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, […]
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 […]
Walter Benjamin pointed out the paradox that poses for the humanist spirit the rejection of violence under any of its forms and at the same time its justification as a means to fight against an oppressive situation. The “divine violence” is that which is wielded promising a new liberating order, a tomorrow that will only be conquered by establishing repression, which engenders another cycle of terror for the sake of liberation, and thus the loop […]
The practice of appropriation is to apply an ecological sense to art, to recycle signs and forms from the past, often with the intention of desecrating icons, subverting canons, resignifying what used to be true in distant times. Javier Díaz Guardiola, Carmen González Castro and Nino Maza, a triad of curators of which the latter two also participate with their pieces, invite ten artists to “rewind and remaster” tongue in cheek. The hair of the […]
A wooden house in a Canadian forest inhabited with maples and polar bears, isolated from the world except for the macabre news that broadcast a radio as stringing fragments of cruel tales. Howls of wolf and shots of hunters interrupt sometimes the announcer voice. A teenage boy in his pajamas, wrapped in his bed, gazes at the snowy meadows through the fogged glass of the window. He gets up at midnight, takes a piece of paper and […]
The mind of Paula Rego works as an alchemical still. She has the hability to absorb, distill and transmute essences of life and fable in which her literary readings reactivate hidden “reefs” of the subconscious. She composes visual stories in which remnants of personal and collective history, dream and memory, intertwine in each other, forming dense plots that trap us, not so much by the narration itself as by the way of joining together. Halfway […]
Roberta Marrero was born and grew up on an island, Gran Canaria, inserted in a culture, the Spanish, which in the beginning of the seventies was also insular, obscurantist and pious. At least, she remembers it thus. But that girl’s mind tore down all that fence, and with a genuinely postmodern spirit she began to record in her imaginary archive a peculiar iconographic blurring between stigmata and pop idol, between holy cards or sacred hearts […]
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 […]
