[…] “we all speak about the same that they already spoke because is what individually concern us and just from the individual, as impossible of encode itself as discourse, can be establish insurrection” […].1
To participate of art from the feminine condition and projection, even when in that the stereotype of women as an emotive and sentimental being do not be denied, is today, more than ever, a politic position, an act of resistance and critic against the imposed values of artisticity and artistic genius.
If it is about to validate possibilities in the ground of the autobiographical, to propitiate a trance –without profound rhetorical mediations–, between the individual and the symbolic (just the necessary to make it valuable as a shared knowledge) and where the feminine has a preponderant place, the attempt could open the way to a certain mistrust about the actual capability to potentialize this experience in the language of art.
To rememorize and to perpetuate each detail of our lives-histories, in particular the concerning childbirth and motherhood do not constitute in Lidzie Alvisa’s case an opportunist option (politically correct) of legitimation, but instead a defense of the feminine as condition from which its dialogue with the world is defined. Does not exist a peculiar kind of sensibility and feminine behavior that is reiterated in multiple and sometimes opposed identities of the being, even when this could appear as construction or convention?
Lidzie defends the possibility of dialoging about the individual from this condition, which is not more than the defense of her own individuality.
However, his position had little to do with the socio-biology’s discourses of the feminism of the seventies, or with the deconstructive reaction of the feminist theory during the eighties. If in fact we can recognize in her works the presence of stereotypes related to the corporal (cracks, blood, childbirth, pain…) y in the intercrossing of discursive abilities already canonized, her intentions will be not belligerent in anyway. The subject of the childbirth and motherhood, so repeated by feminist since the very first moments, as reaction to the excessively romantic and manipulated images of femininity, reappear here as the urgency of an autorecognition that implies at the same time an honest, unprejudiced and socializing intimism.
To materialize in images and symbols her personal experiences of gender and sexuality seems to be the unique and possible way of avoiding they could be lost in memories, words and descriptions. To share them perhaps is the only way of embrace them, recognize them, in front of the real impossibility of defining them, of apprehend them in its all dimension.
Maybe that is why they alternate, in hierarchical planes that go from the most external to the deepest, methodologies and techniques as dissimilar as the documentary, cold, objective use of the negative and the photographic image; the compulsive and laborious relation of the knitting in paper and of the fretwork in wood; the preparation of hangers, clothes and layette to the baby; the medical documents about the pregnant and the fetus. The physical, metabolic and psychological changes, that concern also to her participation, presence and acceptance in the social space are evidenced in the variety of point of view and observers, dispersed nucleus of the image’s construction, off centered self-consciousness.
To conceive has been as be born again, another way of learning to live, of knowing oneself, besides, in the sacrifice to transmit what has been lived and learned. Her looking is not that of the victim. Her worries move between placer and fear, between anxiety and safety, between quietness and intense activity. Lidzie has forgotten of the apocalyptic and skeptical vocation of the end of the century to testify her predilection for the domestic and the hedonist instead of attempting to decipher “how we should look and be looked.”2
1. Estrella de Diego, “¿Sabe Usted lo que está pasando, señora Jones?,” “Fragmentos rotos sobre una teoría de género,” Arteleku, no. 30, 1996.
2. Ibid.