The Fathers

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The Fathers
Inauguracion de la exposicion "Los Padres" del artista Abel Azcona en Madrid - 1.jpg
Artist Abel Azcona
Year2016
Medium Performance Art
Location Madrid
Azcona's Los Padres, Madrid. Inauguracion de la exposicion "Los Padres" del artista Abel Azcona en Madrid - 2.jpg
Azcona's Los Padres, Madrid.

The Fathers is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. The Fathers was first performed in 2016 in Madrid with the final performance, also in Madrid, in 2017 in an exhibition format. [1] The durational piece included dozens of female survivors of prostitution who gave a physical description of their last client. [2] On the other side of a ten-meter-long table, composite artists listened to them and drew images of the clients. The performance generated dozens of portraits which, at the closing of the work in 2017, were exhibited with the premise that any of them could be Azcona's father. The biographical work creates a critical discourse with prostitution and its inheritance, and in the case of Azcona himself, of an unknown father, having been conceived during an act of prostitution. [3]

Contents

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.

Octavio Salazar Benítez, El País 2019 [4]

Azcona's works push his body to the limit and are usually related to social issues. [5] Azcona states that within his works he pursues an end beyond the purely aesthetic. [6] [7] [8] His intent with his works is to question the viewer and force them to react, making his own body the representation of critical and political subjects. [9] The themes of most of his performances are mostly autobiographical and focused on issues such as abandonment, violence, abuse, child abuse, mental illness, deprivation of liberty, prostitution, life and death. [10] [11] [12]

See also

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Empathy and Prostitution is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. Azcona was inspired by his biological mother, a prostitute, and sought to empathise with her and with the moment of his own conception. Azcona offered himself naked to the galleries' visitors on a bed with white sheets, so that they could exchange intimacy or have sexual relations with him.

<i>The Death of The Artist</i> Artwork by Abel Azcona

The Death of The Artist is a conceptual and performative work of critical content by artist Abel Azcona. The artwork was both a continuation of his earlier works and closure of the series, being performed in 2018 in the lobby of the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His previous works had caused Azcona to receive threats, persecution, and acts of violence. By letter, the artist invited the organizations, groups, and entities that had threatened his life to the installation, where a loaded firearm was offered and Azcona stood exposed on a raised platform.

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.

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Eating is a conceptual and performative work of critical, polemical and political content by artist Abel Azcona. Also known as Eating a Koran, Eating a Torah and Eating a Bible.

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The Streets is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. At the end of 2014 and the early part of 2015, Azcona explored the processual work La Calle this time in the Santa Fe locality of Bogota, where he prostituted himself on the streets. In this new work, he explored a change towards the figure of his mother, taking hormones and engaging in prostitution. Azcona was inspired by his biological mother, a prostitute, and sought to empathise with her and with the moment of his own conception. The process continued in the cities of Madrid and Mexico City. The performance emerged, as with the rest of his sex-themed works, as an exercise in empathy with his own biological mother. It was also a social critique, where the artist explored the limits of his body by repeating patterns of sexual abuse, which occurred in his own childhood and in the life of his mother.

File 09812 is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. 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.

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, 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. 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.

The Nine Confinements, also known as The Deprivation of Liberty is 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, being one of the recurring themes in Azcona's work.

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References

  1. Lombardía, S.F. (November 27, 2019). "El artista Abel Azcona: "No existe la opción de prostituirse en libertad"". La Nueva España. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
  2. "El artista Abel Azcona presenta mañana en la Muestra de Cine el documental 'Serás hombre'". Somos Palencia. March 2, 2020. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
  3. G. Maldonado, Lorena (March 3, 2019). "Abel Azcona: "Sexuality beats in my work always from the critical spirit"". El Español. Retrieved January 12, 2018.
  4. Salazar, Octavio. "The Future is called Abel". El Pais.
  5. Molina Ruiz 2016, pp. 144–155.
  6. Raggi, Adriana (October 9, 2015). "Abel Azcona: Empathy and Prostitution" (in Spanish). España. Las Disidentes. Retrieved September 25, 2019.
  7. Guisado, Paula (August 17, 2013). "Un artista termina en urgencias tras 42 días emulando la vida en una placenta". El Mundo (in Spanish). España. Retrieved November 3, 2019.
  8. Cotorro, Paula (June 19, 2019). "Abel Azcona: "Me siento más hijo de prostituta o enfermo mental que artista"" (in Spanish). España. El Confidencial. Retrieved November 10, 2019.
  9. José Luis Romo (November 10, 2017). "Abel Azcona: "No hay nada más sexual que lo político"". El Mundo.
  10. Cano Martínez 2018, pp. 130–140.
  11. Beatriz (November 25, 2016). "Abel Azcona: "Que me llamen "hijo de puta" me parece bello"" . Retrieved November 7, 2019.
  12. "Abel Azcona". Arte Informado. Retrieved November 3, 2019.

Bibliography