“The normalization of genocide in Gaza in unbearable,” was the message that the Tania Blanco artist wrote in the banners with which she joined a series of marches called in London to support Palestine. The Spanish painter is being one of the most commented names of Arco, the most important contemporary art fair in Spain, which is being held this week in Madrid. The reason: his works Palestine journalist self -portrait working in Gaza and Halla. Two pieces exposed jointly in the formatocomodo gallery, with which he intends to break with the story that exists on the Palestinian population.
“There is talk of Palestinian lives as something generic and I think it is not necessary to understand that it covers all kinds of human lives, both feminine and masculine, and children. People with all kinds of vulnerabilities, ”he explains to eldiario.es.
That the protagonists of their pieces are two women has not been a casual choice either. “They are especially vulnerable. When the numbers are treated, people are not seen. The word ‘Palestinians’ remains as if they were something abstract, and they are people, ”he says. It also defends that “from art something had to be underlined as monstrous as what has been and continues to live there.” “That is the starting point, moving my activism to intimacy,” in this case of his study, in which he performed these two works: “I wanted to get out of the noise of the marches and protests, and have this moment of calm and empathy, feel that drama in another way.”
The first protagonist of her pieces is the Palestinian filmmaker, activist and journalist Bisan Owda, who since the beginning of Israeli genocide has become one of the most prominent voices when transmitting the reality in which the Palestinians live in Gaza. Last year he won an Emmy news and documentary award for his report I am Bisan, from Gaza, and I’m still alivewhich published on the AJ+platform.
Tania Blanco tried to contact her, but it was not possible, so she decided to look among her own photographs to take one of them as a starting point for her painting. He chose one that the journalist had made herself on a completely ruined Gaza street: “I tried to be the most faithful to its composition. My intervention has been rather at the level of lights and the chromatic palette. In the way of building the volumes in the brushstrokes, the wakes, ”he describes about his work.
From fertile Palestine to destroyed
The second painting is Hamallawhich takes as title the name of the woman who portrays Rallamah, vice versa, in a nod to a practice carried out Leonardo da Vinci. For her she used a photograph taken between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Probably, it belongs to the time when the first settlers arrived in the Palestine where there was a landscape of peace. Far from the barbarism he staged in the Nakba in 1948, ”says the author. In that period, the settlers had the photographic technology that allowed them to take the snapshot used, and that was subsequently colored.
“I wanted to show the contrast between a fertile, lush and current Palestine,” he says. Its protagonist is dressed in the typical Palestinian embroidery, the Tatreez; and a jacket made from the Tahiri technique, which wore linked rope to generate ornate drawings. The Ramallah that gives title to the painting is actually an anonymous woman. “I have named him to take away the same degree of anonymity with which they count the numbers of killed Palestinians. Put them name and materialize it in a picture, give a second life to that photograph, ”he explains.
Tania Blanco emphasizes that the material with which the photograph was taken, silver jelly, was relevant when wanting to give him a second life in his piece, for how “the historical documentation of Palestine fades in the digital world. I wanted to give it materiality through the pictorial world. ”
Raw, uncomfortable art
The artist regrets that the current context is governed by “a lot of hypocrisy at the political and media level, the large part of the media respond to what the hegemonic oligarchic powers dictate because the media are also propaganda means, and not so much of information.” Against this, “art is a way, a territory where there is more freedom.”
“Each artist chooses how his work addresses and talks about his time, of more intimate and personal issues. Each decides to live more inside a creation bubble or if you throw yourself to talk about more uncomfortable things, ”he values. In his case he has opted for the “most raw, perhaps more uncomfortable route, which complicates you a little more.” An option that, he acknowledges, gives “meaning” to his life: “If I didn’t do so, I would feel bad. Since I have decided to live in austerity and a slightly more thorny road, at least I will speak with freedom of the things that concern me and feel in dialogue with the times we live. ”
Why talk about Gaza
Without ignoring that there are more genocides in addition to the one that is taking place in Gaza, Tania Blanco explains that he wanted to speak for “the flagrant and dangerous” that is being: “It is the first one that is broadcast live and live. Visual and informative communication reaches as many millions of people as it has never happened, due to the presence of mobiles and social networks. ”
For the artist it is “extremely serious” the way in which “it has been normalized that the United States and the Israeli Zionist elite can continue to massacre and kill, and that weapons continue to be sold, no matter how much the Spanish government says no, it is being done both here and in other European places. It is so serious that it seems impossible not to talk about that now. ” The Valencian recalls that in Spain we are “lucky” for not being born in Palestine. “Anyone could have been born there, be trapped there, be dead under the ruins,” he warns.
He also remembers that when he decided to study Fine Arts in Valencia he did not think that, years later, he would be doing works such as those he has presented in Arco. Then there was “siege, Israeli aggression and colonialist project.” However, he could not glimpse the “level of monstrosity” achieved, and that “is considered anti -Semitic to defend the right of a population to exist already living in their land, when in reality the most anti -Semitic that is happening is what Israel is doing.”
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