Terms and conditions

In this series of Polaroids, the artist shares space with the Individual, her former boss, in a performance divided into two phases. The first is a seemingly simple act: the Individual peels a tangerine for the artist, who then eats it. The second indirectly evokes BDSM practices, specifically regarding the dynamics of service and control.

The preparation process included conversations to establish rules and boundaries, as well as the signing of a contract outlining the conditions and duration of the performance. This document directly alludes to the employment contract signed upon joining a company, the instrument through which the institution formalizes its hierarchies. By drafting and signing her own contract, the artist appropriates this logic and reorients it: the rules are no longer dictated by the institution, but by the agreement between two people who choose the terms of their encounter.

Bell hooks proposes that power relations can be renegotiated from within without destroying the other, that true transformation does not require the annihilation of the authority figure, but rather their humanization. For the artist, this performance stems not from resentment, but from its opposite: the genuine desire to free herself from the burden of relating to someone through the filter of institutional power. She does not perform it to cease feeling insignificant before a figure of authority from the past, but to liberate herself from the certainty that, in the eyes of the institution and the outside world, that power existed and was real. The rite of passage does not consist of the Individual seeing her as an equal, but of her seeing him as such. And, ultimately, in that gesture, in humanizing him.

Bibliography:
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.