I use the iPhone with a timer and the available filters.
My relationship with the camera is narcissistic and desolate.
My anxious anatomy emerges.
My unfinished anatomy.
I am a predator of aesthetic experience, comedienne, performer. The actress wants to be made of plasticine, to disfigure herself, to be someone else, to relieve herself of the self.
For me, the selfie is also an immediate expression, to solve publicity, to complement a text, to work with what I have at hand, another way of saying.
I handle my neurotic symptoms through the exposure of repressed material.
The history of art is full of self-portraits and explorations of the body. The silhouettes of Mendieta, the characterizations of Sherman, the exposed youths of Larry Clark, the subjects photographed by Arbus and Goldin, the girls of Balthus, the fleetingness of Francesca Woodman, the anatomical excesses of Spanish Baroque painters…
Bellmer and the disfigurements of Die Puppe.
I am attracted to repulsion in art; I live deeply drawn to strained ligaments, swollen joints, and mutilations; I find solace in museums, in the body engineering of the puppet, in the mechanical paraphernalia of marionettes.
Something undefined and oscillating signals to me in the murky swarm of desire.
Now an adult and patched up, I don’t avoid the precipices
I carry my epic everywhere
my sordid past
I was a freakis child
I was treated for it.
I was born with disproportion and scoliosis, so I was photographed as a child, in the Pedro Borrás Astorga hospital in El Vedado, now demolished, whose Art Deco architecture was terrifying to El Coco, an antechamber to the photographic sessions.
I was photographed as a child in a cold room in that hospital, surrounded by freaks, being one myself, doubly trapped in photography and in the body.
(Photographs authorized by Rosie Inguanzo)
* Translation from Spanish by Fiona Baler.
