Statement

The subject positioned between the limits of fiction and documentary. Stories diluting borders and power relations. Each of the characters subjected to different dictates and instructions. Tales that are both fictional and epochal, that make us question reality and fiction, and the narrative solutions of stories that insist on and emphasise everyday events.

Man as an individual, subject to a tale without an audience, to a review of sexuality and gender in a society that denies him any other forms of existence, and that limitlessly unifies all. A gesture that changes meaning and questions gender categories and role assimilations. Masculine stereotypes as social construction and also as a politics of movement in space.

The individual confronts his own image in a constant search for his own identity, in a struggle forcing him to look in his sorroundings for new forms of self-affirmation.

The relations between humans in society are structured around different systems of communication. Objects have attributes whose function it is to codify items of information. Neither the material they are made of, nor their design, nor the choice of functionality, are innocent. Power relations are generated from the beginning and their representation defines the status of the individual. Implicit in each object is a judgment about the way we are, our desires and how we present ourselves to others. We can even, deliberately, turn others into a mask that allows us to remain hidden behind them. Everyday objects are contemporary interpretations of identity. The process of the subject’s identification with its objects is that of entering the field of conscience.

Mental constructions of our drives are transferred to the objects in our surroundings, and so they become representations of our own identity. The selection of each one of these objects follows an intrapsychic, unconscious and non-communicational process. A device full of multiple causalities and contaminated by consumer patterns standardised by advertising and capitalist society, for which the individual is reduced to a mere consumer object/subject.

With each object choice, the individual is confronted with a dilemma: to desire is to want, to want is to search, to search is to choose. The search cannot always be proven and at the end, desire is not always consummated. The search becomes an end in itself. People cluster around multiple offers unable to decide. As time goes by, the same ritual is repeated: search, election and abjuration of the object. This process contains a metaphor for the relations of the individual with fellow human beings and the desire for an identity of one’s own.

The space in which we live is fundamental: the city, its construction and the geographic setting are necessary for the subject as referents of its exterior world. The nearest referent would be the home and all the objects in it contained. The home is the space that gathers all of society’s cultural coordinates, in which the individual is immersed. As the intimate space that it is, it contains one’s own objects - testimonies to memory - upon which the individual bestows value and meaning.  Objects speak of our history, of our past, they are filled with memories. They hide meanings that only we know and that do not always correspond to what would be their most obvious meaning. The home defines the territory of the private against the public, the interior against the exterior, isolation against connection. We spend our whole lives at home, living parallel lives to our exterior ones. The home contains its own history. It is a representation of the individual in her search for an identity, for signs of identification. It contains a will for differentiation, and a reflection of the social status of the individual.

Hotels are spaces conceived with the exclusive function of responding to its guests’ needs. They are designed according to functionality, although on occasions this is veiled under other kinds of concepts. Furniture is chosen like a commodity, lacking any emotional content. Space is arranged to provide the individual with a series of comforts. Time is the only variable that’s modifiable in this terrain. The visitor defines the limits in terms of duration and intensity, but nothing can be done to change the space which houses her. Of her whole surroundings, her baggage is the only thing that contains the few objects with any referential content.

Hotels are non-emotional spaces where the individual is completely divorced from the meaning of the objects surrounding her. It is a space free of conflicts and confrontations, and it is from this perspective that it can be seen as liberating. An impersonal atmosphere that fuels the estrangement between one’s own objects and surroundings, and their implicit affections. Reality is not denied. The emotional correlations of the objects that define the subject’s biography are confronted, discovered and liberated. The individual can get rid of any figuration of her existence, and confront with a certain distance from reality, her own inner visions.