Siesta

“When I woke up, there was a man on top of me and another underneath, while two were grasping me.”
Personal account of a 16 year-old girl raped by 30 men in Brazil in May 2016

Regina José Galindo’s performative dimension is political and polemic. It yields disturbing, often brutal works where her minute and seemingly fragile body is exposed to a series of public actions that use the metaphorical space given by art to denounce the ethical implications of social and cultural injustices, discriminations based on race and sex and, more generally, every abuse stemming from the power relations that afflict contemporary society. Galindo transforms her own body into a tool for the symbolic recall of events that the collective body, the so-called “social body” is subjected to. 

Her actions, involving her completely, on one side reiterate the artist’s engagement in the expression of a dramatic present by means of violence and pain, and on the other explicit a sense of deep impotence that strikes both artist and viewers. In Sui Generis, Galindo presents Siesta, a performance in collaboration with Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani where the artist, as she often does, starts with a reflection on violence to then reflect on the concept of gender egalitarianism tied to the female microcosm.

Regina José Galindo’s performance concludes the Sui Generis performance festival, curated by Eugenio Viola and Angel Moya Garcia, that investigated gender-related conceptual complexity, in the realm of the season that the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio dedicated to this theme and that featured site-specific performances by Luigi Presicce, Nicola Ruben Montini, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Yan Xing, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş, Rosy Rox, Carlos Motta, Eddie Peake, Karol Radziszewski and Miguel Gutierrez.