Rage, Angst, Deal … and now Faust: in the titles of Anne Imhof projects converge feelings associated with anxiety and juvenile nonconformity with the transactional component of any social contract or illicit agreement. Imhof has transformed the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale into delusive glass cages, before which it is difficult to know if those who are captive are the performers or the spectators. Transparency acts in the opposite direction to the fog in […]
In the Freudian compendium of oniric symbolisms, the male genitalia are represented as revolvers, knives, swords, sticks … and complex machinic devices. The machine has traditionally been associated with masculinity in its productive and destructive aspect, but the artificial creatures (literary, mythological, filmic) have been mainly women: automatons Galateas, seductive android, Pandoras clad in metal after the Industrial Revolution, replicants with artificial intelligence in the cyber era. But it is not the ideal woman forged […]
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 […]
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 […]
The world has become a beehive leaky of peepholes from which to observe without being seen, virtual labyrinths traversed by stalkers. Obviating the Orwellian resonances, this world populated by spied spies can be read poetically like songs of love. In the film of Jean Genet (a chant d’amour) the peepholes practiced in the cells seem holes drilled by the uncontrollable force of desire, which slips through all the cracks, deceiving even the jailer. Masculine universes, […]
It is so respectable to wake up and worry about “what I should wear” as reflecting on whether a sculpture has the proper shape, material and scale. I dare say that sometimes it’s the same exercise. This statement, which I rescued from a lecture given by Ana Laura Aláez in Arteleku, gives us the key to understanding the start of her career as artist and her evolution. For her, self-expression (first in the dressing room) […]
The fossil finds lead us to the redefinition of the human on each occasion, denoting the ambiguity that underlies any search for an evolutionary origin. The paleontologists who found the puzzle of bones that would group under the Beatlemaniac name of Lucy believed to discover the missing link between the primates and the Homo Sapiens. They drived the origin of our species back for several thousand years. How does each anthropological paradigm shift affect our […]
