TRES ACCIONES

Critical text by Marco Scotini

Two years later the assignment of the Leone d’Oro award thanks to the presence at the Venice Biennal, Regina José Galindo is coming back to Italy for a three steps exhibition. Three different actions in three different places and in three different but subsequent moments, which follow at the same time a unique intervention’s strategy. That is to say, the continuous compromising of her own body that has made her so well known through many irreverent and high risk performances, will be in this peculiar situation one of the most important issue. The spaces involved in this new occasion are the San Matteo church in Lucca at first, the Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani in Milan secondly, and finally the Volume! Foundation in Rome.

Galindo’s body often appears chained, blocked, shut up, forcedly locked up, completely smooth and raped, excluded from every social relationship. Moreover, her body always looks like a theater of a neverending conflict. More in details, it is a kind of witness of the force relations typical of a local context like Guatemala is, for one side and it denots the whole current condition which the crude life has subjected, for the other.

Concerning to Regina José Galindo’s performances, Rosina Cazali has spoken about “Body politically incorrect”. Many others, instead, have underlined some derivations and assonances with the Sixty and Seventy performative practices, which have had as primar subject the body of the author: from the Viennese Actionism to the Body Art or the feminism. Someone has also insisted on the expression “social sculpture”, above all in a beuysian manner. But, at first, Regina José Galindo’s body, in the middle of her action, can be seen like a pre-individual body. That means, it is a docile body, it has to be disciplined, cured, preserved, educated, supervised and isolated. But in the meantime, it is a body which relaps into obedience. It belongs within the space and the storical and social time. It claims something, it protests against something.

On the occasion of these three Italian shows, Lucca, Milan and Rome, Galindo returns with deep impact actions which round on topics like the control system or disciplinary strategies. Performance that also open a wide reflection about the relation between victim and killer, strenght and weakness, existence and policy but also between the individual freedom and social control, nature and rights. To say in a better way, her artistic research works mostly on the increasing implication of human life within the power’s mechanisms and on the more and more fleeting political borders between death and life.