Regina José Galindo
Estrías (Stretch Marks)
In her performance work, Regina José Galindo (*1974, Guatemala) refers to a wide range of violent experiences by inflicting violence on her own body. She sees her work as a personal catharsis that is closely connected to the violence in her country and also as pointing to the fight against political crimes, social hierarchies, segregation and the oppression of women. The viewer’s empathy for the artist’s suffering physical pain is also turned into an awareness of the protest’s political subtext. Works in which her own body comes into contact with her own or someone else’s blood ("The Weight of Blood", 2004, "Ablucion", 2007) particularly remind us of performative works by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta from the 1970s. Her first performances took place in Guatemala in 1999. "Who Can Erase the Traces" (2003) is a statement against the candidacy of the former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt. In this performance she dipped her feet in blood and walked to the National Palace.
In Estrías (Stretch Marks), a man takes the artist by the leg and drags her across a wooden floor as she resists, scratcihng her nails on the floor. Microphones fixed to her hands amplify the sound of her struggle to halt this movent backwards. The work was commissioned in 2009 for the 15th International Festival of Contemporary Art City of Women. Its then programme director, Mara Vujić, writes that "the body constitutes a central expressive arena for Regina José Galindo, as it provides the grounds for conflicts to emerge while never losing inspiration for its own existence. Galindo understands the body in terms of a politically inscribed female body, which reflects upon violence-soaked reality in relation to women issues, and paints powerful narrative images of the suffering, poverty, pain, horror, and fragility of an individual in a metaphoric as well as semiotic sense." Galindo stages the asymmetry of power as something enacted directly on the body, her own body standing in for those on whom state violence is routinely exercised. Conceived as a response to conditions in Guatemala, the piece reads as increasingly prescient rather than historical. IK
courtesy Regina José Galindo
Format
Performance produced by City of Women
Document media
Video, colour, sound, 4:19 min
Issue date
2008
To be seen in
re.act.feminism #4 - Archival Chain Reactions, MSUM, Ljubljana, 2026
Relations
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