Seeking to this position prevented in preview mode
This piece has become paradigmatic in the field of feminist video art in Spain. It appropriates attractive and glamourous images reflecting the canonic imaginary around the normative couple, in order to reflect on the hidden values of these images. Montage thereby becomes a “dis-montage” warning us of the control operations used in advanced capitalist societies. By means of stylised, spectacular and hypnotising shapes, the objectives of these societies are satisfied.
The video’s linguistics is key. In the seemingly perfect images, little visual details are inserted, evoking the frames of a pink cartoon, of those same images. Like a precise microscope, these details reveal wrinkles, folds, edges, allowing us to see the perversion that lies underneath these “perfect pictures”. The video effectively discloses that conservative and sexist values permeate this “inconsistent hyperreality”, whose only aim is to encourage consumerism.
The artists that founded the collective Erreakzioa-Reacción in 1994, partake as feminist militants in workshops, exhibitions, seminars and have produced a set of pieces that are signed collectively. Their preferred disciplines are those previously marginalised such as video, comic or drawing, rather than traditional media.
This piece focuses on the process of spectacularisation of our society. As predicted by Debord, spectacle devours all forms of representation and ends up denaturalising them to an extreme. Individuals have become accustomed to living in this dominating bubble, a bubble hard to break out of in order to think critically. They thus find themselves asleep under any of the spectacle’s forms: information, propaganda or advertising.
The collective Erreakzioa-Reacción was founded in Bilbao in 1994 by Azucena Vietes, Estíbaliz Sábada and Yolanda Buyes. They were looking for strategies for the deconstruction of the dominant discourses, fundamentally those that referred to woman’s body and the treatment that the media offer of her. Both the technique and the formal treatment chosen for each of the projects are very important for the collective, since it is by these means that new messages of critical reappropriation are emitted. Their works reflect an understanding of feminism more in line with poststructuralist and constructionist tendencies, but without however excluding other feminist approaches. More importantly, they warn us against the dangers of the institutionalisation of gender politics.