Red Rash Under Breasts

interdependencies (2) Eulàlia Valldosera

MUTUAL RELIANCE (2010)

Video-action (6 '.) Video documentary (4'40'').

To me no one has contracted.

hear this statement from the mouth of Liuba, the protagonist of the two videos that Valldosera presented. While Liuba is alluding to his work as a domestic worker, the artist takes the phrase as his own experience. As explained in the text Valldosera written by her for the recent exhibition of his work in the gallery Madrid Factory , is not trying to talk the subject officer, but tuning in to this woman what is common to both. But read to the artist submitting the video-leading performance:

I asked my domestic worker Neapolitan gallery to act in my place. Of Ukrainian origin, as many of the girls who clean the homes of the wealthy classes in southern Italy, this woman "without papers", which has become the alter ego of the artist, is preparing to clean the statue of a Roman emperor kept in Napolitano Archaeological Museum. Pride male figure is subjected to mechanical gestures of someone without a voice. As the action progresses, the ghosts of female libido bold flourish thanks to light treatment so bland to submit action.

highly vertically integrated in an image (the recording has been made with the camera is also designed vertical and vertically), witnessed the melee between migrant women and the symbol of power. Their relationship is ambiguous and open to interpretation. What we are seeing is it just a practice of submission or it is also the setting in motion a complex set of interdependencies? Against inert marble living embodiment, Liuba is the only one who can play in full to the emperor, who knows, literally, that the emperor is naked or, what is the same, that depend on it for its proper preservation. Putting his body (at work and migration are the bodies that are in play), Lyuba gives the opportunity to think differently of power relations.

cleaning: it is a recurring theme in the path of Eulàlia Valldosera, since in The Navel of the World (1991) decided to change "the brush of the broom," acting with a broom on a carpet of cigarette butts with which female figures built and erased. The act of cleaning, packaging and cleaning products in other works, refer to the deeply critical attitude with which Valldosera reviews the mandates awarded to female . Publicly display the powers that want to leave the private sphere. With Mutual Unit the artist erases the boundaries not only between private and political, but extends to the realm of social and crime.

Feminism: Valldosera is also aware of its critical and ambiguous relationship with feminism. Not fit into your logic to adhere to it from the place of collective claim, but rather puts itself on the critical feminism and the politicization of issues equally important subjective. Since there is significant designation, referring to the museum and the art institution, those who work there as caregivers: all those charged with maintaining and upgrading the memory alive of our visual imagination are in a category of roles maternal, as the author . This conceptualization of the mother should not see, then, neither biological nor with the instinctive, but a cultural work, social and symbolic life support, of knowledge, culture, care for the world we inhabit as a primary need to be undertaken by everyone. The artist has placed the origin of this piece in its concern for the preservation of his work, articulated mainly from the ephemeral and comprised of everyday materials-packaging of cleaning products, medicines, light projectors or home ranges ... - in the field of museums, which ends not assume that this type of work need different care than traditional materials of art.

The centerpiece is accompanied by a second video of documentary in which Liuba, born in Chernobyl, chronicles their migration process. We hear it is a subject in a voice that takes over their desire for change focused on improving their conditions, which assumes the risk of instability and vulnerability of their situation as a way to become master of its decisions. Liuba's employer, and gallery owner in Naples Eulàlia Valldosera-does not appear, although the explicit relationship of mutual dependence has with his employee: the emancipated woman needs the services of the subordinate to perform their work. Valldosera does appear on the scene, talk, but listen to Liuba, its presence refers to the ambiguity of the role of the artist: the cleaning and at the same time, his wife.
Photo: Carmen Garcia and Pepe Domínguez