Image
Mari Claudia Garcia
Disobeying
Disobeying constitutes a deeper conceptual and formal inquiry into themes that have been permanently present in my art practice since I started thinking about them in 2008. My concerns are anchored in a socio-political study of communication and language as impacted by power relations, politics, micro-politics, and censorship. In this thesis, I particularly focus on the way in which I see censorship in relation to protest through my recent work, on account of the relevance these issues have for me after living most of my life in Cuba under a totalitarian regime.
Through this writing exercise, I also intend to delineate the conceptual operations and the recurrently performative methods behind my making processes. In the same vein, I trace and connect the meanings of the material explorations I have gone through, essentially in the last two years, when I simultaneously came to continue my art studies and emigrated to the United States.
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass.
Variable
2023
Fences create boundaries between the inside and the outside, between power and obedience, whatever that is in each case. Installing them is based on the belief that there are imminent dangers to protect against. But, are fences designed to protect or to restrict? Fences are structures that can both control access and prevent escape. I am not necessarily interested in a decorative kind of fence, picket fences for example, used for establishing property line. Conceptually speaking, I am more drawn to restricting fences. Chicken wire, barbed wire, and chain-link fences are the motives I am using to create with. I appreciate what they symbolize. One does not need to have physical contact with such fences to understand that they are marking a limit that must not be trespassed. Barbed wire even implies danger, they work as signs in this sense
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass.
Variable
2023
I have used archival and found material for my work in the past. However, for Disobeying I have been imbued in working with more intuitive and abstract material explorations. This project explores censorship and protest from a less representational and illustrative dimension. It consists of an installation composed of several glass and metal wire pieces assembled together, which create an aqueous flow due to the visual qualities of the glass. They are all placed on an asphalt platform.
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass.
Variable
2023
In order to make such pieces, I have been hand-weaving metal wire fences by combining existing patterns such as chicken, chain-link and barbed wire with my own designs. After that process, I have been pouring molten glass on them, while manipulating the materials in a way the fence is mostly encased in glass. The glass records some shapes of the surface I poured onto. It does not destroy the metal fence but it registers a movement by melting and distorting some parts instead. It transforms the material, it transgresses it while holding a memory of it.
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass.
Variable2023
I perceive fences as barriers, limit marks, and imposed borders, but also as fragile and permeable elements that can be transcended. Following this idea, I use rigid structures on the wall to weave pieces of fences that are then deconstructed with molten glass. The structure, which is made with screws in the form of a grid of different sizes, functions as a DIY loom that allows for consistency when weaving.
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass
Variable
2023
Hand-weaving fences is a slow and very laborious process; it consumes a lot of my time and energy. However, the craft and effort involved in creating an object like that, usually produced industrially, has great meaning to me in terms of resistance. Those occasions when I am weaving are repeated moments of critical reflection.
Image
Disobeying (installation detail)
Hand-woven metal fences, glass.
Variable
2023
My body involved in that labor, time dedicated, and effort required for making the project, align with the idea of struggle I want to convey with it. This is a common thread I can distinguish in many of my works, in which physical effort, dedication, and a performative attitude are required. I am aiming for those elements to support the contents addressed in my practice.
