romina de novellis - gradiva - le bastart

Romina de Novellis, old myths, new rites

What is the distance between a Swede sculptural beauty soaking in the Fontana di Trevi and an Italian brunette eating spaghetti, in a histrionic style, before the Fontaine Saint Michel in Paris? The latter, in a cannibal act, “devours” the misogynous construction that the first epitomize. It was one of the urban performances that the Neapolitan artist Romina de Novellis made when settling in the French capital (Splash! La Dolce Vita a Parigi 2010). Continuing […]

raquel paiewonsky - guardarropia - le bastart

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 […]

la ribot - mariachi 17 - le bastart

La Ribot; keep moving, change position

Synergies between dance and fine arts are ancestral, prior to the segmentation between disciplines. In the 20th century, when this compartmentalization is called into question, when the limits between one and the other languages begin to be forced, pioneering dancers like Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller take the stage. It is therefore not a matter of indifference that Rodin admired these two women and that by drawing again and again their fluid movements on the […]

anumusma - pantys religiosa - le bastart

Anamusma, I start from my own to step outside myself

Poor is the prince who tries to take one of the shoes that Anamusma distributes through her revisited tales, because he runs the risk of being attacked by a vagina-dentata or of the clog rotting like beef in his hands. The shoe is one of the fetishes that Ana Vázquez (Anamusma) has managed to transgress the submission of women to aesthetic conventions, establishing linguistic and conceptual parallelisms between the stiletto heel and the surgical punch or the butcher knife […]

nino maza - seminario - le bastart

The art of borrowing without asking

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 […]

raeda saadeh - vacuum - le bastart

Arab women artists: body, home, territory

The Book of Genesis talks about a man and a woman made together in the image of God. We are not talking about Eva, Adam’s subaltern product, born from his rib as if she were a cyst. We are talking about Lilith, born of dust with Adam on the sixth day. But she soon disappeared from the manichaean script of good and evil. She left Paradise and went into the desert, taking refuge on the […]

diana larrea - sistema de ventilacion - le bastart

Diana Larrea, reinventing streets, rewriting history

She subverts official versions of reality, understands other means of inhabite the city, celebrates anniversaries of women artists missing from art books, she prefers ephemeral interventions in street than museographic embalming of experience…, we could say that Diana Larrea always has felt attracted by the other side of the moon. This is the title of an ongoing group exhibition curated by Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, and refers to the alternative history of recent artistic practices that has […]

marcel dzama - flowers have horns - le bastart

Marcel Dzama, make love… and war

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 […]