| casilda sanchez | statement |
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We are all voyeurs at some point. At least I know I am. I have always been inclined to observe the intimacy of others, if what we call intimacy can be susceptible to being eyed. I believe intimacy is something that - when it exists and occurs - must be apprehensible, and so, I am on the trail. Intimacy is not linked to individualism but to a fold where I can relate to myself as well as to others. Jose Luis Pardo, in his essay Intimacy, writes that, “There is no bigger intimacy than the shared”. In my work I examine community and intimacy as a pairing, as disparate behavior originating from an identical drive, and as a coupling that could be compared to the notorious binomial public/private in terms of the particular relationship established between its parts. Not only are these dichotomies not exclusive, in fact they are complexly complementary. I am interested in the exercise of voyeurism as an act of entering another’s space, of paying thorough attention to someone’s personal space. The eyesight may not necessarily be the best sense to comprehend and explore intimacy; think of the power of touch, smell, taste or hearing. But taking into account the predominantly scopic regime in which we live nowadays, where science and knowledge are based on optical observation, it becomes enormously motivating and relevant to explore how we could study intimacy by means of using eyesight. It is here where voyeurism comes to play, the most ancient exercise of scrutinizing privacy. By photographing lighted windows at night I feel extremely attracted to trying to capture the intimacy and privacy inherent in those spaces. The viewer of these images could also take pleasure in projecting him/herself into them while taking the time to observe the quiet and personal spaces that so forcefully call upon us as their potential and imaginary inhabitants. This series of photographs, extended from Madrid’s windows to Chicagoans’, led me to reflect on the key role that distance plays to define voyeurism, and how it differentiates the voyeur’s gaze from any other kind of gaze. Rosalyn Deutsche in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics tells us that, “The voyeur’s gaze frames the objects as if they were images, places them within a distance, encloses them in a separated space and locates the viewer subject in a control position”. So, if I am becoming a voyeur in order to see intimacy and join somebody’s inner space, how can that be possible if intimacy implies relation and community, and the voyeur’s equation contains distance and detachment on it? This is the starting point of a work as the “Peephole Relations” series, where I have decontextualized the peephole as a detaching device that permits scrutiny while one hides oneself behind it. The works presented explore the varied contradictions of voyeurism: gaze/distance, face confrontation/back to back, optic/haptic, etc. By means of using photography, video and installation I attempt to transform these interests and questions into artworks that are capable of engaging the viewer in the dichotomies of the gaze the same way I feel pierced by the gaze’s matter. |
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