Associação Cultural Videobrasil

essay_ ff>>dossier Paula Delgado_ "What do you see when you see me?"

What do you see when you see me?

By Enrique Aguerre

Almost since its beginning, video as a language—and as a support—has been deeply concerned with attempting to define its specificity as opposed to other means of artistic creation, seeking the much dreamed of adulthood. This operation, which involved most of the names in the video art sanctuary, culminated in a resounding failure, crowned on the one hand by the quick assimilation of the rebellious new medium by the institutions, “museologization” and all and, on the other hand, by the arrival of video at a state of maximum spectacularization, among millionaire budgets and state-of-the-art technologies. Of its antiart nature, virtually no postulate would remain standing.

This diagnosis, which at first might be regarded as a sort of disenchanted reflection, has a positive side to it and enables us, in turn, to make new readings of the relations between video and the mass communication media, from the traditional television to the Internet. It frees up the artists who choose video as a contemporary tool of creation to focus on the uses of image, from a clearly critical stance.

Visual artist Paula Delgado is a clear example of the new generation of creators who assume a position in face of the seductive imagery instilled upon us by the means of communication, questioning, in her case, the structures imposed upon the female and their multiple stereotypes.

Delgado’s first video work was done in 2000, with the goal of being showcased at the exhibition for young artists (all under twenty-five years of age) entitled Invisible :) (2000), held at Centro Cultural de España, in Montevideo, and curated by Fernando López Lage.

The creators selected for the exhibition, along with Paula Delgado, included the artists Julia Castagno, Daniel Umpiérrez, and Martín Sastre who, later on, with Federico Aguirre, would form the Movimiento Sexy artistic collective—for “cultural healing,” as they used to call themselves—, which debuted formally at Centro Cultural Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the performance Todo por Natalia (2001).

As a common denominator, it is worth noting that all members of the collective used the video tool to make several single channel productions between 2001 and 2003, each contributing their own individual knowledge, and to the recording of their incisive performances, always spiced with humor and irony. Movimiento Sexy rocked the vernacular little art world with its defiant iconoclastic attitude and, at the same time, contaminated it with a quite welcome pop behavior.

Ayer (2000) was the name of Delgado’s video screened in Invisible :), part of an installation presented in the exhibition room. It featured her alter ego, the artist Mariana, sitting on a wheelchair, alone in her room, evoking, through a photograph, her loved one—or perhaps just her desired one. The photograph would fall on the floor, out of her lap, and the object of her desire would materialize to melt caressingly into her arms. Finally, it would disappear again, and solitude would take over Mariana in a definitive manner.

In a sort of misshapen music video, Mariana sings in karaoke mode over the homonymous theme by Mexican Luis Miguel, thus exploring certain structures that are imposed upon the female role. Mariana is a passive being awaiting her beloved man—her immobility underscored by the wheelchair—, and all that she can do is keep waiting, without taking any initiative for the meeting to become a reality.

After a foray, in that same year, in a video with Daniel Umpiérrez for his Sala de espera (2000) installation, Delgado made Feliz aunque no libre (2000), which also questions certain social rites. One such rite is the fifteen-year anniversary for women, which motivates the most diverse and absolutely stereotyped celebrations, from the dress and the waltz to the hundreds of pictures, and the mandatory video.

As in Ayer, the video is built around a performance by Delgado in the Montevideo Shopping Center. Habitual customers are converted into surprised spectators watching her go down the main escalator wearing an elegant salmon-colored dress and white gloves, and carrying a bouquet in her hands, to be received by her companion, all in blue, and dance the traditional waltz with him. On their side, a video screen shows the famous comic strip Love Is…, which, by means of cliché phrases, stated what the act of loving really consisted of. After the waltz is through, the couple goes up the same escalator, kissing and hugging. To the recording, Delgado incorporated, in the subtitles, phrases taken from Love Is…: “Love Is… dreaming of wedding bells and babies,” “Love Is… doing the dishes yourself,” “Love Is… staying fit for him,” among others.

In the next year, for a solo exhibition at the Subte Municipal in Montevideo, curated by Adriana Broadway (a project by Daniel Umpiérrez), she made the video Candy. Queen of Karaoke (2001), which was screened alongside photographs of Candy—Paula Delgado herself, once again using an alter ego—and of her busy social life: by the pool, at the beauty parlor, etc.

Candy is a sort of third-world, eighties-style Jennifer Beals, determined to triumph in the wonderful world of spectacle. The video, shot in the abandoned building of the Montevideo Hall of Justice, featured another karaoke song, now including choreography. The embryo of the work was Candy Is among Us, which was presented in the exhibition BIG. Quisiera ser grande (2000), at the Momenta Art, New York, and curated by Santiago Tavella and Fernando López Lage. The work was mentioned in no less than The New York Times, in December 2000.

In 2004, along with Julia Castagno, she was awarded a prize for young artists from the Paul Cézanne contest, organized by the French Embassy in Montevideo, for her urban intervention Expansiva. Together, they later on made the video Karina (2006), which debuted in the group exhibition Soberbia y pasión (2006), at the Subte Municipal.

According to Delgado, Karina is a watershed work between her early productions and her later work: “I have always worked with the gender issue, but I changed my focus.” Karina is a woman who, like so many others, faces the everyday violence of having her most basic rights restricted, by having to endure being hostilized in the street by some men who use words as a means of harassment, going so far as to physical contact. In this case, there is a key variation: Karina is a boxer. And if Mariana would wait, Karina will act.

Cómo sos tan lindo (2005) is a video made by Delgado in which the artist puts ads in newspapers inviting men who consider themselves handsome for a casting process. Fourteen Uruguayan men are selected to act and to answer questions about the issue of male beauty. Delgado defines Cómo sos tan lindo as a travelling project focusing on male self-perception of beauty, and its resulting images.

The video featured in the exhibition 13 x 13 - trece curadores / trece artistas (2005), held at Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo. The curator-general, Manuel Neves, invited Paula Delgado and Adriana Broadway/Daniel Umpiérrez (who had already done the Candy curatorship at the Subte Municipal) to work together. In the exhibition catalogue, there is an extremely revealing dialogue between Delgado and Umpiérrez, written in the form of a curatorial text:

Paula: …What I want is for this to be inescapable.

Adriana: What do you want to be inescapable?

P: The image of a naked young man as an erotic object. It is important that the image be large because it is not something very common, an everyday thing. Neither is it very common to allow oneself to see an image like this.

A: When did you realize that this was not so common?

P: I always did. I cannot find images that explore man from a female vantage point. Those that exist are usually made from a homoerotic view. The most difficult thing is when that absence is regarded as normal.

And that was when Paula decided, in Cómo sos tan lindo, to leave behind her alter egos and start directing her portrayed ones, to ask herself, along with them, about more than male beauty, about the production of images that are bearers of that beauty. The reason for this uneven relation between naked female bodies and naked male bodies.

After the video recorded in Uruguay, the project Cómo sos tan lindo had a second phase, this time featuring Argentine young men, fully produced in Argentina—it is a key feature of her art to elaborate the entire work in its own context—and which could be seen last year at Galería Belleza y Felicidad. With the results visible, Delgado decided to raise the stakes and record in Santiago, Chile, a third video.

Delgado’s oeuvre is developing. With each new video, she fine tunes her aim and becomes more incisive in critically confronting a state of affairs that must be revised and transformed without further ado. The images produced by Paula Delgado in this series of videos are the images that are missing, those that are hidden from us, those that we wish existed... The necessary ones.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>Dossier 032>>Paula Delgado". Available at: . São Paulo, 2007.