Estíbaliz Sádaba

This video performance shows the artist, defying, looking straight at the camera, as she covers her face with press clippings out of women’s magazines. The simplicity of the act, its focus, lacking any sophistication, and making no concessions to a stylization capable of captivating our gaze, bestows upon the piece a crude and rebellious tone, very disturbing to the viewer, and so perfectly fulfills its objectives: to denounce the ways in which the dominant discourses circulated by the mass media “block us”, preventing us from seeing beyond, while they propose a notion of the body and of femininity that in many cases is firmly grounded on conservative values.

Within the tradition of feminist performance, in A mi manera Sábada presents an action using her own body in order to openly criticise the ways in which women are forced to maintain a mandatorily thin canonical body. With high doses of humour and the sound of Frank Sinatra’s song My way being hummed, we watch the artist’s belly in a close-up shot. On it are written the words “Dieta” (Diet), and she will massage it for the length of the song, purposefully looking for the visual modulation of the flesh.

This video performance shows the artist, defying, looking straight at the camera, as she covers her face with press clippings out of women’s magazines. The simplicity of the act, its focus, lacking any sophistication, and making no concessions to a stylization capable of captivating our gaze, bestows upon the piece a crude and rebellious tone, very disturbing to the viewer, and so perfectly fulfills its objectives: to denounce the ways in which the dominant discourses circulated by the mass media “block us”, preventing us from seeing beyond, while they propose a notion of the body and of femininity that in many cases is firmly grounded on conservative values.

Wearing a horse head, the artist is lost and wandering in a lush patio. Every time she falls, the sequence is repeated accompanied with canned laughter, as if we were watching a silent sitcom. Bits of text appear between the different scenes. They are extracts from a text about how to survive being a marginal monster, by the artist Karen Finley.