Vision and presence 2023: performance cyclew

In Fluidity the Honduran artist Scarlett Rovelaz reflects on the present-day disconnection with the environment and on the drying up of Spain’s rivers. Starting from the painting Orchid and Humming Bird near a Waterfall by Martin Johnson Heade in the Carmen Thyssen Collection, the artist traces the course of a metaphorical river that reminds us of the need to rethink human beings’ relationship with nature.

This performance is also a homage to the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres and to all those women who have been murdered for defending the land.

Amapola Prada (born Lima, 1978) presents an action based on the relationships between the body, psychology and history, and on the idea that the reactivation of emotionally conflictive historical facts, transmitted from generation to generation, has the potential to process those facts in a symbolic space.

In this performance, the artists of Art al Quadrat (Mónica and Gema del Rey Jordà, born Valencia, 1982) take some of the pejorative terms found in trial reports from the Civil War to describe accused women, such as “dangerous, incendiary or immoral”, and wear them attached to their own bodies in a metaphorical and physical sense. By doing so, they transmute them into something collective in an exercise of empathy and sisterhood with the audience.

Artist Ana Beltrán (born Alcora, 1986) focuses on how the press reports on violence against women and how it minimises the impact of statistics. This performance shows that the victims are women with names and a life, and Beltrán recounts the data using a more immediate and intimate language than is habitually employed.

Through her own identity-body Paula B. Pailamilla generates a trans-territorial connection in the place where she undertakes her performance. She thus raises issues such as “what does my body mean in this territory?” In My body is a museum the Chilean artist looks at the colonial history inherent to western museums in relation to indigenous bodies, the Spanish Crown’s colonial past and the invasion of South America.