‘The Mindful body: The conscious body’.
As a result of an artistic residency at the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy) between April and May 2018, I developed this artistic project entitled: ‘The Mindful Body: an explorative journey as a woman through photo-therapy and self-portraits’.
Female representations in art have always been linked to their bodies from a naturalistic and masculine perspective. And the body plays a central role in social and political thought. This is why feminist theories of embodiment focus on distinctive aspects of female embodiment that produce different ways of being in the world, and therefore of being women. The body is always subject to culture and plays a role in our subjective sense of self. That is why it is our battleground. For this reason and because I decided to write in it conflicts and projections ranging from archetypes, to processes of emancipation and self-knowledge.
Through my experience as a psychologist, anthropologist and photographer but also because of my personal life, the body has always seemed to me a blank canvas where we embody our culture and education, but also project contradictions, creativity and struggles that shape our identity.
As part of my phototherapeutic workshops with women and also through my own experience, I believe that photography can be a perfect form of self-representation and personal exploration.
My self-photographic work is also therapeutic, as it is a way to release and explore elements that are present in me as a woman. This work not only speaks of a physical body, but also of an emotional and mental body conditioned by my gender, my experiences and the society in which I live. Through the self-portrait I intend to speak of the women who live in me in the form of archetypes or simply as part of bodily representations shaped by my upbringing.
As an artist, I do not aspire for this work to be solely autobiographical, but to recreate the human aspects of this collective consciousness through my truth as a woman.
Work exhibited at Spectrum Sotos Gallery (Zaragoza), December 2018.
