Installation
(photography + Video)
2017
Patagonia, Argentina.
La Esmeralda, Uruguay.

When Marcela Villagrán decides to name “The lost word” to her visual-photographic work, she warns us of a story that is still being written, she suggests a text that is constructed in the eternal search and presents us with the idea of the unfinished.

This exhibition begins its journey with the image of a naked woman immersed in a natural landscape. She looks at us, interpellates us and her presence among the exuberant vegetation announces the transit through different scenarios, where other corporalities also appear performatively.

The body stripped of the city, torn from the culture, is a presence-event in the natural spaces that the artist chooses for dialogue. A new communication is established between humanity and the river. Another intensity we perceive when the flesh moves barefoot through the dense forest and another will be the sense when the women step on hot sand, when they argue and meet, and finally throw themselves into the sea. And after? What else? A new start.

Perfomatic photography is a construction, where a transforming action takes place. The artist projects her creative process, imagines new metaphors and finally gives it shape, taking that idea to the physical territory, to the plane of our material reality. It shows us that natural space that is interfered by the bodies and generates the link art and life, where a mythical-religious exploration arises.

Before this work, we can not stop asking: what are we looking for?

“The word lost” reminds us of the works of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta in her performance “Flores en el cuerpo” of 1973, she investigates the natural cycle of life, reincarnation and the transformation of the body. Here between both works a connection takes place: bodies of women, the body of the artist as a work and the links with nature, sacrifice and multiple interpretations to get closer to the essence of the human.

The Villagrán’s work becomes living tissue. Being in an invention is not the inherited, it is the possibility, it is a starting point, it is what comes and it will be concluded perhaps when we as spectators dare to participate in the deciphering of the code, in search of visibility.

The process of internal construction that integrates the artist, his works and the receivers is installed, questioning up to the ideological-political core, to transmit re-written, re-programmed, re-edited forms of the original character. What is being a woman? There are no certainties, but we are convinced of something: it is not a copy of anyone.

The visual journey made up of thirteen photographs allow us to make the necessary internal changes, being accomplices – at the same time – of the formal transformations. River, forest, desert, sea. And in that circle we are trapped to start again. The video – piece of 1’55”; – filmed from a subjective one, allows us to penetrate in the thicket of that time, that tries to disappear to be able to contemplate.

The conclusion is not possible, and thus the multiplicity of rhizomes is visually suggested: a fragment of the past is present and is – simultaneously – the one that will continue to delineate the future.

Carina Borgogno – Curadora

Pecado Magazine #23
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Link

Installation
(photography + Video)
2017
Patagonia, Argentina.
La Esmeralda, Uruguay.