Carmen Bioque Zurita

Domestic Maps of Confinement

Spanish born and based in London for the last three years, Carmen Bioque Zurita exhibits a visual practice that is introspective and self-documentary, with a strong resonance with relational aesthetics and other philosophical perspectives that afford to frame both the personally inhabited reality and the artistic practice, some of which result accentuated in the rarefied context of the present pandemics. With an interdisciplinary vision of media, Carmen is always interested in the interplay of image and text, driven by the expressive capital of juxtaposition and habitually working with image archives -this time with her own photographic production-, as well as concerned with the role art performs in merging the individual with the collective for the sake of joy and celebration. Here, she lets her thoughts and impressions emerge in an unordered flow, upon image and text.

About work:

Locating Food as a sign of everything and responding to pandemics, I speak and reflect on Costumbrismo (dictionary translation: style focused on customs and manners), biased perception of reality, absurdity and strangeness upon that what was familiar, the necessity of feeling close an other, localism and affective distancing. For this I dialogue with Relational Aesthetics, Marcel Proust, Susan Sontag and essays on Art and Labour in disciplinary societies.

In the form of a disordered stream of reflections, I aimed to produce photo series and occasional collage forms, with an intimate self documentary undertone. 

I tried to think through the visual, to destabilise my textual-trained mental schemes. To give order and trace maps upon the flux of information that I have been gathering and producing more and less consciously since COVID’S outbreak, and not always as an observer but as an affected by that reality I catch. 

In the end text turned out necessary for my process of organising what I intended to express. I initially thought of alternating images with text, but then I realised it no longer made sense, because those images were text and the text itself was another piece, a written mosaic of images. 

Thus, I decided to let the volume of images I produced rest in one place, and text in a different one.

This way images are seen on a continuum and so for text. 

Text may be the register of everything I tried to say with those images, or may not. Images may reveal what I wrote, or may not. 

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