information / gallery

No title

by Jano Cortijo

Upon entering a doctor’s or lawyer’s office we notice, before we even see the actual professional, the decorous and lifelong collection of degrees, diplomas, certificates, etc. to confirm that our selection is right.
Going through university classrooms is, generally, considered worthy and respectable just as postgraduate courses, seminars, conferences, or workshops –even better if taken abroad– are proof of a constant “development” and “updating” whatever our work field is.

It is blindly assumed that classrooms, libraries and lessons are useful and beneficial in solving our daily complications. But, just as there are the most unusual professions and specializations, there are tasks and labors which can not be formalized in the academic terrain.

It is not the first time that I deal with maternity in my work. The time between the photographs, the dresser and the doily in Hoy día (Today, 1999) and the prints, the frames and the furniture in No title (Sin título, 2001 - 2002) has meant understanding where my interest / fascination with maternity comes from: observing –for a long time unconsciously- the biased and almost discriminatory treatment that women and mothers receive in our context and from my obvious physical impossibility to produce the indissoluble bond between child and mother.

The emphasis to mark a difference, to make a noticeable superiority, caused a short circuit with the first scholarly (and catholic) teachings of love and mutual respect. It took some time for me to understand that the differences are, fundamentally and inevitably, an ideological and cultural issue. I now consider that as long as we recognize and acknowledge –even celebrate- those supposed differences life can be, to say the least, more livable.

In that sense, No title –somehow- tries again to “articulate fiction with fact to generate a new kind of sensible information that allows the inscription of the personal into the social and viceversa” *.

If Today ended up being “a sort of monument to maternity”, No title questions it by projecting a parallel world where the woman who decides to be a mother achieves it through accomplishments and recognitions materialized in a series of diplomas and certificates.

A bachelor’s degree in maternity can be laughable at first sight, but that initial irony is certainly diluted by the doubt that finally sets in the viewer: Can the countless tasks a mother has to inevitably perform at home be formally recognized?, Can a document validate a task exerted, basically, with common sense and human sensibility?

I do not know or think so. In the meantime, I hope that the unavoidable presence of all these documents in the exhibiting space will propose the possibility of considering what we have probably been ignoring all this time.

presentation text for the installation “No title”
presented in the exhibition “About the art of being a woman”
Trujillo, 2002

* Jorge Villacorta in the catalogue for the exhibition
“Pact with the uncertain moment”, 1999