Margarita Aizpuru
Marina Núñez
“The craquelured feminity. New behaviours and gender restructurings”, catálogo, Diputación de Málaga, Málaga 2007, pp. 37-39.

 

Marina Núñez is a painter who has extended her usual original creative area to other artistic fields, such as video, installations, photography and the world of objects, though with a clear pictorial influence. She is producing with her works a new iconography of women in accordance with technical advances applied to biology, but always from her feminist position. She believes that the possibilities of body transformation due to advanced science and technology are major advances for women and for the whole humanity, beginning a new developing phase in its existence, with all the potential it implies. These transformations are currently allowing —and much more in the near future— the application and implant of mother cells in sick organs for their cure or body renovation and rejuvenation, operations in human genetic chain involving the possibility of suppressing genetic inheritance diseases, human cloning, highly complicated cosmetic surgery and those revolutionary operations in which substitute artificial prosthesis of the human diseased organs are transplanted, which implies the generalized start of the cyborg age, praised and held, among others, by feminists theorists and by herself, These aforementioned body transformations allow even more if possible the break-up of the binary and fixed generic identities, creating another sort of different, multiple and even transitional human identities.

The majority of her creative work is focused on the conjunction between body and mind, both in transformation, and she makes it from perspectives which are different from other Spanish artists and in harmony with other international feminist artists and theorists, above all with the North American Donna Haraway’s theories, but taking very own and personal paths, She has been rejecting the feminine corporal and psychic restrictions which are set up —and unfortunately fiercely imposed to women— by patriarchal cultural traditions, and that’s why she advocates those new constructions of hybrid and changing bodies, in accordance with this kind of identities differ­ent from the ones assigned by our culture based on the rigid dualism of feminine-masculine gender, clearly differed and imposed to women and men separately. We can say that she advocates —and so we do— self-managed bod­ies and identities, that would be the target: self-management of bodies and identities, in the same line —but from completely new views— that feminists used to shout in the seventies during street demonstrations demanding the right to abortion “My body is mine and l’ll do with it as I choose.”

In a first phase, she focused on investigating a feminine imagery representing mental derangement, hysteria or some kinds of madness, which were considered by patriarchal society as typically feminine diseases, in order to classify the otherness and psycho-corporal differences beyond the standard feminine behaviours and attitudes of repression of the ego. She used to do it from critic speeches and feminist approaches to Freud’s and his followers’ misogynist theories.

Subsequently, she got into the sphere of science fiction, not from playful imagination perspectives, but possible realities, and in the frame of new feminist tendencies of representation, above all through cyborgs and cloned beings imagery, as well as the aforementioned approaches, representing human beings, basically women, multiplied, cloned, between human and artificial, post human beings in a new age. She has also explored the representation of androgynous beings, which went beyond binary gender and have assumed a part of them plus other new identity elements. Those beings have broken the limits between the human and the artificial and become post human persons, much more cultural than natural, the clear proof of it being two pieces in this exhibition: two computer graphics on cir­cular light boxes which offer us beings, bodily women, but whose building and setup have been culturally and identitarily transformed.

Within these artistic contributions, M. Núñez shows us two other works in which she explores the representation of flexible gender identities and contributes something new —the space and territory of the gender identity, not only reduced to the individual, but to her body, including the immediate context around her. In the two paintings chosen, Untitled, we can see a woman polluting the objects she touches, turning them into a part of her, into a sort of identitary-corporal expansion including the whole space around her and her personal objects which thus become humanized. With these two works, the artist keeps on moving forward in her research, adding new ideas to the concept of human identity and its limits, now in the sense of incorporating to this concept the context and habitat around the individ­ual, and somehow determining and forming it.

At last, and related to the thesis about a multiple, changing, and ephemeral gender identity which is continuously under construction, we come across two videos by the artist, the so-called Red [Net] and Multiplicidad [Multiplicity]. In the first one we can see the portrait of a woman under construction, full of wires and electronic components; in the second one we can see some beings in the mutation process, whose faces show us some eyes with clonally multiplied pupils, extending their vision, Configurations of new human beings, with gender corporal identities which have gone through the boundaries established up to now; beings of a new humanity which is not explored yet and, therefore undiscovered, maybe out-side discrimination and subordination by gender; it depends on us.