Estudio de la figura sentada

video
Traveling exhibition, El Avispero Art 2022

The work reviews hundreds of images from the history of art and popular culture, tracing a possible iconography of the human figure in a sitting position as a context in which to insert the body of the artist, a wheelchair user, who rotates like an object on display, in dialogue with the different connotations that the seated figure can have and its uses and sociocultural meanings, as well as with the intersection of identities and dissident bodies from gender, sexual orientation and disability/functional diversity. Images neither innocent, nor impartial, nor casual, which respond to a critical and curatorial position.

The Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra) recited by the Zen Buddhist master Taisen Deshimaru and his students is the soundtrack that sets the rhythm in this succession of images. This sutra is recited after the practice of zazen (zazen: sitting meditation, “sitting alone with the mystery”) and teaches, among other things, about the impermanence and interdependence of all beings and things.

The sequence culminates with an epigraph by American artist Finnegan Shannon, whose multidisciplinary work focuses on disability culture and access, from a queer-crip perspective: “Reinventing my strangeness as an art form that only I practice at the same time.” perfection”.