The body as a symbolic border: gender, memory, and vulnerability in the practice of self-representation

Abstract

This article examines self-representation in contemporary art as a particularly productive thematic and methodological approach for addressing diverse social problematics and zones of conflict. Selfrepresentation is understood here as a situated critical practice in which artists use their own bodies not merely for the affirmation of identity— although this dimension is also present—but as a field of tension where experiences of gender, race, desire, and sociocultural belonging are inscribed. Drawing on the artistic practices of the Cuban artists Elio Rodríguez and Yahanara Mauri, and the Spanish artists David Burbano and
Águeda Ortega, the article argues for the dialogical nature of this mode of artistic production. Although their artistic languages—photography, performance, installation, and the use of digital platforms—differ, as do their contexts, in all cases the body operates as a site of negotiation between intimate experience and social conflict, between desire, memory, and cultural normativity. Their works shift self-representation from the realm of the image to that of lived experience. In Elio Rodríguez’s work, the body becomes a branded image, a surface upon which stereotypes of racialized masculinity are exaggerated and parodied. In Yahanara Mauri’s practice,  the body appears as an everyday presence and an ethical witness to a social
environment in crisis, where visibility entails political responsibility. In David Burbano’s work, the body functions as a site of sacrifice and embodied memory, subjected to acts of exhaustion that refer simultaneously to personal and structural dimensions. In Águeda Ortega’s practice, the female body is asserted as a sovereign territory through rituality and symbolic reappropriation, while simultaneously questioning the cultural dispositifs that regulate it.