Strange Domesticities.
(For Ximena Zomosa´s exhibition "Much to Learn",
Gasco Gallery, Santiago - August 2005)

Ximena Zomosa exhibits four jumpers in both spaces that conform the Sala Gasco gallery. In her own words, a normal jumper, a (blue + white) gauze jumper with gauze lining buttons, a sack-cloth jumper with wicker buttons and a flower-pattern jumper.

In each hall, these school dresses beyond any control of their dimensions, are joined by various word listings:

The incorporation of these words responds to a material –and signifying– operation that Ximena Zomosa has been developing since exhibiting her artistic production –as such- for the first time, bound to the sanctioning scrutiny of an academic commission which, after her grade exam, will extend her the Fine Arts degree.

Similar operation happens with the enormous dresses, instituted from 1997 on.

Ximena Zomosa works from what she herself denominates Material Bank , a more or less limited, more or less identifiable with herself series of dispositional elements and techniques that are reused, folded or unfolded in different exhibition moments through which her work keeps configuring itself.

As when on prior occasions the needlework was spun into hair, hair onto chocolate molds or words appearing embroidered on the cloths the chocolate molds caged, now words and dresses coexist to articulate new meanings…maybe the same ones.

I. Material Bank: Rosas street and its surroundings

By the kilo cloths Central Importer, Bandera 693. Birthday articles, Rosas 981. Carlos Ramos cord supplies, button market Rosas 979. Liquiplast, Rosas 971. Mike packaging supplies, Las Rosas Gallery locations 1 and 2. Paty packaging supplies loc. 4. Wind Importer, loc. 6. El Ocho distributor, loc. 8. Mini Commercial, loc. 12. Caperucita sweets birthday arts., toys, disguises, San Pablo 958. House Telias, Rosas 930. Palmira cord supplies, Rosas 949. Galaxia cord supplies, Rosas 945. House of the Seamstress, Rosas 926. El Gato con Botas birthday arts., Rosas 921. Tape supplies cake decorations party arts. House Costa, 21 de Mayo 738. (2)

The jumper as part of the school uniform is established in our country following the education reform proclaimed in 1965, and from there on is constituted into an image clearly associated to the idea of a woman in educative process. Image that, in the public street scenery -outside school- identifies ( as such ) and demands a certain order (neat personal presentation ).

It would be interesting to imagine how women's education has been understood in our process of republican consolidation, since the decrees establishing obligatory children's education or the idea of national progress made through education (to govern is to educate) , contrasting it with the educative imagery to which girls have been submitted in this process, from the characteristics responding to the ideal of a good education , to the illusion of making a possible place for oneself in society through the educative process.

On another hand, as part of her Material Bank , Ximena Zomosa has oscillated the dress from the minuscule to the monumental (3), from religious shades of gold to coarse handcraft material qualities. Nonetheless all of these dresses have spoken to us about categorization through a role: on this occasion, the school jumpers , which come to join the already worked with housewife and maid (nana) aprons significantly denominated (woman) painter in our everyday talk.

Needlework, staged in these dresses, could well speak to us about a recuperation of gender labors, but in this case said recuperation would not necessarily take charge of a claiming desire but would operate an ironic turn from the disproportion and the monumentality, commissioned sewing and the notion of an artist's manual labor.

II. House / creation / madness

Nonetheless, beyond any statuary or normative precision, Ximena Zomoza's work suddenly takes us to a world which, in my judgment assertive and poetically, Adriana Valdés has associated to the idea of what is unheimlich , the Freudian sinister or ominous in the text for the Colección de la artista/Collection Of The Artist exhibition (4) .

In Colección de la artista / Collection Of The Artist that which is sinister, defines itself from an apparent innocence –a little chocolate road and candy houses- revealed itself to us in its perturbing power starting from a simple word embroidered on a cloth framed by an appetizing and tempting infant universe of sugary and chocolate sweets (5) .

Now, what is horrific appears in front of us through the fallout with reality starting with the dresses' hypertrophy.

This way two worlds, the domestic and the infant one, permanently cross each other before our eyes in Ximena Zomosa's work, with the entire numinous burden that both states behave: strange, unknown, incomprehensible, but at the same time attractive, apparently feasible to be dominated, subdued, domesticated universes.

This idea of what is sinister, strange and dislocated also becomes evident in the texts written by the artist herself to explain –from a subtle irony impossible to pass by- her creative processes or the relation with her works. In these texts, a recurring place/element which tellingly repeats itself is compulsiveness : the artist seems to work under a hypnotic (hysteric?) compulsive state (manufacturing unusual size dresses, for example (6), similar to the one, we could imagine, dominating her works' infant aggressors.

