble, alien to the radical changes that were affecting even the meaning of art. In the Longford […]

orge carruana - shunga - le bastart

Jorge Carruana, love under the shrapnel

To be born in the forties of last century in a Cuba in transit between a dictatorship and a revolution that was nothing more than the preamble of another dictatorial regime, growing lulled by black and white Disney cartoons while the news were reporting the final leg of the Second World War, the sorcerer’s apprentice…, all that left a hotchpotch of memories in Jorge Carruana‘s vertiginous imagination. These lasting memories will return as raw images […]

pierre molinier - hanel - le bastart

Molinier and D’Agata, orphic beings

Photography is always a capture of an announced death. There is no future in it, said Roland Barthes. What you show will no longer return, if it has ever been. No wonder it is an artistic expression of those who are seduced by death most. Both the self-portraits that Pierre Molinier staged in the last years of his life locked in his apartment, like the photographs that Antoine d’Agata has been making from himself and […]

rogi andre - lamba - le bastart

Amour fou, perpetrator of chaos

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 […]

nicolas schoffer entretenimientos sexuales - le bastart

Spaces of desire: from the sexual utopia to pornotopia

Licentiousness, yes, but subject to tight control. Architects, reformers and literati of the eighteenth century coincide in projecting or imagining houses of pleasure inspired by the panopticon of Bentham or anticipating its radial and controlling configuration: the ideal city conceived by Ledoux (in which could not be absent a temple for sex education, the Oikema) is built around that central eye; In The 120 days of Sodom, Sade gives semicircular form to the hall of […]