Search Results
As an artist and researcher, I present my box-assemblages which, although reminiscent of polyptychs and tabernacles, incorporate within them simulacra, relics and memorabilia of Idoia, a specific woman who within the context of my work epitomises but at the same time transcends womanhood. With its sanctuaried design, this kind of three-dimensional, body-themed artefact not only enables me to mediate between myself and the other via a self-reflexive process of both mirroring and distancing at one and the same time, but also functions as a means whereby I address concepts of sacrality and femininity. The box-assemblage is essentially an intimate receptacle for Idoia’s body which, once fetishistically broken down through representation, is encased and enshrined inside it with her actual body fragments. By metonymically transferring her body-in-pieces into the structure, I endow it with a sacral status. As part of an ongoing process through which my relationship with Idoia, my regular model for the past fifteen years, is continuously metamorphosed, re-shaped, and re-visioned, and also through ‘relicing,’ this artefact becomes my means of equating this woman with the transcendental. Drawing on Luce Irigaray, and mindful of the effectiveness of the box-assemblage in bringing together the dismembered female body and the divine, I suggest that woman and God may share the realm of the other. As for the participant-spectators of the box-assemblage, they may establish their own relationship with Idoia, based on visual and tactile contact with her boxed and apotheosised body. Toward this aim, its structure is designed in such a manner that exploring it and its contents is a gradual process through which the gaze is fragmented and re-fractured. Subsequently, the viewers may construe this artefact as their own means of accessing the other.
The chapters in this volume explore some uncomfortable territories – spaces where desires and practices remain ‘taboo’, pathologised or invisible. Unveiled are premises under which citizenship can be constructed, and the ways that persons can be made valid or invalid as cultural artefacts. This book speaks loudly to our cultural and collective identities. A number of crucial debates that surround relationships between and among gender, sexuality and identity within a global context are discussed across an eclectic array of disciplines, professions and vocations. The result challenges perspectives and provides new and innovative possibilities for future development. The authors’ international perspectives illuminate practices that continue to discriminate and marginalize those identities, behaviours and desires that are seen to sit outside hegemonic cultural norms
The chapters in this volume explore some uncomfortable territories – spaces where desires and practices remain ‘taboo’, pathologised or invisible. Unveiled are premises under which citizenship can be constructed, and the ways that persons can be made valid or invalid as cultural artefacts. This book speaks loudly to our cultural and collective identities. A number of crucial debates that surround relationships between and among gender, sexuality and identity within a global context are discussed across an eclectic array of disciplines, professions and vocations. The result challenges perspectives and provides new and innovative possibilities for future development. The authors’ international perspectives illuminate practices that continue to discriminate and marginalize those identities, behaviours and desires that are seen to sit outside hegemonic cultural norms