ARTE ABANDONADO #1

(ES)

In a leisure area of the city, where advertising and consumerism prevails, in which human relationships are always a frivolous exchange, amid the hustle and bustle to escape loneliness. Where the act of consume becomes a supreme manifestation of happiness, as a result of the conditioning of advertising. All an artificial mechanism of standardizing socialization in order to escape of the existential void.
Against this background, an abandoned work that proposes the primacy of culture and education facing to media manipulation of corporate governments. Accesible to every citizen who wishes to participate in it. Without any commercial interest, with the added aim to vindicate the public space as a showroom open to everybody. We are living in a social emergency. If we want to avoid that democracy was a sham, a substitute or a simulation, culture will provide us the means to resist, survive and coexist.

Sp3Solidarios

Time of installation:10 min.

Exhibition time: 15 hours.

Location: Playa de Las Canteras (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

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Fashion Victims

(ES)

“Fashion Victims” is an urban action inspired by the recent events in Bangladesh (the collapse on the 24th. of April of various textile workshops which killed 1,127 workers) which means to bring into the light of day the real “fashion victims”: the enslaved workers and child exploitation and the millions harmed by the contamination that the factories produce in the production countries.
Various bloggers appear buried under rubble in a one of the commercial streets of Madrid, some extremities with luxurious accessories (bags, shoes, and so on) can be glimpsed and these remind us of the  images published of the tragedy in Bangladesh in which arms and legs stuck out from under the remains of the building.
This is an appeal for responsible production and consumption, both for people and the planet. 

Yolanda Domínguez

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Broken Pots

(ES)

"It's not possible to forget it (...) despite the passage of years, every day I feel a great emptiness inside" - Silue Djeniba, mutilated at age of 15.

Every day, 6000 girls and women around the world undergo this barbaric torture.

For several years, Silue Djenieba has been engaged in the fight against the female genital mutilation. She does it for her daughters and their peers. She is afraid to show her face in the picture. She fears to be identified by people from her native village and to be revenged.

November 2012, Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire

Agnieszka Napierala

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Evicted

(ES)

One-year-old Chase Milam watches as a sheriff’s deputy and a member of an eviction team remove possessions from his aunt’s home in Milliken, Colorado. His aunt, Brandie Barbiere, whose child-care business had dropped by more than half, had stopped making mortgage payments 11 months earlier. Americans experienced the fifth year of a national housing crisis. By the end of 2011, some four million families had lost their homes after they could no longer meet mortgage payments. People renting houses often found themselves in a similar situation, no longer able to afford the rent and facing eviction. In Colorado, eviction teams supervised by a deputy from the county sheriff’s office arrive with court orders, and clear the contents of a house onto the street. Families have 24 hours to remove their possessions.

John Moore 

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Being

Caitlin and I

LiTer I

Zinzi and Tozama II

Caitlin and I

(ES)

Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond.

The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as 'unAfrican', even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality.

Despite the fact that, in contrast to most other African states, our South African Bill of Rights guarantees us legal protections against homophobia, there are still no loving, intimate photographs of black lesbians. As a visual artist, one is always confronted with the politics of representation. I have the choice to portray my community in a manner that will turn us once again into a commodity to be consumed by the outside world, or to create a body of meaning that is welcomed by us as a community of queer black women. I choose the latter path, because it is through capturing the visual pleasures and erotica of my community that our being comes into focus, into community and national consciousness. And it is through seeing ourselves as we find love, laughter, joy that we can sustain our strength and regain our sanity as we move into a future that is sadly still filled with the threat of insecurities - HIV/AIDS, hate crimes, violence against women, poverty, unemployment.

In the past year, I have lost two of my friends to AIDS-related illnesses (one in April 2006 and the other in March 2007). Both of these women made herstory within the lesbian community, but because of resource politics, their stories are not publicly celebrated. Consequently, an aspect of these images is to create awareness around how we as lesbians need to take precautions when we engage sexually with other women. Researchers routinely perpetuate the wrong notion that we are less at risk for infection and transmission because we do not sleep with men. But the reality is that our fellow sistahs are raped and killed in this country every day. I wanted to capture photographs of 'my people' before we are no more.

Zanele Muholi


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