In 2005, Su ALONSO and Inés MARFUL decided to veer off their academic and professional career path to undertake together an artistic project, combining their experience and different languages of expression. Originating, as they did, from very different worlds, the result of that confluence has been an aesthetic of coalescence in which expanded photography, philosophy, written texts, music and performance come together to give substance and entity to a work that is eminently multidisciplinary.
From their very first projects together, the solid, unmistakable trace of an artistic proposal with profound cultural roots and a singular poetic dimension revolving around timeless themes and motifs was clearly visible. The fleeting nature of life, identity, the place of Heideggerian “being-toward-death” in a tenaciously unknown universe, surge forth as salient traits of projects that depart from a material base of photography, which are aesthetically minimalist and rooted in silence, such as 1,618 m2 de cielo, Metáforas del centro or El 5% del universo visible. A self-inflicted wound in the forehead of one the artists, in Cómo nombrar el grito, marked the beginning of the performative vein within their work, paving the way for the organic grammar that gave the necessary impetus for expansion towards more ambitious textual and plastic layers. Their photography exploded tri-dimensionally and the projects presented thereafter were always accompanied by art books, within what the authors themselves call “intimate code”, exhibited in specially chosen site-specifics. From then on, an emblematic style has marked all their works: the presence of spatial coordinates, geographic location and height above sea level.
Alonso and Marful have, since then, gradually opened new avenues to serialization, juxtaposing elements that bring into sharp focus the circumstantial attributes that accompany the individual under focus, always set against a backdrop of anthropological-existential themes and constants. Their projects constitute visual, textual and sound frescoes, and underline the ineffable, secret nature of individual experience (Meditación #381 La ceguera). They are deep inner essence that seeks, and that also seeks itself, within roots common to the species. Actively seeking to transmit an intimate experience, they are presented as chamber pieces (Meditación #193 Iluminaciones 37, Meditación #752 La quietud, Meditación #329 Falacia del significado), or, at times, as artefacts that only individual readers can get to know (Silent Press).
Simultaneously, underlining the tension between the personal and the social, they build projects openly belligerent to ideological and political conformity and reflect the extent to which they vouch for the fringes, the oppressed minorities denied a voice. Thus, were born, their “devices for lyrical resistance”, compositions and performances with clear political intent, and whose register, poetic dimension and conceptual poignancy allow themes such as the historical oppression of women (Libro de las mujeres muertas, RE-ACTION), transsexuality (La identidad herida), or illegal immigration (Corriente alterna, De profundis, In itinere), to be dealt with, being brought to audiences in restricted but intense spheres of diffusion where, armed with the power of the voice and the consciousness and purpose of gaze, they demand direct contact with everyone who contemplates them.
The death of the mothers of both artists led to them further broadening the avenues of their poetic expression towards a horizon of secular sacralisation, calling for a world cast anew in a veil of fresh enchantment, in a womb of pantheistic humanism pregnant with philosophical and literary references. Their work now transcended individual borders, opening up to the presence of multiple agents and natural elements (water, earth, fire, wax, organic fluids…) seeking dialogue with life within a more conciliatory, organic set-up, bereft of hierarchy. Lugares comunes, Oración, Meditación #184 Cuaderno de piedra or Soliloquio del icono can be placed within that intellectual and emotional realm, marking the powerful advent of what critics have called “symphonic conceptual art”.
RE-ACTION, Genealogía y contracanon can be readily bracketed within that current since they require the presence of other artists to continue with the elaboration of an unending work, destined to become a device that generates neatly concatenated, aesthetic, messages, and an icon of women’s art.
From their very first projects together, the solid, unmistakable trace of an artistic proposal with profound cultural roots and a singular poetic dimension revolving around timeless themes and motifs was clearly visible. The fleeting nature of life, identity, the place of Heideggerian “being-toward-death” in a tenaciously unknown universe, surge forth as salient traits of projects that depart from a material base of photography, which are aesthetically minimalist and rooted in silence, such as 1,618 m2 de cielo, Metáforas del centro or El 5% del universo visible. A self-inflicted wound in the forehead of one the artists, in Cómo nombrar el grito, marked the beginning of the performative vein within their work, paving the way for the organic grammar that gave the necessary impetus for expansion towards more ambitious textual and plastic layers. Their photography exploded tri-dimensionally and the projects presented thereafter were always accompanied by art books, within what the authors themselves call “intimate code”, exhibited in specially chosen site-specifics. From then on, an emblematic style has marked all their works: the presence of spatial coordinates, geographic location and height above sea level.
Alonso and Marful have, since then, gradually opened new avenues to serialization, juxtaposing elements that bring into sharp focus the circumstantial attributes that accompany the individual under focus, always set against a backdrop of anthropological-existential themes and constants. Their projects constitute visual, textual and sound frescoes, and underline the ineffable, secret nature of individual experience (Meditación #381 La ceguera). They are deep inner essence that seeks, and that also seeks itself, within roots common to the species. Actively seeking to transmit an intimate experience, they are presented as chamber pieces (Meditación #193 Iluminaciones 37, Meditación #752 La quietud, Meditación #329 Falacia del significado), or, at times, as artefacts that only individual readers can get to know (Silent Press).
Simultaneously, underlining the tension between the personal and the social, they build projects openly belligerent to ideological and political conformity and reflect the extent to which they vouch for the fringes, the oppressed minorities denied a voice. Thus, were born, their “devices for lyrical resistance”, compositions and performances with clear political intent, and whose register, poetic dimension and conceptual poignancy allow themes such as the historical oppression of women (Libro de las mujeres muertas, RE-ACTION), transsexuality (La identidad herida), or illegal immigration (Corriente alterna, De profundis, In itinere), to be dealt with, being brought to audiences in restricted but intense spheres of diffusion where, armed with the power of the voice and the consciousness and purpose of gaze, they demand direct contact with everyone who contemplates them.
The death of the mothers of both artists led to them further broadening the avenues of their poetic expression towards a horizon of secular sacralisation, calling for a world cast anew in a veil of fresh enchantment, in a womb of pantheistic humanism pregnant with philosophical and literary references. Their work now transcended individual borders, opening up to the presence of multiple agents and natural elements (water, earth, fire, wax, organic fluids…) seeking dialogue with life within a more conciliatory, organic set-up, bereft of hierarchy. Lugares comunes, Oración, Meditación #184 Cuaderno de piedra or Soliloquio del icono can be placed within that intellectual and emotional realm, marking the powerful advent of what critics have called “symphonic conceptual art”.
RE-ACTION, Genealogía y contracanon can be readily bracketed within that current since they require the presence of other artists to continue with the elaboration of an unending work, destined to become a device that generates neatly concatenated, aesthetic, messages, and an icon of women’s art.