| Workshop of Research Artistic Production and Contexts of Creation |
Roxana Ramos
Participant
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Lugareña Project, action in Cafayate |
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Lugareña Project, action with a little sand heap in Tucumanian
“places”, 2002. |
Lugareña
A lugareño/a (a villager) is somebody who has been born and lives
is small villages or towns and is typical of such places. I feel literally
and symbolically represented in the above definition, which enables me
to approach and explain (even to myself) my concern with the places of
one's own (my own and others') This, in turn, accounts for the feelings
that prompt these reflections: the fact that I am not altogether there,
that I exist in a time and place that don't suit my cosmovision and my
desires, My mechanism is to recognize and outline my own places. Is it
actually possible to outline a place of one's own in the context of a
global world that seems to be swallowing all of us? Does the maelstrom
of daily life lead to such extreme nomadism that we lose our primeval
sense of spacial belonging, of property, of intimacy, of individuality?
There is no way to escape these questions; in me, they arouse a sort of
resistence to the loss of sense regarding a place of my own, of property
as a shelter. Gastón Bachellard would say: a dreamer of shelters
who dreams of stopping a corner from evolving.
Consequently, my project consists of a photographic record of my own places
and, when the places are not mine, I will work with objects of my choice
so as to record them too.
Lugareña is a project in the making and is divided, though not
fragmented, into several parts. In the first place, I have built up a
kind of file of simple events related to my daily life, in the way situationists
used to do. In the second place, then, there arose a series of actions
in which certain objects got involved with my body: ancillary objects
that aid me to adapt to a given situation: a sponge mattress on my breast
to absorb what I have lost; spring-soled shoes that ease my walk; a llama
bedspread that brings back the feeling and the aroma of my lost refuge;
a little heap of sand that might well be an oasis...
My work, almost a nostalgic game, intends to provide me with shock absorbers
so that I do not get thrown into the deep chasms of the "cultural
sponge" mentioned by Silvia Barei . Thus I will be able to be a
part of the everlasting overspill of influences, where the spectator's
look also puts them in play. Still, my own game is not really aimed so
much at making culture more flexible, but as to absorb (mine and others')
pain of existing.
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Débora Roxana Ramos Navarro |