Arachnid Castration (Detail)

Arachnid Castration (Detail)

This work has three sources of inspiration. The first one is French painter Odilon Redon, from whom I took the strong pastel colours and the figure of the spider, which appears in two charcoal paintings called "L'Araignée qui sourit" (The Smiling Spider) and "L'Araignée qui pleure" (The Crying Spider). This performance only adds a third emotion to the list.

The second inspirational source is Irish painter Francis Bacon. The idea of a deformed body has an appalling and yet attracting character that confronts us with the reality of time, gravity and death.

The third source would be Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's concept of body without organs as a performative horizon to push yourself beyond your boundaries in order to liberate the potentials of becoming. This is why it is an idea with great potential among performative arts, for there is no way you can do art without experimenting with that fictional core called "Self".

The theme of castration is here more or less incidental. The original photo is a long-exposure nude. I decided to remove digitally the sexual organ, which it turned out to be a more suitable depiction for the expression of suffering.