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ABOUT MY WORK: I am a Spanish professional artist based in the United Kingdom due to my PhD studies and the interest I have in working internationally and within different communities and fields of interest. My area of interest lies within anthropological and ethnographical study. As an artist I engage with places and people, immersing myself within specific “situations” offered by the surrounding environment (anything from a scene at a local café to conversations shared between people), and developing what an ethnographer would call ‘field work’. As John Monaghan and Peter Just say in “Social and cultural anthropology”: “Ethnography is to the cultural or social anthropologist what lab research is to the biologist, what archival research is to the historian, or what survey research is to the sociologist”. Judging by these statements, I believe that the term “what practical research is for an artist” is equally legitimate. I believe that self participation in the aforementioned “situations” is the most effective way of understanding the ways in which other people see the world and interact with it. Being able to observe the event first hand, I am able to record these interactions and explore their social and cultural implications. I choose to bring my observational research into my every day activities as, usually, I encounter the most significant social phenomena accidentally. This process automatically implies cross-cultural comparisons and contextual engagement with the spectacle in question. Therefore, my methodology is based on social observation from which I gather information in several formats: photographs, diaries, digital sound, conversations, or interviews. Because of the previously defined methodology, my work revolves around projects in which I am required to actively participate, and whose ending results are unpredictable. But my interest towards anthropology/ethnography does not only lie in methodology (field work) but also on the idea that anthropology reconstructs stages of social and cultural evolution through recording ways of life that rapidly change. Furthermore, this perspective not only gives me the chance to play a liminal role as an observer but also gives me the opportunity to develop a more interdisciplinary way of practice. My work deals with idea that the most important things about the ‘everydayness’ – the every day as value and quality - of everyday life are its familiarity and its being built from known bits of behaviour rearranged and shaped in order to suit specific circumstances. Alan Kaprow defines ‘lifelike’ art as practices that slightly underline or highlight ordinary behaviour, paying close attention to how a meal is prepared or looking closely at the conversations we have with friends. The everyday is also the home of the bizarre and mysterious and the ‘commonplaces of existence’ are filled with strange occurrences: ‘life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind could invent’. My work looks at some aspects of the work of Mass-observation: ‘we shall collaborate in building up museums of sound, smell, foods, clothes, domestic objects, advertisements, newspapers, etc’ and the macro-analysis of the meanings and experience of a culture as a practice of understanding society as a totality of fragments. |
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