| My work is about how artificially identities are constructed, and how it is possible to undermine the myths of social conventions such as the political borders, languages, religions, and last but not least, art. The tool used is just to take to the extreme the logic contained on them. I put into dialogue drawings, photographs, videos, and installations where myself, other people, or even live animals orchestrate performative acts that confront the symbols, myths, and metaphors of the foundations of Western patriarchal dominance. The use of satire within my practice produces a moral ambivalence, which unsettles any fixation on a historical victimization of women, concerning their social visibility and mobility in the public sphere. |  |
Cristina Lucas
My work is about how artificially identities are constructed, and how it is possible to undermine the myths of social conventions such as the political borders, languages, religions, and last but not least, art. The tool used is just to take to the extreme the logic contained on them.
I put into dialogue drawings, photographs, videos, and installations where myself, other people, or even live animals orchestrate performative acts that confront the symbols, myths, and metaphors of the foundations of Western patriarchal dominance. The use of satire within my practice produces a moral ambivalence, which unsettles any fixation on a historical victimization of women, concerning their social visibility and mobility in the public sphere. Nonetheless, the criticality in my work can be found precisely in the stereotypical, literal representation and overexposure of the significance of signs in both misogynist traditions and feminism’s own agendas and contested genealogy.
The experience of the language is a fundamental part of the experience of knowledge. Curiously religion and art are founded on the impossibility of talking about the truth by common words.
In the video Talk (2008) I recreate the violent act of Michelangelo giving birth by kicking the knee of the sculpture, and demanding the statue to talk. This time is a woman who is asking in a beautifully brutal way to know the secrets only revealed to the men and by the men. First God spoke to Moses and later on gave Michelangelo almost the secrets of life or at least immortality, curiously by art. Very recent work as La Liberté Raisonné (2009), is a video that comments on the inherent contradiction that can be found in Delacroix’s 1830 painting La Liberté guidant le people, in which one finds the petrification of a woman as a female allegory that represents liberty. But I am as well very interested in cartography as the way of understanding concepts as national identities, citizenships, or sexuality.
In Pantone (2007), a 2D animation of 41 minutes, I show abstract colors that second by second are changing, and finally creating our actual political world. There is no name on those colored tasks, but the perception of too many cultures appearing and disappearing in silence creates state identities. It was present at the Istanbul Biennale, the noisy version of seven historians explaining a particular area of the map in which they were experts but all of them talking at the same time. The sound was cacophonic.
Light Years (2009), a luminous cartographic installation that gave the name to my last solo exhibition at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, chronologically visualizes a sort of pandemic of democracy in a global adoption of universal suffrage and its various forms of geopolitical appropriation.
