| File 09812 | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Abel Azcona |
| Year | 2015 |
| Medium | Performance Art |
| Location | Palace of the Arts, Contemporary Art Fair of Mediterranean, Castellón, España |
File 09812 is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. [1] The artist shows, in an art installation and documentary way, his Social Welfare file, fully exposed in various occasions. These documents speak of a child in a situation of total abandonment, with visible signs of abuse, neglect and malnutrition, and testimonies from neighbors and the environment are provided confirming that the child could be left for weeks in total solitude in the apartment, which did not meet the minimum habitability conditions. The documentary installation is accompanied by a performative reading of each of the pages of the file by Abel Azcona himself. The artwork was responsible for inaugurating the International Contemporary Art Fair of the Mediterranean. The work was part of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to the artist by the city of Pamplona in 2015. [2] [3] [4]
Disturbing and disconcerting. Intimate and emotional. Abel Azcona, who had already been seen by the fair, walks barefoot and dressed completely in black on the esplanade of the Palau de la Festa and surroundings. He stands among the people, who await him. He gets on stage with some papers. File No. 09812 begins. Azcona stands facing the public, who is staring, and begins to read the file. And so, among the coldness of those mechanical words and administrative jargon, his childhood is recounted; prostitute mother, drug addict father, from house to house (from bar to bar and brothel to brothel), environments in which a child should never be found, social services, an expensive attempt at adoption by a foster family and even sexual abuse. A long process that evidences a hard childhood. Azcona finishes reading File No. 09812, his file (which he leaves on stage). He finishes and gets off the platform, leaves the esplanade and walks through the surroundings in tears until Enrique Bocángelus, director of the International Contemporary Art Fair of the Mediterranean Mars, approaches him and they merge into a hug. People, meanwhile, read the file, perhaps trying to understand why a child has to go through something like that or simply thanking him for being able to expose it that way. Mars is silent, and that is only the first day.
— Asun Pérez, International Contemporary Art Fair of the Mediterranean, 2019
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Abel Azcona, the son of a prostituted woman who is looking for his whoremonger father, because it perfectly summarizes everything that the patriarchy has built on their subordination and for our autonomy. Abel represents the aching son of an unknown father. All of us are those men who walk on their backs. To those who do not see their faces until the end. Those parents who sign unwritten covenants and who leave their semen springs across the planet. Those who rent vaginas, wombs, and maids. It is urgent to face those who prefer to remain installed in comfort. Only in this way will it be possible to turn our face towards the camera, without fear of being recognized in a robot portrait of a whoremonger father. Without fear of the mirror returning the image of a monster.
Buried is a conceptual and performative work of critical, social and political content by artist Abel Azcona. The performance artwork was created in 2015 through a public and participatory performance, or happening, on the esplanade of Franco's Monument to the Fallen in Pamplona. Azcona invited dozens of relatives of Republicans who were shot, persecuted or disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. Descendants of victims make up the installation in a row in front of the monument, all symbolically buried with soil from the garden of one of the participants, where his relatives had been shot. In 2016 the city of Pamplona invited Azcona to show his work inside the Monument and the project was recreated inside the Monument, which had been converted into an exhibition hall, under the name of Unearthed: A retrospective view on the political and subversive work of the artist Abel Azcona. The exhibition brought together the Buried project and fragments of all of Azcona's works.
There are symbols that cannot be covered. The Monument to the Fallen of Pamplona is a clear example. Fighting this symbol with another is what Navarrese artist Abel Azcona has proposed, known for his performance, sometimes controversial and often linked to the body. In this case, Azcona does not propose this new art exhibition as a war between symbols, but as an invitation to arouse feelings and, also, as a claim. For him, it is about inciting memory, individual and collective.
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The Shame,, is a conceptual, critical and process artwork by Abel Azcona. Developed along the West Bank Wall in 2018, in The Shame Azcona installed original fragments of the Berlin Wall along the Israeli wall in the West Bank, which forms part of the barrier built throughout Israel to separate the Palestinian lands. Azcona made a metaphorical critique by merging both walls in the work. The actual installation, as if it were a piece of land art, currently remains along the wall, and has been exhibited in different countries through photographic and video art. The Israeli government has prohibited the artist from entering Israel because of the piece.
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The Nine Confinements, also known as The Deprivation of Libertyis a conceptual, endurance art and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. The artwork was a sequence of performances carried out between 2013 and 2016. All of the series had a theme of deprivation of liberty. The first in the series was performed by Azcona in 2013 and named Confinement in Search of Identity. The artist was to remain for sixty days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness. The performance was stopped after forty-two days for health reasons and the artist hospitalised. Azcona created these works as a reflection and also a discursive interruption of his own mental illness. Mental illness being one of the recurring themes in Azcona's work.
