I want to start my entry talking about “HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File” by Hito Steyerl, one of my maximun references, in which proposes different ways to disappear; To round off, reduce yourself to a pixel unit, to round off live in a fortress or be a woman over 40 years old.

Each chapter of the series I Love Dick begins with a scene of a film directed by a woman: Chantal Ackerman, Sally Poter, Naomi Uman,  among others. Female writers, filmmakers or artists, who are the beginning of a memory spell about invisibility. From the first chapter, the positions of the characters are defined within a micro-system of an art institution lost in a town in Texas that, in turn, illustrates the dynamics of the SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ART. Thus, in the series and in general, men are the recognized academics, the consecrated artists and  the visible heads. Women are the wives of, those who manage and work from a low profile, the precarious ones or those who try but fail. And always: TOO YOUNG TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, TOO OLD TO BE VALID.

In the series, the story about the creativity and visibility of women in art is triggered at a dinner between the three main characters: the couple formed by the academician Silviere and the apparently unsuccessful filmmaker Chris Kraus, and the artist Dick. According to Dick, women are not good at art because they work from oppression. Dick is a land-art artist. Large works, straight lines – which, according to him, are perfection – owner of lands, of a collection in his name, Dick is the personification of artistic manspreading. Remember that Dick in English is a colloquial way of saying dick, so Dick is the dick. A lonely cowboy in the desert of an obsolete but dominant masculinity. Chris is Silviere’s partner, the one who accompanies him – not an entity of his own – who makes films that nobody understands. Chris becomes obsessed and falls in love with Dick, which is a bad plan for everything mentioned above.

The female lead is about forty years old. The system, which we live in. THIS FACT, THE AGE, IS NOT RANDOM. It never is.

People always ask me where I get my creative inspiration from. Any form of art is an inspiration. For me,  Architecture, Film and Literature are basic. Psychology and human behavior are issues I also feel passionate about. I read a lot. Reading is knowledge, it gets you familiar with characters that lead you to unexpected places. Anne Sexton, for example. Her writing made my stomach cringe, but in a positive way. Reading her autobiography in letters and understanding her complex reality was a very authentic experience. As I said earlier, watching films is very important for a photographer. I watch movies every day. You need to watch all sorts of things in order to enrich your inner world and create a personal visual archive that you can use in your creative process.

Art must have a multidimensional meaning: poetic, social, personal, aesthetic and strategic one. The idea behind it must have a structure that makes sense and is attractive. One that makes us leave our comfort zone. It is very very complicated to achieve it these days. Now everything has already been done and it is so difficult to innovate. A photograph must have visual presence, but also go beyond its frame, this is what I think at least. And in order to get this right, you need guiding references. It’s impossible to make a list and I hate lists, but let me mention some names. People that create eye candy for me: Andreas Gursky, Aino Kannisto, Sagmeister & Walsh, Edward Burtynsky, David Hockney, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cecilia Paredes, Philipe Dujardin, the Dusseldorf league, Todd Hido, Stephen Shore, Javier Vallhonrat, Pedro Almodóvar, Paolo Sorrentino, Victor Vassarely, my father … The list is almost endless!

Artists are not those magical and mythological beings, superior and self-absorbed, almost crazy and sometimes martyrs who  present us with film biopics, biographies or anything like that. Now we know that Van Gogh did not cut his ear in an outburst, but in a fight. It was a fortuitous blow, and not even the whole ear, but a tiny piece. Artists are as abnormal as you, as us, as them. It is certain that they have some special characteristics, such as tenacity, insistence, perseverance, sometimes a strange security in themselves, in what they do. The own the assurance that they do what they have to do. This faculty leads them to dedicate themselves to art for a lifetime. A whole life in which most of the time there is no glory, no awards, no recognition. Neither money, nor exhibitions. But even if the artist has to earn a living from hundred other things that most of the time have nothing to do with art, they will continue to do what they have to do with the same insistence. Even if she gets married, has three children and does any petty job while taking care of the household … she will always keep thinking about what she has to do: her art. It is something that eventually fades if they do it for themselves, as an inevitable part of their destiny or as an obligation that nobody understands.

The system ends up expelling us all, the old and the new, because they will be old and new ones will come, only the myths of history, the great quotes for the auctions, the tragic lives, will always remain, they will appear sporadically in the news … and the prizes, the Grand Prizes, which finally only serve to remind us of all those who never received them.