Last year you were at Feministaldia and, among other things, stressed the importance of the tour of performance.En the history of art, traditionally, a subject (artist) creates an object (artwork) so that
it is then observed by another subject (viewer). In the 1960s, some artists started to create events instead of objects. This is the performativity tour.

It was very important because it broke with two deeply rooted dichotomies. On the one hand, it broke the bilateral opposition between subject and object, creating a new space, something we could call intersubjectivity. On the other hand, the performances went beyond the limits that until then were considered aesthetic, so they also broke the opposition between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. It became clear that the aesthetic is the social, the political, the ethical.

In his thesis he analyzed the bodies that appear.

Firstly, and as we have already mentioned the question of the performativity tour, I would like to say a couple of words about the very concept of performativity, because there is a huge mess, even among the people in it. The concept is being widely used in the arts and also in feminism, but it actually comes from the philosophy of language, and it means that there are statements that instead of descriptive are performative, which produce concrete consequences in reality.

Another thing is performances or actions, which are directly related to art. My thesis, therefore, does not refer to the concept of performativity, but to the ethical-political implications of the bodies that appeared in the performances held in the Spanish State in the last years of the Franco regime. However, in the context of the thesis, I have used the concept of performativity to analyze how these artists perpetually produce concrete consequences or actions in the public reality, which they often address in the public space.

What does the appearance of a body mean?

It is the occupation of a space of presence in the public space and, in relation to it, the occupation by the subject of the agency. What appears is not necessarily something that was absent, but is presented in a different way or acquires a certain type of visibility. If we take the example of women's bodies, the national-catholic ideology shaped and produced certain women's bodies to serve the regime, and those models were present. I've looked at what the bodies of women artists that started to appear in the '60s (because I couldn't start from scratch) contained, and what new things they proposed.

Therefore, at the end of the Franco regime, were many women artists working with the body in the Spanish state?

In the 1970s something very special happened in Catalonia, probably because it was close to the French state and the dictatorship was not as strong as in other places. A group of artists, who have later called Catalan concepts, began to work with other means: installation, video, performance… As they were alternative practices, not so institutionalized, several women were introduced into the art world.

The interest of some of these women artists was the starting point of my thesis: Fina Miralles, Olga Pijoan… I started looking for them, but I realized that in all the works of action the body was on the front line, and that was very significant, because it was happening precisely in a place where for 40 years the National-Catholic discourse of the body had been dominating.

Then, people always wonder if Esther Ferrer's works were really feminist, but the fact that they appeared that way was inevitably revolutionary. There is nothing more than reading the press of the time: it was called a whore, without any delusions.

In his thesis he states that the aesthetic field can be a focus of resistance. Examples?

I am led by a work by Gonçal Sobré, La dansa de l’afuselpassport [The Shooting Dance], 1966. Sobré is at the height of a wall, moves the body as if shot and falls to the ground. He did so in the Barcelona district of the Poblenou, in the Camp de la Bota, where a large number of people were shot. The same artistic action seems to be harmless: the guy is not going to go to jail for moving in front of a wall. However, he is referring to what cannot be said, to all those bodies that are in the ditches.

Sobré's work, like many of the works I explain in my thesis, generates new ways of saying what was forbidden and in this sense we can consider it as an ethical-political strategy and a space of resistance. In the field of art, there is a kind of ambivalence, depending on whether artistic action is a spectacle or a reality. This opens up a field of opportunity, as language can be distorted and spoken through metaphors or metonimias. The aesthetic framework and, in this particular case, artistic action becomes a privileged place to question and criticize a concrete socio-political reality. If the things that some artists have done were done by the activists, they would be strongly persecuted.

The artists you've studied have been largely forgotten until recently.

Yes, many of these artists were definitively excluded in the 1980s in favor of a more ambitious project, in favor of what has been called the Transition. It had very concrete consequences in the field of art. The tour became very reactionary, returning to the painting, although in the previous decade they performed avant-garde practices such as Zaj or Esther Ferrer.

During the Transition, the Government of Spain wanted to give an image of modernity to the outside, the appearance that the dictatorship had been overcome, and that was precisely when ARCO was created and subsidies were granted to specific artists. All the exported artists were men who shared the stereotype of genius.

In general, the 1980s was a rather conservative time (Thatcher, Reagan), but in the Spanish State all previous practices were forgotten and until recently no research has been started, especially since the 1990s.

The work of these artists did not favor the official account of the transition.

By no means. This has been one of the most important conclusions of the thesis. By analyzing these practices from a new and transversally aligned perspective, gender and class research, we see that they have a strong political content and question the hegemonic history of the Spanish State and, above all, the official report of the transition, which says that the transition broke with the previous regime. They show that there were no real changes, but a continuation of the above.

Now you're at UNAM in Mexico, where you wrote part of your thesis.

Yes, I was here the 2013-2014 course. It was of great help to me, because the one who is working in the academy here offered me many interesting keys, among them, to think of those works of Franco's end from the difference. Latin America is thought of inequality because of its violent history of colonization. During the Franco regime, the Spanish State was also a place of inequality, since it was neither Europe nor symbolic, nor artistic, nor intellectual. What happened there cannot be compared to Anglo-Saxon feminist art, as some have done.