THE GAP IN THE HIDDEN
Tania garcia
2016
At first, we are amazed at our own body, the noises, the smells, the flavors, the light ... Step by step, these sensations cement an image of the world, but that amazement is not mitigated, it is transformed into curiosity. , in desire that pushes and demands, that raises questions and questions about "the things" that make up that world and that body that we inhabit.
In this search for understanding the elements that make up our environment, we carry out detailed and structured studies, that is, we submit “things” to research and systematization methods. In such a way I assume artistic practice as one more research method on the way to understanding.
Where are you from?
It is the question that begins the discursive path of my work. An elementary question, when starting a conversation with someone you hardly know. A question that arises spontaneously, supposedly easy to answer and that encourages a gentle approach, a politically correct conversation that supposedly does not invade the privacy of the person being interrogated. The answer, however, places the examined individual, in a specific territory, with a particular cultural identity, moving in a specific social stratum, sometimes revealing the intimate sphere. A question that, despite its naivety, provides the interlocutor with endless information immediately, while delimiting the field of action of the questioned person.
In turn, this question turns out to be not so easy to answer for an (increasing) number of people: those who do not know their country of origin; those who feel they belong to a country that denies them citizenship rights; those whose country of origin, culture, religion or ideology arouses tensions in the country in which they live; or simply those who have grown up in an amalgam of cultures and countries that are very different from each other. For all of them this simple question could be somewhat complicated and uncomfortably long to answer.
Ultimately, this superficial a priori question is a great machine of meaning and pigeonholing, which at times oppresses and delimits. A question that reassures some and alienates others, making it worth careful thought. I sketch like this, a work that arises out of conflict, out of doubt. A work that invites us to rethink codes and formulas, whose aim is to tear the surface to try to glimpse that other side, a gap in the hidden.
Where are you from? It is, therefore, the starting point towards a reflection on the constitution of the subject, his identity and the multiple elements that interfere in the reality with which each subject lives. Concepts such as territory, border, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic will be tied together in an interdisciplinary practice that leaves a mark, a scheme, a result of indefinite forms, a will to explore.
the ephemeral, the immaterial, the performance
Performance or action art is an essential part of my artistic practice, the area of the ephemeral and immaterial that allows us to penetrate the sphere of the spectator. Performance is a free space for sensory experimentation, for observing phenomena, establishing itself as a fruitful field for the search or creation of meanings collectively. It is presented as an intentional action in a specific space-time, which allows an analysis of the signs used. One of these signs is the performer, who shows his body-signifier in a situation of nonsense, forcing the viewer to construct the absent meaning, always starting from nonsense.
The viewer can be close or distant, indifferent, skeptical or surrendered, and in this sense action art allows an anomalous interrelation with the viewer, with sometimes uncomfortable, frustrating, disturbing results that are much more interesting - especially in a search practice — than predictable. This art form, consequently, moves in the fruitful field of the
error and difference, it drifts like reality, but provides sensory experiences to ideas, to unknowns, to Lacanian stranded signifiers.
Another aspect of performance that interests me is the ability to blur the traditional communication scheme. There is a change of roles between the sender and the receiver and in that swing the message is transformed, it becomes subjectivized. Thus, performance deconstructs transmission systems, creating a paradigm of language, requesting an interpretative scheme from the viewer. The meaning of the work depends specifically on the meaning that is produced from the "other" side. This forces us to think of a work with an openness that is not completed with a mere association of ideas, since it demands complementarity, a connection with the other, an interpretive cooperation, a decoding of those unusually decontextualized, denatured signs. Which text full of gaps to fill in by the reader ...
the enduring, the material, the object
The body, everyday objects and basic forms are the sign complexes used within the action and outside it as plastic results. They are signs endowed with numerous communicative and expressive variables that permeate the performative action or the exhibition space. In turn, they make up the material, the deep-seated and the apparently enduring of the work.
Due to the intentional aberrational arrangement of these signs, my work does not produce units of knowledge, it does not include closed codes, but rather seeks to break, disrupt the face to face of the visual tradition, decentralizing the gaze to promote transversal gazes. Appealing to the viewer to search his knowledge for something that allows him to decode these signs, forcing him to ask himself the same or other questions.
All this game with the other and with the signs, allows me to investigate what I consider the intrinsic objective of this practice framed in the relational: to create unknowns, paradoxes and thus provoke restlessness in the spectator, the same restlessness that some apparently simple questions pose . Thus creating an exercise in immersed search between the material and the immaterial, between the idea and the object, between the interrelationships and the hermetic, between the roots and the uprooting, between infinite dichotomies that emerge from the inexorable binary thought that shapes us.