HOW ELSE CAN I SERVE YOU?
EN QUE MAS PUEDO SERVIRLE?
Andrés Isaac Santana, Art Critic, Madrid, Spain, 2019
"How else can I serve you?" is a mise-en-scène, a declaration of principles and an installation of objects with an eminently feminist discursive emphasis, supported by her relevant and daring critical commentary. In this piece, the artist unfolds a web of her own hair, a sort of strange vine, onto "the body" that defines the repertoire of silverware, providing a new meaning for the utensils’ dual semantic-linguistic nature.
The piece is beautiful in itself, in its most radical autonomy, but the title is what truly determines (and amplifies) the discursive context of its interpretation and possible meanings. Even with its straight-forward enunciation, it refers to the troublesome social contract that nominalizes gender inequality, condemning ongoing loyalty to power relations and their governing structures. The piece itself is a kind of memorandum for a geography of fury. However, her proposal transcends a mere feminist interpretation to attain other discursive elements of a broad symbolic and narrative implication. In fact, its statement refers to the de facto nominalization of the subservient role that the "female symbol" has been reduced to, where women are subject to constant humiliations and silences by the phallocentric narrative and its extensive mechanisms of domination and control. Nevertheless, that same statement and those same objects retort to speak on the constant condition of otherness and the stratification of contemporary subjects. By saying this, I don’t deny the piece’s feminist dimension (in fact, this semiological component is quite obvious), but I believe that, due to an extension of the real or figurative meaning, it should be taken into account that these objects are, by force majeure, the mirror of many subaltern realities and lateral subjectivities. The artist has experienced in her own flesh, like myself and many others, this situation of withdrawal and violent (arbitrary) distribution of law. More or less recently, after spending enough years on American soil, she finally came to uphold the "power" of owning an American passport. As far as I know, this means conquering one nationality, provided you give up another. Once more, control mechanisms offer an advantage that will imply loss and uprooting in the long run. I strongly believe that, at is core, this piece passes a sharp critical comment on all operations of authority, segregation and loss".
HOW ELSE CAN I SERVE YOU?
EN QUE MAS PUEDO SERVIRLE?
Rael Salvador, Art Writer, Mexico, 2019
Caligrafía Capilar / Capillary Calligraphy
The notion of things-in-itself doesn’t exist, everything boils down to interpretation. Hegel neglected his defense of the “Phenomenology of Spirit” –which contains the questionable chapter “Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage”– and took care of his young wife. By disregarding his brilliant philosophy, they both died of cholera.
In the 19th century, the vibrio cholerae bacillus made its way from the Ganges delta into all continents. The same thing happened with the pandemic that ultimately justified capitalism, which Alexandre Kojève, Kandinsky’s godson, ideologically analyzed in his interpretation of Hegel’s "master-slave dialectic", prompting a debate on the complex relationship between the people who dominate and the submissive.
Marisa Caichiolo presents an association of elements –the banquet silverware, the woman (represented in Rachel Loba Robles’ image), and the red writing– weaving the story and redefining it by using her own hair. With this series, she proposes a new power dynamic: it's not about a symbolic boot that crushes, but an artistic subtlety that emancipates.
The structure and the visual rancor of the room at Madrid's Athenaeum become the stage to showcase that the connection between submission and rebellion can escalate to a true unstable confrontation in an evident cultural dispute. “How else can I serve you?”, superior in voice and height, comes to question such troubled relationships, establishing that servitude and the anthropological myth of the joy in dominance no longer exist.
Dictatorial and repressive regimes, products of an imbalance between wisdom and human compassion, only strengthen criminal complicity in their modern versions of seduction, acceptance and exclusion... To that, Caichiolo says "No" and, from each capillary calligraphy in the artwork, her deep analysis in "How else can I serve you?" is precisely what dismantles repression, abuse and domination.
Rael Salvador / July 2019