Marta de los Pájaros

Marta de los Pájaros - Silence II. The Re-Recognition of the Self in the Voices of Nature

Technique: Mixed (collage and paperclay) on wood

Artist Biography: Marta de los Pájaros is a visual artist born in Barcelona in 1984, where she currently lives and works. Her work focuses on the exploration of identity and the social construction of gender through painting, drawing and installation.De los Pájaros began her training at the Llotja School of Art and Design in Barcelona, and later moved to New York to study at the Parsons School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Spain and abroad.The artist draws inspiration from queer theory and the struggle for LGTBQ+ rights to create works that question established gender norms. Her work is characterized by the use of vibrant colors and an expressionist painting technique, in which gestural strokes and loose brushstrokes create an effect of movement and dynamism in the work.In addition to painting and drawing, De los Pájaros has explored installation and performance, creating works that invite the viewer to actively participate in the artistic experience.

 

The voices of nature in six Silences This project reaches the climax of the discursive lines of my latest projects. It raises, in a more radical and forceful way, the relationship that the human species should weave with nature and the respectful place that we should occupy in it. We live in an individualistic and accelerated world, governed by the principles of speed, productivity, impatience and immediate reward. We are hostages of an instrumentalist attitude, with which we observe the world from our own interests and reduce our environment to instruments from which to achieve our goals. We have become so isolated in our bubble that we are no longer able to recognize ourselves outside of it, as part of the marvelous web of life formed by the rest of the living beings and ecosystems of this planet, which we exploit in such a way that more than 26,000 species are on the threshold of extinction and the biosphere is in check due to global warming. We speak of the Sixth Extinction as if the cause were not linked to our actions, and despite moving towards a precipice of no return, it seems that we even have time to coin concepts such as the Anthropocene to designate the era in which we live, placing ourselves once again at the center and reaffirming our project of domination. The voices of nature in six Silences is a series born in response to this situation, as a capital BASTA that implodes without making noise in a white on white human that yields space and prominence to the colorful voices of nature. Six works, six spatio-temporal silences that grant us another type of rhythm, less hurried, to go to the horizontal re-encounter with nature; to the embrace with true freedom, the one we reach by listening, silencing the noisy monologues of our ego, without imposing our own identity on the world and with a lot of dialogue and respect towards the different; to the stripping of the dominant instrumental attitude in favor of a more disinterested one, which gives us the opportunity to see beyond ourselves and understand that we are simply one among many other species that co-inhabit this planet. Six collages that are formally resolved as mathematical fractions whose common denominator is always the same: human silence. Compositions whose visual weight resides in a nature that makes itself seen and heard; that vindicates the importance of understanding animals, including ourselves, as inhabitants of their ecosystems. For the first time, my works demand the absence of language (of the word) in them, as a fundamental part of the exercise of silence, of silencing our voice and giving space to that of nature. The birds, constant in all of them, as animals with their own language, are the ones who best represent this voice. In addition, they become the element that conveys the spectator's entry into the compositional space by being able to recognize themselves in the humanized attitudes that emanate from them. Loaded with symbolism, they represent the lightness that frees itself from earthly heaviness, from the prison we have built and in which we have confined ourselves; they represent the necessary freedom from which our gazes must reconcile with our environment, while symbolizing the higher states of being, fundamental to be able to embrace it. Six works that in dialogue shed light on the discourse and assume the moral responsibility of the ecocide that we are provoking from the hopeful silence that listens to what is different. Six permeable works that offer a visual experience to awaken, once and for all, our eco-dependent condition. Six works that, in short, are waiting to be visited in as many ways as silent gazes manage to reactivate them. Marta de los Pájaros