Museo de Mujeres

WOMEN, FIRE AND DANGEROUS OBJECTS

The linguist George Lakoff has written that in the language (Dyirbal) of an aboriginal group of Australia, one of their several genders is made up principally of the elements women, fire and dangerous things . What first interested me about this fact was the spontaneous relationship perceived by this culture among the elements represented by these three words. Then I realized that these elements coincide with themes central to my own production. So I decided it would be pertinent to work with the implications of grouping these three potent concepts and research more systematically women, fire and dangerous objects. (I choose the translation objeto –object- for thing because an object is tangible, concrete and thus more visual).

I always work with images from archives, generally from archives of my own invention, but this time I decided to use that great archive which is the web and I started to put into google search: images the words women fire or dangerous objects. The material that emerged was both interesting and unexpected.

Under dangerous objects I found references to meteorites, for example, and series of X-ray images documenting the dangerous and unusual objects occasionally found in human as well as animal bodies. In the case of women, that of a young Chinese woman stands out; when she finally sought relief from chronic pain, doctors found more than 20 needles in her body, apparently inserted under her skin in infancy by grandparents eager for her death in order to permit the future birth of a male grandson. I also began to ask friends and relatives for suggestions of potentially dangerous objects and to look up these possibilities on internet.

As for women and fire, I found evidence of case after case of a practice in India in which the open fires of traditional kitchens were employed to burn unwanted daughters-in-law and wives (thus enabling the arrival of a new wife and dowry). Among those who burn themselves to death -I have examples in my archives of both men and women- there are famous cases of monks who light themselves afire for political reasons, but what most surprised me were those who resort to this drastic measure after they are denied a work permit or when facing eviction.

Linguists have focussed on Dyirbal in order to study categories, especially cultural categories. I find these categories interesting for the different connections and layers of meaning they suggest and for the images I can invent from this starting point. I try to do with these images and the concepts I discover through them what I always do with the material with which I work: alter, combine and recontextualize, in an effort to create images which offer something that words cannot encompass.

THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US
4 artist’s books
Transfer print on Japonese paper with stitching
Mounted on Liberón etching paper
Book I. 22 x 120 cm
Book II. 22 x 122 cm
Book III. 22 x 150 cm
Book IV. 22 x 13 cm
2012

For a long time I’ve been interested in phenomena related to the idea of an alter ego, clone, Siamese or conjoined twins, synchronicity, and what in Spanish is called desdoblamiento: a splitting apart, or unfolding into two, of the self.

Related to these themes is a childhood memory of a science-fiction movie in which whenever a young woman went to sleep, a monster came out of the sea and walked the beach, wreaking havoc.
Looking for the lost movie online The Creature Walks Among Us must seems like the origin of my memories. Although –and it’s important to mention this- apparently in the real film one doesn’t find that dichotomy –the woman goes to sleep / the monster wakes up- central to my mental image. So perhaps this was an invention product of my own bipolar sentiments.

Yes, a young woman faints (underwater) and yes, the monster comes out of the water and walks around scaring people- but not necessarily at the same time. Anyway, with the photo stills of the movie as a starting point, I began to put together a group of images that range from pure monster to pure maiden. Once all the variations on the theme come together, a sort of continuum, a world of hybridizations, began to emerge. What happens if the monster is half asleep and the maiden half awake? Into this vision I incorporated images and relics of cultures from Polynesia to Patagonia by way of Bauhaus.
What you see here are these images incorporated into an artist’s book in four parts. Each image is related formally to the image on either side of it. My idea was to create an installation of drawings, but I ended up trying them out as an artist’s book first.

Mirror Image
Graphite/paper
14 drawings 11 of 76 x 56 cm, 3 of 76 x 86 cm
2012-13

To make the series of drawings Mirror Image, I started off with the concepts developed in the artist´s book The Creature Walks Among Us, but in the process added and subtracted images so the work began to adquire its own personality. These images from my archives have been collected from old magazines, books, family potos and material taekn fromt he internet.

I began with a photo from Facebook of a little girl dressed in a Helly Kitty outfit with her brotehr dressed as a ninja. From there, on the boy’s side I began to develop “masculine” images, using the “ninja” as a formal and conceptual starting point. The men project and hide themselves at the same time, an exposed body often acompanies a covered face and dark tones predominate.

The “feminine” side, on the other hand, tends toward light and exaggerated grace. But, after going through the paces of these cultura extreme of gender, I started modifying the images to mix in something dark from the female side and more nuanced elements from the male.
In the circle of drawings I proposed to form the work, the Helly Kitty girl and the ninja boy end up confronted by a girl dressed up as Darth Vader with a tutu: the perfect blend of the two original opposing elements. There is a subtext: 5 of the drawings consist of twin images. So finally, Mirror Image refers not only to what we reflect in the mirror (and more importantly, how we choose to proyect ourselves) but also to the concept of the doble or Doppelgänger.