Interesting pointing out that in his 1919 article Freud initiates his explanation on what is ominous relating it with what is aesthetic, opposing what is ominous as distressed, contrasting, repulsive, arduous, to what is beautiful, as grandiose, attractive, positive. What is ominous is that variety of what is horrific that goes back to what is accepted as aged and longtime familiar.

How is it possible that what is familiar becomes ominous, horrific, and under which conditions does it happen? (7), Freud asks himself.

It is also interesting noting that what the unheimlich opposes to is, in German, what is heimlich , concept referring to what belongs to the household, but also, like with animals, to what is domestic: if these little animals are raised with people from the beginning, they become totally heimlich , friendly, according to the example Freud contributes . In another aspect, and continuing his semantic analysis, other examples pointed out to explain the sense of this word ( heimlich) aim at the idea of what is trustworthy, proper of the intimacy of the native soil; the well-being of a quiet satisfaction, a pleasant calmness and a safe protection, like the one the house, the closed space where one lives produces (8).

That which is familiar becoming horrific is, in Freud's analysis, associated to that inner repeating compulsion (9). I hold on to the idea of compulsivity and its link with what is horrific.

When Ximena Zomosa describes her creative process of the work in the above cited Cotidiana/ Everyday text, it appears as dominated by the compulsivity and decontrol: suddenly, decidedly, irresistible impulse, compulsively, abrupt haircut , are words used by the artist.

In the Greek-Latin tradition, the most terrible figures of mythology, associated to the mysteries of life and the home, have been female ones: the Furies or Eumenides, goddesses of vengeance that watched family laws being complied with, and were represented as being tall, wearing long dresses, with a serpent and a flower in each hand and described as hateful and repulsive, of sinister aspect and with snakes curled up around the head.

The Bacchantes, drowned in states of blind madness (the orgiastic rage ), celebrated the liberation and self-control loss feasts in honor of Bacchus every two years.

Pandora, adorned with graces and intellectual dowries, nonetheless lets evils loose on earth when trying to satisfy her hunger for knowledge.

Which would be the power of what is feminine? Apparently an ever threatening, destabilizing, hard to control one, in this aspect including creative power. It would seem that the moments of feminine creativity always come down in fits of madness, similar to the ones the Bacchantes would unleash every two years at the Parnassus, in clear opposition to the Muses, inspiring masculine creativity apparently derived of states of calmness or illumination.

In Ximena Zomosa's work that which is decontrolled also appears associated to the childhood world, the one Freud himself revealed us as the kingdom of what is traumatic, occult, the about to be unveiled in its mechanisms, fantasies and psychic operations.

III. Words

Words constantly repeat themselves in the work of Ximena Zomosa, already from 1991 on, contained in her Imaginary Museum. Words and adjectives appearing embroidered, words and adjectives appearing written on the wall, words and adjectives responding to processes or possibilities in the frame of a conventional femininity marked by social passiveness. Ultimately then, words and adjectives that stage the intimate space, words of relief –of poetic extent- as signaled by the artist herself (10).

Nonetheless these word listings are constituted in the verbs and nouns to be repeated, telling us of a possible identity construction, one moving between the noun's passivity and the attitude of the verb, an identity constitution moving from the object-being (of speech, sight, desire, the educative process) or subject.

Some of these words give account of states of the soul –to dream, to remember, to doubt, to love-; others of states of the body -to bleed, to sweat, to cry-. Nonetheless all of them allude to that relief referred to by the artist, the cleansing and liberating relief expurgating the body (blood, sweat and tears) but also the soul (dream, delirium, desire): The text substitutes me / The body is substituted by the dress it wears, Zomosa affirms.

Impossible to at this point not remembering that from the most secret myths of antiquity the female body has always been described by the dominating reason as a mystery (conception), as what contaminates (blood), as what is sinful (sexual pleasure); it has always been associated with the mysteries of birth (mother), sex (lover) and death.

In an interview published in the Rites Of Passage exhibition catalog titled Of Word And Flesh, Julia Kristeva points out: “If one goes a step further, as anthropologists have, it is not only murder, excrement, menstrual blood that are dirty, but anything which endangers a structure. When you have a coherent system, an element which escapes from this system is dirty. It begins with something fairly anodyne. Tears, for example, are considered dirty because they escape the limit of the body (11).

IV. Place

The Sala Gasco is located in a city sector extremely familiar for Zomosa, a few blocks from Rosas street, a kind of provisions market for the artist, which at some time was described as downtown Santiago's backyard, place of domestic handcrafts commercialization.

