Expelled from Eden
by Alicia Candiani

A floating body
container – liquid-filled uterus
an umbilical cord, several…

Woman … water,
full moon 
lunar movements regulating the tides - cycles,
remembrance of Yemanjá,
Lady of Ocean Waters,
 female orixá who protects women,
curing infertility 

Patricia… submerged, running, crucified,
a dis..connected body,
dragged/bound,
suctioned/expelled,
manipulated/tortured,
or, finally, an illumined body

No form is more personal and better known to an artist than his or her own body and – paradoxically – rarely is there ever a greater challenge than having to represent it.  Throughout history, artists have “re-presented” the body (their own and others’) from diverse perspectives.  These are not neutral depictions, however.  Subjectively, they stem from the psychological desire of the artist (which implies the artist’s identity), and, objectively, from the philosophical representation that a culture makes at a specific point in time.  In the past, the systems of meanings related to the body differed in cultures separated by geography or religion, even within the same historical moment.  Today, in contrast, new media have reduced territorial and cultural distances thereby adding a new symbolic order: that of globalization, which homogenizes more than differentiates the varied socio-cultural spaces.

Meanwhile, within contemporary art,  the ideological discussions of feminism/post-feminism, the critique of pornography, the revindication of a fixed or multiple/fictional identity, sexuality or transgendered concerns, are all debates that continue to be waged on the body.  Within these diverse representational sets where the human body is the protagonist, we can find as a sub-set within the History of Art, the particular way in which the female body has been addressed. Feminist critics have written enough about the representation of female bodies by male artists in art and the parameters of behavior that each period established for the role of women and the definition of the “feminine”.  In the self-representation women artists implied the burden of defying stereotypes,and the construction of gender through the male gaze. The last twenty years have been some of the most intense and diverse periods in terms of the presence of women in art and the representation of their own bodies, oftentimes in a clearly self-referential sense.  After pioneering women questioned gender constructions and segregation, “third generation women” give way to new paradigms that, although based on the female condition, overcome this position and are guided toward other discussions among which are the biological condition of the species itself. 


Post-human…trans-human?

In post modernity the decoding of discourses also spread to that of the body, loosing its central position as the measure of all paradigms.  Paradoxically, in this “post-human” phase, the preoccupation with reconstructing, rejuvenating and scientifically cloning the human body, again places it as one of the most recurring concerns in culture. Microsurgeries and biotechnical implants enable the fragmentary de/construction of the individual.  From the implantation of a cadaverous face onto a French woman and to that of a disfigured Asian man, to the surgical performances of the French artist Orlan, the fragmentary re-construction of the exterior of the individual produces a rupture in the close relationship that exists between image and identity.  One person in the body of another is, according to social and legal criteria, another person: an artificially reincarnated subject. 

In a post-human world, what vanish are not only identities but also interpersonal relationships, transcending spatial-temporal reality. As a result, the expansion of virtual borders of information is inversely proportional to the physical isolation of the individual.  Likewise, as an almighty Demiurge, communication technology increases contact between human beings, despite distance and even geographic locations, but it deprives them of the direct experience of the bodily presence of other people.  As a consequence, for some, post-humanism has transcended to trans-humanism since not only is the humanist view of the world been dispelled but the individual has become “de-substantiated,” remaining in a condition of “virtual” corporeality.

Expelled from Eden

Just as Adam and Eve, the human body has been expelled from Eden – nature – and thrown into a dehumanized and denaturalized world.  This banishment is evident in the works of Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, which also speak  about other displacements.  The artist, who was born in the United States to Salvadoran parents and raised in Nicaragua, moved to the US as an adolescent, where she currently lives and works. 

Technically speaking, her work moves comfortably within a broad spectrum of artistic practices that range from print media and photography to video installations. Her work deals sub-textually with the crisis of the gaze by altering the representational strategies and transforming visual structures.  New media (which removes the image’s dependency with process simplifying the states of creation and manipulation) allows the artist to place herself in a privileged position. From this position she re-presents herself with a drifting gaze that goes from freedom to repression, from recollection to amnesia, from the physical to the spiritual… from unity to dissociation.  

Villalobos Echeverría does not believe that the self-referential content of her artistic output is the only lens from which to view her work.  However, given that her body is both the representative subject as well as the object of her work, the reference to autobiography is unavoidable. It somehow wraps her naked body with an invisible veil of meanings.  A mantle that is sufficiently broad to be universal but that, within its folds,  wraps a persona living in two diametrically opposed cultures and geographic spaces. Covered by this invisible material akin to the protective oil used by swimmers, her figure wades into the sea, floats in a pool, walks in the snow, and observes the viewer from a giant fishbowl. 

The artist uses water repeatedly with a ritualistic connotation (we know that in many cultures and religions it is a symbol of purification) while she makes a point of underlining her condition of change.  Able to endure temperature and physical changes, water comes to a boil and bubbles, freezes and becomes solid, vaporizes and rises and becomes fog.  Water also bathes on two sides the narrow band of land that is Nicaragua.  In a country with vast mountainous and volcanic terrain and a poorly developed road network, water was and continues to be one of the main access routes and also (in hurricane and flood prone areas) one of the main reasons for its misfortunes. Lastly, water has the property of being able to adapt itself to whatever its container in the same way in which the artist has had to adapt to different spaces. 

Finally, Patricia Villalobos’ work introduces us to the intense artwork created by women who navigate among various cultures and who, far from becoming fixated to one identity, seek to define themselves in of the complexity of an identity of change. By depicting a post-human body – almost asexual and ageless, floating in the water – speaks of nature’s lost paradise, while – through a seemingly neutral gaze – warns us of a new era in which individuals instead of transforming the world are able to transform their own beings. 


NOTES

1.    Orixá:  in the Yoruba religion “mysteries”.  These orixás/mysteries act as protectors of human beings, as do the saints in the Catholic religion.

2.    We know that 70% of nudes that are artistically represented are nude females.

3.    GIANETTI, Claudia. Entre el humanismo y el posthumanismo {Between humanism and post-humanism]. Participation in the debate  "Femenino, arte y tecnología” [Female, Art and Technology]. French Institute of Barcelona, 1999.
4.    A land devastated by a tortured political history and which also has endured tremendous natural catastrophes such as the 1972 Managua earthquake and Hurricane Mitch in 1998, among others.

Expelled from Eden by Alicia Candiani was published in the catalogue for the exhibition aflujo • afflux at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, PA and Mesaros Galleries in Morgantown, WV, published by West Virginia University, 2006.

Version en Español apriete aquí