“ To all those tortured, raped, humiliated bodies. To all those bodies to whom their being as a body has been denied”.
Jean Luc Nancy, on the occasion of Bosnian war.
Tortured, repressed, violated and manipulated all over this conflictive planet, the body irrefutably becomes transformed from a mere object to an everlasting bearer of speech. The very “speech of speech” urges us to speak instead of speaking about it, speak right up and out loud, speak against it, speak for it, let it speak. This is how French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sensorial and expressive omnipotence of the body in its interference with the external world, and this is how the body emerges in the series “Poètique de la Desaparition”. […]
Alarming and discomforting, Sádaba’s posture arguably serves as a metaphor for the condition of total expropriation, destruction and nihilism the body is subjected to today, as much as it brings into the foreground the existential right of not to be, in terms of placing oneself -in this case, Sádaba and her female being- within an alternative non-space that lies beyond codified language, politics and culture.
Sádaba’s discourse displays great affinities with the Lacanian view of femininity as a state of negativity existing outside the hermetically constructed male world. Such an interpretation allows a feminist reading of her work that the artist herself fully welcomes. For her, exposing one’s own body and self, speaking volumes through it, implies a fundamental political attitude as the most unmediated way to express identity. “Poètique de la Desaparition” was originally performed before the camera as an unpremeditated response of personal exorcism. Yet, it could not have resulted less political. Just the presence of a suffering naked female body between the sheets of a double bed makes up for the absence of the politically and socially charged landscapes of Sádaba’s previous oeuvres. The political statement running through all this self-exposure is too explicit… […]
Somewhere between the material and spiritual realms, being becomes no-being, and so does representation. In Sádaba’s visceral response, movement, feeling and time are employed as tools for a wide-ranging critical analysis and formal deconstruction of the granted space that defines the photographic frame, rendering obsolete devices such as the unique still image, the representation space and the frozen time. Repetition, rhythm and eclipse… So many bodies, so many expressive possibilities; as if time were dilated into many parallel moments; as if time were comprised not from a unique moment but from millions of afters and befores within an eternal present in an infinite emotional and conceptual expansion.
Fragments of the text written by Natasha Christia for Eyemazing Magazine, 2009
