(CRACKS)
Pictorial study. Berlin - Barcelona - Iceland. In process 2024 - 2026
Paintings, texts, thoughts and self-portraits about the fissures and cracks opened on the assaulted bodies, living in constant alert in a patriarchal and violent system, where the woman’s body is used as a capitalist object. Also a space for tenderness to oneself.
April 1st 2021, I reported the man who sexually assaulted me when I was 9 or 10 years old. The first man who touched me and made me stop being a child too soon. The one who made a volcano grow inside me, silenced and still for many years, like an hibernating bear.
April 1st 2025, I flew to Iceland to paint, study and embrace that volcano and that island that walked with me all these last years, having seen the birth of 'La Muda'. I went there with little Marina, hand by hand, to look at each other and embrace the opened cracks in the earth and in the body. There, in the hole between the sternum and the navel.
“The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension”
Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence’
“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body, based on my own silhouette. […] I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.”
Ana Mendieta
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“Basically, the place in which the narrative operates is the women's bodies. The body is, in that sense, a surface to locate what I’ve called corporal geographies. The concept of corporal geography suggests me to transfer to the body the idea of territory with all its meanings of power and, therefore, also as an occupied territory and, simultaneously, of fighting, of resignification. This territory is a political and undoubtedly social space. Body geography is the term that allows me to position the women's bodies in an specific territory, in which certain norms and obligations govern it”
Nerea Barjola, ‘The Sexist Microphysics of Power’
photos by Alba Huerta Moya
Iceland, 2023
Iceland, 2023
