Estefany. 2002

2002 – Installation of variable size comprising two vinyl canvases of 260×193 cm and 290×210 cm digitally printed. Three series of photographs of 30×20 cm each and a video documentary of 90 minutes.

At the beginning of 2001 a new community of women became apparent in the public space of the city, generally Nigerian, who offered their sexual services with a very impetuous attitude. I offered work to one of them. The work consisted of modelling for a photographic project to be incorporated into a documentary video that I was producing about the activities of these prostitutes. Estefany and I worked together for six months developing different activities. We went to see exhibitions, museums and other obligatory venues for so-called cultural tourists, constructing a kind of photographic diary. We made a series of photographs where she posed in front of a number of drawings copied from mythical pictorial works of western culture. Her presence in front of these pictorial sources substituted their main protagonists. At the same time I was carrying out recordings with a hidden camera of the rituals of negotiation between the prostitutes and their potential customers in the public space. The end result was an installation of a selection of all the material that I gathered and that described a new and fictitious reality for Estefany . The exhibition forced the relation between two parallel worlds that live together in a common physical space but which are totally antagonistic and proposed to the viewer a meditation on the links between visible and invisible, experiences and concepts, latent and explicit, the imagined and the lived.

Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani de Girona.