Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (Roman tomb epitaph, Epicurean principle: I did not exist, I existed, I do not exist, I do not care). Epicureanism revealed the nonsense of all fears with […]
Category: Photography
Joel-Peter Witkin, delicious horror
The reverse of consensual reality never before Joel-Peter Witkin had been shown with such diabolical perfection and such crossing of artistic genres. It was in the late Middle Ages when iconographies with cynical streak were developed to erode the status quo, being the mundus inversus (the donkeys riding the men, the rich serving the poor …) and the “macabre dance” those who mostly devastated social hierarchies and taboos. Bearing in mind that in medieval times the […]
Paloma Navares, night vision
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 […]
Fatima Mazmouz; the uterus, from a sacred niche to a desecrated territory
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 […]
Raquel Paiewonsky, irreducible hybridity
The island’s geography has been chosen by writers and utopians as the ideal place for the development of horizontal communities, without rich or poor, without envy or competitiveness, such as Aldous Huxley’s Pala. But the history tells us otherwise, locating in the most beautiful islands bloody chronicles of colonial despotism, cultural extermination and natural exploitation, to end up as a cover photo in a tourist brochure. The Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky belongs to a generation of […]
Irene Cruz, territorial rootlessness, emotional roots
In l’heure bleue, nocturnal animals have already gone to sleep and diurnal ones have not yet awoken. The entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre talked about this magical hour as a privileged moment to observe quiet nature, before the parade of armored beetles and other hardened insects on which he fantasized as if they were exotic ethnic groups. During the twilight hour the forms blur, nothing remains, shadows become longer. The thought flows and looks inside. It is […]
Tracey Moffatt, interracial desire, a matter of ghosts
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 […]
Gema Rupérez, longing for survival
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 […]