Playing between concealment and presence

Coca, Diana

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/apropos.6.1750

Playing between concealment and presence

Llicència

Citació

Coca D. Playing between concealment and presence. Apropos. 2021;(6):359-75. DOI: 10.15460/apropos.6.1750

Resum

This article is based on the methodology of art-practice-as-research, which departs from my artistic production Where is Diana?, a series of photoperformances and videos made between Beijing, Tijuana and City Mexico during 2013-2015. Aware of the obsession with identity, with this proposal I raise the question of whether it is possible to transcend physical and intellectual borders. In my work I include the dynamics of recognition in a paradoxical way, as I present myself hooded, unrecognizable, without identity, placing myself on the border, on the margins, on the limit and in precariousness, through a body that transgresses its place and moves from the private to the public. This theoretical-practical perspective considers the gender perspective, as well as the conceptual tools that feminisms have created to rethink the female subject and de-center it, through a displacement towards what is non-hegemonic or predetermined by biology. The characteristics that are defined as masculine and feminine must be questioned because their meaning is the result of a historical and social practice that has artificially naturalized them. So I propose axes of resistance to subvert gender and national identities, which I argue are fluid and modifiable. Creating this de-centre may lead to the construction of new subjectivities, a framework that expands the possibilities of action and recognition. To achieve this, I relate my artistic process to politics through the reconstruction of the sensible in social space, in the way bodies and their meanings act in that space. The relationship between art, politics, and representation that I propose here does not have to do with a discursive level but focuses on the artistic gesture and how to communicate the affects that are imprinted in the bodies, which have a sensorial and political implication.