Adassa Santana
Gran Canaria, 1984
I develop my artistic research in the representation of the experiences and relationships of the subject with the other, both in private and public space; specifically in the virtual environment. Reflecting on the use and abuse of mass media as a space for the construction of individual and collective identity at the stroke of a selfie; dangerously turning us into objects of desire and, finally, into a consumer product. I work in a multidisciplinary way, playing with different techniques from drawing to painting, from hand embroidery to video installations.
In my project Specto. Portrait Network I revisit the portrait as a container of memory, through a network of synchronies memory, through a network of visual synchronicities through which I talk about this genre both historically and from the contemporary need to share subjective and personal content on platforms called communities. Thus continues, the series Fragments, embroidered structures and thread wefts that give the pieces a handmade, manual character, in this digital era that allows me a slowness, a pause, in this maelstrom. pause, in this maelstrom of always being visible, of being there. To find some place or a point where we can relate to each other in a more horizontal way, beyond the power games, from another place; or simply an attempt to deconstruct or understand the contemporary obsession of self-representation in spaces of communities emptied of meaning or a new type of technological ‘life in common’ or, as José Luis Brea would say, in ‘the community that is coming’, which is already here. Or it is simply a common howl of an attempt to relate to the other, to narrate our history beyond the games of power. Looking for another place and another way to represent ourselves without having to become products of desire, of consumption, of stereotypes of a personal brand.
