Pink Power

Installation consisting of a video and 33 framed paintings (32 works of 30 x 30 cm. each and one of 60 x 60 cm.)
Inkjet print on cotton paper.
Video: 3:46 min.

Pink Power

It is an installation made up of a two-dimensional piece and a video that documents a collective performance by the artist, carried out at the ARCO Fair in February 2018, at the stand of the Rafael Botí Provincial Foundation of Plastic Arts, in Córdoba, under the title of I Am a Woman. In this action, a series of women, from different fields, ages and contexts, mainly art, each selected a phrase with which they wanted to define and identify themselves, as a plural and diverse empowered self-affirmation, which was printed by the artist in texts white on pink backgrounds, and with which each woman wandered, in a row one by one, carrying them, and touring an entire Pavilion of the Fair, in a forcefully participatory performance of feminist demands, which flooded the fair space.

To make up this piece that could be seen for the first time at ARCO 2018, the artist requested, a priori, other women to write or say phrases with which they wanted to identify themselves and that began with I Am, from there come some such as: I am an artist, I am your sister, I am trans, I am lesbian, I am feminist, I am fire, I am a writer, I am your sister, among others, which make visible a variety of ways of being women in the society and to live and feel, breaking the clichés of femininity and the clichéd unidirectional behaviors that integrate it. Composing with all of them a two-dimensional wall piece, surrounding a central one with the colors in reverse, with a white background and pink text, with the significant statement I am a woman. A forceful piece full of strength and sorority, in which the artist states that all these different women, so different, are all women, taking up, and making that feminist translation, the phrase of the Black Power movement I am a man.

To formalize the work, the artist uses the color pink as a background or as a text, a color traditionally "so feminine" and that is recovered here as a symbol of the struggle, of the empowerment of women, deconstructing the stereotyped meaning assigned as feminine to what throughout history. And with that color of changed meaning, he elaborates revulsive phrases that advocate changes and encourage collective action full of strength and energy. This use of the texts carried out by the artist is absolutely rooted in the approaches that feminists made, from the 1970s and 1980s, fundamentally, questioning themselves about the meaning of being human, the silence of and about women. in the construction of thought, and the need to subvert language as a bearer of androcentric symbols. Since then, some theoretical discourses have been developed that have come to contribute deconstructive strategies of the existing and dominant patriarchal language in our society, as well as the construction of the thought on which it is based, contributing new approaches in which those are reappropriated as a subject. , recovering his word and moving away from silence.

For this reason, feminism inquired into images, words, their codes and meanings, dismantling the discourses that functioned as the "human" when they excluded women, offering a part for the whole. In this sense, the German artist and writer Gisela Breintling will speak in 1986.

daisy aizpuru

IMAGE: Pink Power / ICAS Room, Seville / 2019