Marina Vargas Spain, 1980
Máscara Ekuk. Símbolo de felicidad entre los Kwele, 2024
Collage and mixed media on paper mounted on PVC.
126 x 126 x 4 cm.
EKUK mask from the Kwéle ethnic group. The masks are not related to innate powers but to powers acquired through learning. The Ekuk mask is a dance mask. The dance...
EKUK mask from the Kwéle ethnic group.
The masks are not related to innate powers but to powers acquired through learning. The Ekuk mask is a dance mask. The dance mask is the territory on the edge par excellence. Its function is to enhance a certain liminal territory between the world of the tangible and the intangible, which is established during the dance itself.It is a process of socialisation, the place where the community gathers in order to remember and to encourage the direct participation of the mask, as a catharsis and an element of mediation of the ancestors in the present of the community itself.The ancestors keep the unwritten memory and can reveal part of this higher knowledge, hence the importance of the rituals of permeation between the two worlds. In this place there is no name, but approximations to naming. A history of the face. Putting on a mask implies becoming another.Relic Guardian and Ekuk Mask are works that are part of the Anonymous Was a Woman 2024 project. This project takes its title from a phrase in Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own. ‘I would venture to guess that Anonymous, who wrote so many unsigned poems, was often a woman’.
Anonymous Was a Woman is about storytelling: the secret and the revealed, through ritual and the symbolic. Because the spiritual is also political and reality is the playing field. These works arise from conceiving ‘image-as-story’. This project engages in a symbolic and mystical dialogue based on talismanic elements and objects of mediation such as the mask. Proposing new narratives and interpretations of the role of women in contemporary society.The works place special emphasis on process, through a stratographic reading of various layers of meaning. The images are conceived as a story and the drawing is taken as a diary-like writing in which time and accumulation play an imperative role in the execution of the work itself, making each piece unique and unrepeatable. Making it difficult for them to be conceived as serial works ...
These works start from the fragmentary with the intention of vindicating the ornament as a container of concept; the sign as the essence of being and the tattoo as a container of meaning and a way of inhabiting the world.
It is an opposite position to the essay by the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1993); ‘Ornament and Crime’. In this essay Loos introduced a sense of the ‘immorality’ of ornament, describing it as ‘degenerate’. He took Papuan tattoos as one of his examples. Loos says that, in the eyes of Western culture, the Papuan man has not evolved to the moral and civilised circumstances of modern man, who, if tattooed, would be a degenerate.These works are a counterposition to his theory and a direct link to ‘degenerate art’, an expression adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany.
The masks are not related to innate powers but to powers acquired through learning. The Ekuk mask is a dance mask. The dance mask is the territory on the edge par excellence. Its function is to enhance a certain liminal territory between the world of the tangible and the intangible, which is established during the dance itself.It is a process of socialisation, the place where the community gathers in order to remember and to encourage the direct participation of the mask, as a catharsis and an element of mediation of the ancestors in the present of the community itself.The ancestors keep the unwritten memory and can reveal part of this higher knowledge, hence the importance of the rituals of permeation between the two worlds. In this place there is no name, but approximations to naming. A history of the face. Putting on a mask implies becoming another.Relic Guardian and Ekuk Mask are works that are part of the Anonymous Was a Woman 2024 project. This project takes its title from a phrase in Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own. ‘I would venture to guess that Anonymous, who wrote so many unsigned poems, was often a woman’.
Anonymous Was a Woman is about storytelling: the secret and the revealed, through ritual and the symbolic. Because the spiritual is also political and reality is the playing field. These works arise from conceiving ‘image-as-story’. This project engages in a symbolic and mystical dialogue based on talismanic elements and objects of mediation such as the mask. Proposing new narratives and interpretations of the role of women in contemporary society.The works place special emphasis on process, through a stratographic reading of various layers of meaning. The images are conceived as a story and the drawing is taken as a diary-like writing in which time and accumulation play an imperative role in the execution of the work itself, making each piece unique and unrepeatable. Making it difficult for them to be conceived as serial works ...
These works start from the fragmentary with the intention of vindicating the ornament as a container of concept; the sign as the essence of being and the tattoo as a container of meaning and a way of inhabiting the world.
It is an opposite position to the essay by the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1993); ‘Ornament and Crime’. In this essay Loos introduced a sense of the ‘immorality’ of ornament, describing it as ‘degenerate’. He took Papuan tattoos as one of his examples. Loos says that, in the eyes of Western culture, the Papuan man has not evolved to the moral and civilised circumstances of modern man, who, if tattooed, would be a degenerate.These works are a counterposition to his theory and a direct link to ‘degenerate art’, an expression adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany.
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