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 […]

miguel scheroff - ritual - le bastart

Miguel Scheroff, the twilight of all species

The lament for the fleetingness of life is rarely expressed in the art before the Baroque, when the Vanitas genre reaches its maximum expression. Perhaps this could be related to the beginning of the human rebellion against death: neither the resignation to the collective destiny of the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance rationalism in whose limpid Euclidean spaces there was no place for the shadows. Miguel Scheroff, interested in the clair-obscure of human existence, in […]

paloma pajaro - durero - le bastart

Paloma Pájaro, rethinking the human

The wisdom of Homo Sapiens is questionable. The more knowledge, the less understanding. It would have been more appropriate to call the species Homo Spiritualis, said the anthropologist amazed by the rock art of the cave of Chauvet. But, as the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary reads, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. But, as it says in the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. We neither understand the propitiatory meaning of these magical symbols nor […]

marta beltran - honor perdido - le bastart

Marta Beltrán, she got her gun

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 […]

alejandro bombin - soltero - le bastart

Alejandro Bombín, high frequency disturbances

Andy Warhol wanted to be a machine, decoupling the artistic work from the human pulse, to eliminate the brushstroke. Alejandro Bombín wants to humanize the machine, recover the gesture, a margin for error. Between one and the other the digital revolution took place, making all of us massive producers of images, fulfilling the dream of the pop art master. We live in a democratizing media utopia (or dystopia, depending on the point of view), in […]

cristina de middel - gentlemen's club - le bastart

Cristina De Middel, the reverse shot of a profession

Those who ask for money in exchange for sexual services are defined as “prostitutes”, an illegitimate or illegal status, while those who pay for sex are rarely differentiated from the male population in general (Gail Pheterson, The prostitution prism) Virginie Despentes, in King Kong Theory, rescues this fragment of Pheterson’s book to reflect on the cultural construction of stigmatized femininity. The clients constitute a varied population (in terms of social extraction, age, motivations…), while whores […]