Manual for Constructing Bodies
Before turning my attention to water as a territory of memory and conflict, my research was concerned with the ways in which the female body is socially constructed. Bringing together works produced at different moments of this investigation, the series interrogates not only representations of women, but also the systems that sustain them, including family, religion, sexuality, education, art, consumer culture, and domestic labor.
By assembling everyday objects, still lifes, paintings, installations, and ordinary gestures, the works reveal that no notion of femininity emerges naturally. Rather, it is learned, rehearsed, corrected, and transmitted across generations. Within this context, these elements become cultural devices through which particular ways of being are produced and maintained.
Today, I recognize these works as the point of departure for the research I continue to pursue. Before asking what happens to bodies, I became interested in understanding how they learn to inhabit the world. Water had not yet become the central focus of my investigation, yet it was already beginning to surface as an underlying presence.
In a sequence of paintings in which a woman remains inside a refrigerator while her image gradually disappears beneath successive layers of white, freezing becomes a metaphor for the historical immobilization of the female body. Ice, water deprived of movement, anticipates a question that would later become central to my practice: how do the different states of water reflect the ways in which society enables some bodies to live, move, and transform while preventing others from doing so? Who determines which lives are worthy of care and which are rendered disposable?
