EVENTS
Conversation with Cristina Lucas
24/03/2010
Conversation among Cristina Lucas, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Yaiza Hernández (CENDEAC Director)
March 24th. 6:00 PM Sala Verónicas
Cristina Lucas
1974 Jaén, Spain. Lives in Spain, Holland and France.
While describing Cristina Lucas’ critical perspective as feminist might seem unavoidable, it also falls
well short of the mark. Over this already well-worn opening decade of the 21st century, Lucas has
brought her biting sarcasm to bear on a wide breadth of intellectual, institutional and iconographical
idols, outlining a practice continually focused on ideas of emancipation. The dominant theme
underlying her practice is the activation of critical humour, which Lucas brings down upon political
stereotypes of Spanish social history (El viejo orden, 2004), or harnesses to instigate a
carnivalesque lynching of a bust of Jean Jacques Rousseau in condemnation of the patriarchy of the
Enlightenment (Rousseau y Sophie, 2007), or indeed to stage the mass rape that would have to be
enacted if we were to take Eugène Delacroix’s well-known image of a naked Liberty leading the
people literally (La Liberté Raisonné, 2009).
Over and above her strategic deployment of satire, Lucas posits an aesthetic of intervention to be
used equally in the appropriation of images and in an ironic engagement with a range of apparatuses
of power. In the same way that she secretly recorded a dialogue in a confession box with a catholic
priest about the church’s disdainful attitude to contemporary art in Más Luz (2003), or when she used
calls to recruitment centres to register the instrumentation of immigration as a kind of contemporary
levy in soldados.com (2007). Each one of Lucas’ works points it finger at history as a continuous
rebirth of the many heads of the Hydra of ideology which is expressed on a planetary level in terms
of the advance and retreat of the frontiers of empires and sovereignty, and in the ironic effects of
universal suffrage.
Anyone who has recently seen the film Habla (2008) in which Lucas unsuccessfully tries to force
Michelangelo’s Moses to speak again using a kind of “sledgehammer philosophy”, will have no
problem in understanding why this contemporary iconoclast has a place reserved in Dominó Caníbal.
Accepting the challenge of taking on the elements that Jimmie Durham introduced in the Verónicas
church in Murcia, Lucas proposes adding a new transgression, transforming the supposed
readymade into a “relational” catch-22. Short-circuiting codes of contemporary aesthetic and the way
in which waste materials are normally recycled, Lucas invites spectators and commentators to take
part in an act of cultural cannibalism. In her intervention, spectators will be made aware that the
smile with which the invitation to return objects designated as high culture to the lowly register of the
utilitarian is issued can barely hide the fangs underneath.
Cristina Lucas willl participate at PAC 2010, in the proyect Dominó Canibal (Cannibal Domino) curated by Cuauhtémoc Medica. His exhibition, at Sala Verónicas in Murcia, will be open from 24th of March. More information here.
Information and enrolment
Language of the Seminar: Spanish
Free entry to those who do not wish to receive an attendance certificate (paying users will be granted preferential entry if the auditorium reaches its full capacity).
In order to enrol and obtain a certificate of attendance, you need to:
- Attend all sessions of the course
- Fill in the enrolment form
- Pay the appropriate fee
Fee: 5€ professionals, 2,5 € students, unemployed and OAPs (proof of status will be required). Free for holders of a Friends of CENDEAC card.
In order to enrol online it is necessary to fill in the enrolment form and make a payment for the appropriate fee WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF ENROLMENT to CAJAMURCIA bank, Account Number 2043 0090 3420 0055 0928, specifying as a concept the name of the seminar and SENDING ONE COPY OF THE PAYMENT RECEIPT to CENDEAC (you can do this by email or fax in order to save time and avoid de-enrolment, however, if you are de-enrolled you will be enrolled again on receipt of your payment slip). Alternatively, you can enrol and pay your fee at the CENDEAC office (Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4p.m. to 8 p.m.).
CENDEAC
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