Cierra la Boca (Shut your Mouth) is a series of three performances done in Madrid, in response to Spain's social and political situation, addressed in three specific problems: the Public Safety Law (26th December), the Abortion Law (28th December) and Jorge Arzuaga's hunger strike and its invisibility in the media (29th December).
In these performances I am not only an artist, but also more overtly my identity as a Spanish person and a citizen is underlined. They respond to artistic, as well as personal and political concerns.
I have chosen to use the body in performance to address these particular issues because of the body's potential as a political terrain. The body can become the advocate of the person, and a medium to represent oppression.
Taking cultural psychiatrist Armando Favazza's concept of skin as the limit of the self, the whole surface of the body could be imbued with symbolic power as the frontier between self and world, and hence be a privileged site to explore the individual's relationship to the social and political. I choose the skin as the place to negotiate and contest power, a plastic material with it's natural and artificial openings that expose the vulnerable self inside.
Top two images from Cierra la Boca, bottom from Occult (2011) performance.
The mouth plays a central role in the three pieces. What comes out of it, what goes in, together with it's association to speech, voice, silence and censorship, bring all the pieces together. In reference to Jorge Arzuaga's hunger strike, the mouth is wide open to show it's emptiness, the biological functionality of food intake denied for political reasons; in relation to abortion law, the mouth becomes uterus, and by extension the menstrual cycle becomes infused with personhood; at the Congress performance, the mouth and eyes are sealed and silenced.
Cierra la Boca consists of three performances I did in Madrid:
- 26th December 2013 at the Congress of Deputees, in response to the Public Safety Law.
- 28th December 2013 at the Ministry of Justice, in response to the Abortion Law reform.
- 29th December 2013 at the Plaza del Sol, in response to Jorge Arzuaga's hunger strike.
There is also a press release in Spanish.
