The great lady of the performance Spanish shows an enviable sense of humor and vitality. Esther Ferrer is 86 years old, she has won the national Fine Arts Prize (2008) and the Velázquez Prize (2014), among other distinctions, and her work is widely recognized, despite the difficult and pioneering beginnings of her performative art when it generated reactions even violent among a part of the public, who did not fully understand what they were seeing. And yet, she doesn’t seem back from everything. Perhaps because her goal has never been the result, but rather the process, the knowledge that is acquired when she conceives an idea and needs to document herself, inform herself, to translate it. This is how she explained it in Valencia this Wednesday on the occasion of the presentation of an exhibition that brings together some of her best-known works at the Center del Carme Center Cultura Contemporània (CCCC).
“For me, art is a way of knowledge. Since I don’t know how to do almost anything, when I have an idea I have to learn a lot, talk to people, because what interests me about art is the process. I am very happy to see this exhibition finished and it is very well put together, but I could perfectly live without doing exhibitions. I try to understand everything I experience, but in reality I can’t understand practically anything,” says the veteran conceptual creator from San Sebastián, based in Paris since the seventies, who has shown herself to be curious, solicitous, and vitalistic.
“It is a hot conceptual,” according to Margarita Aizpuru, curator of the exhibition. Esther Ferrer: the body crossed by gender, space and time. It refers to the absence of coldness in his work, his sensuality and the sense of humor that permeate all his actions, his videos, his photographs. “I never define myself. All versions and interpretations are valid,” responds the artist, who has seen how the art has evolved. performance until it is assumed by consumer society for commercial purposes: “It is impossible to resist. Capitalism recovers everything and quickly. A few years ago, they sent me an invitation to an opening of a very good perfumery and it said: ‘At 7 performance”. Art has always had patrons and evolves and speaks of the present, adds the creator, while emphasizing the importance of technology in current performative art. “Now physical presence is almost irrelevant. It has evolved a lot. It is logical that all this is integrated into the present. Artificial intelligence was science fiction for us. There is no point in living in the past,” she says.
Bartolomé Ferrando, a reference for performative art in Valencia, was present at the presentation of the exhibition, which can be seen until September 29 in Valencia and will arrive in October at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante (MACA). Friend of the creator, he has asked her about the high narcissistic burden of the performance current. Ferrer has admitted it, but she has not been very critical of this evolution either: “When women began to do performancesamong them me, to undress and show their body, with centuries of art where painters and sculptors have undressed us and have reflected all their ghosts and their miseries, their problems, and have demeaned women’s bodies in a horrible way, But then, serious people, serious critics, at the time we got naked we were narcissists, exhibitionists.”
Ferrer recreates in a well-known series of images of his pubis that tells through symbols the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. “It’s me, but I’m already like this,” adds the artist while she shows her work to journalists. She also exhibits the extensive series in which she reflects on the passage of time with her face, mixing photographic self-portraits in which half of her face belongs to one era and the other half to another.
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The artist believes that “the perception of time is totally personal.” “If I work with time it is because when I was a child my parents went to the theater a lot and when they came they would say that it seemed like it had lasted two hours and in reality it had been shorter or longer. And this left me thinking. How can it be? Is an hour and a half an hour and a half for everyone? This was already happening without technology or artificial intelligence. The perception of time now turns out not to exist,” she maintains.
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