In 1995 a fire destroyed a great number of the stores at which Zomosa bought the majority of her materials. That same year, shortly after the fire, Zomosa exorcises the place through an intervention consisting of hanging delicate doll party dresses in a destroyed store. Following a first moment of commotion facing the loss, the artist reflects on the straining produced on her by the until that moment reiterative use of the elements purchased in said sector. The fire sets her free, almost, from the subjugation to these materials.

Ten years later, the artist feeling exhausted with the materials said sector provided her with, returns on the aforementioned elements, memories and parts of the city overturning the party uniform by the school uniform, competing from its own and magnificent display window with the clothes stores on Santo Domingo street, many of whom offer work uniforms (aprons, nose caps, coats), first communion dresses, wedding dresses, bouquets and other complements.

V. To Learn (From) What Is Domestic

Which is the space of what is domestic in Ximena Zomosa's work? Which is the space for creation in Ximena Zomosa?

The social and personal circumstances, neither denied nor rejected, are –in my judgment- made productive by Ximena Zomosa and I would also say, by an ever growing group of artists characterized by not having a studio and working with those media and materials nearest in their everyday habiting space. In these cases the work does not exist materially before its exhibition, but comes into body –and reason to be- in the exhibition display.

The space of what is domestic, to which Zomosa circumscribes her creative possibilities constitutes a possible space of learning and doing. This point has already been largely made explicit and analyzed, fundamentally from literature and exemplified by the confinement of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to the convent kitchen as a form of punishment (12).

The kitchen or the school, the intimate home space or the public, social one of the educative system finally point at shifting a certain knowledge to allow the formation of an identity which we seek to constitute beyond stereotypes summarized by the very jumper.

The jumper appears before us as an image for the longing for the liberty education would give women, but also as the castrating image of a system which constantly seeks their submission to the stereotypes forming our day to day identity.

Every night I read at least two tales. Then my daughter gets lost in a forest. Houses with turned on lights appear. Most of them are traps: a witch, an ogre, a cage and a wolf await her inside. But each of these traps also hides the key of liberation. Like if before passing through this visit she was a naïve girl and then like she had learned something from life and the necessary ability to survive in it. (13)

So, Mucho que aprender/A Lot To Learn , the title Ximena Zomosa has chosen for this exhibition remits us to a nostalgic tone, to still having a lot to learn about the very artist facing her own work, in front of its public appearance.

But this title also can be conjugated in a different tense and tone, tense and projective tone, even if sometimes also nostalgic, of a girl in school who still has a lot to learn.

Soledad Novoa Donoso
May 2005

Notes:

1) Adriana Valdés, On The Imaginary School in Alicia Villareal , La escuela imaginaria/The Imaginary School , cat. Exp. National Fine Arts Museum, Santiago 2002 (pg. 37-38).
2) Taxonomías (Textos de artista)/Taxonomies (Artist Texts), published by Jemmy Button Inc., Santiago, 1995 (pg. 15).
3) The minuscule golden and baroque dresses from El grito en el cielo/Scream In The Sky (Spanish Cultural Center, Santiago, 1994), to the enormous ones shown for the first time as part of Cotidiana/Everyday (Posada del Corregidor Gallery, December 1997). Is Gulliver's journey between Lilliput and Brobdingnag not also one of (self)knowledge?
4) Gabriela Mistral Gallery, 2003.
5) Speaking of which we remember the aggression suffered by one of these works during heir exhibition in La Serena as part of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Gabriela Mistral Gallery itinerancy: uncontained infant teeth leave their biting mark on the piece entitled Miedo/Fear. Or in Talca, where during the Collection Of The Artist exhibition the sugared caramel sticks are abrupt and swiftly torn off the work by a school child.
6) Cotidiana/Everyday, Posada del Corregidor gallery, Santiago (December 9, 1997 to January 4, 1998).
7) Sigmund Freud, The Ominous in Complete Works , vol. 17, Amorrortu publishers, Buenos Aires 1994 (pg. 220).
8) Op. cit. pg. 222. Ximena Zomosa's work has already talked to us of how no place is home and that every place becomes home (see Proyecto de borde/Project of a Boundary catalog, Valdivia MAC, 1999 and Colección de la artista/Collection Of The Artist catalog, Gabriela Mistral Gallery, March 2003)
9) Sigmund Freud, op. cit. (pg. 238).
10) Cotidiana/Everyday exhibition catalog, Posada del Corregidor Gallery, 1997.
11) Julia Kristeva, Of Word And Flesh in Rites of Passage. Art for the End of the Century. Cat. Exp. Tate Gallery, London, June 15 to September 3, 1995 (pg. 24).
12) Octavio Paz titled his study on the seventeenth century Mexican poet nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or the traps of faith.
13) Proyecto de borde/Project Of a Border catalog, Valdivia Contemporary Art Museum, September - November 1999 (pg. 23).