The art of being at home

Jus­tice for women artists

QuedAR’T draws from the legacy of west­ern mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary artists, above all fig­u­ra­tive paint­ing and some pho­tographs, to cre­ate an imag­i­nary mu­seum of home­made works of art “of in­fi­nite nu­ance“. It also marks a dif­fer­ence with ac­tual mu­se­ums, all closed for al­most two months and with­out any hope of re­open­ing any time soon. In this on­line space, vir­tual, fe­male cre­ation en­joys the equal­ity which has his­tor­i­cally been de­nied it. More than a third of the pieces are by fe­male artists.

The per­spec­tive of genre runs through it all, Gar­ganté points out. And this en­dows the pro­ject with a healthy crit­i­cal spirit, which is very use­ful for ad­dress­ing the role that has tra­di­tion­ally been as­signed to women – in charge of the daily house­hold chores, an over­ex­ploited cliché in art.

The se­lec­tion has also been made with sen­si­tiv­ity to­wards sex­ual and af­fec­tive di­ver­sity and to bod­ies out­side the norm. At the same time, it does not leave out the most un­com­fort­able re­al­i­ties of this quar­an­tine and the con­cept of the house as a hos­tile ter­ri­tory. “The home might not al­ways be a refuge, it can also be a place of con­flict, of op­pres­sion and abuse; hav­ing a house doesn’t mean hav­ing a home,“ says Gar­ganté.

Of all the sec­tions (about 20), the one on the hell house has been hard­est to build, he ad­mits. An ef­fort was made to go be­yond the par­a­disiac gar­dens of San­ti­ago Rusiñol. They worked to give vis­i­bil­ity to the vi­o­lence against women in Frida Kahlo’s paint­ings or of Ana Mendi­eta’s pho­tographs.

Ac­com­pa­ny­ing texts

Stay­ing home to avoid a cruel pan­demic hides more than one truth, all com­plex but some es­pe­cially tragic, and the lie of art can also bring them closer to us. Hence the im­por­tance that the cre­ators of this vi­sual pro­posal have given to the text that ac­com­pa­nies the pieces, to go be­yond ap­pear­ances and stereo­types. A small se­duc­tive and evoca­tive piece of writ­ing pre­cedes the walk through each of the blocs. To the one ded­i­cated to the toi­lette, show­ing art by An­toni Fabrés, An­to­nio López, Berthe Morisot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ramon Casas, Pi­casso, and Robert Map­pelthorpe, we read: “Bath time is the real mo­ment of the body. The mo­ment of truth that the mir­ror re­turns to us, which nev­er­the­less also de­ceives us with false promises often made of fire­works, se­quins and fine fab­rics. See­ing our­selves well and tak­ing care of our­selves is like a com­mand­ment and an al­liance with the self. It is tak­ing care of our­selves by paus­ing in the mid­dle of stress, and the dry and ugly re­al­ity. Be le­nient, not too re­lent­less to know how to enjoy stop­ping and notic­ing water droplets drip­ping on your skin or evap­o­rat­ing. The mo­ment of the body tells us – al­ways in in­ti­mate di­a­logue – that our car­cass is per­haps the only thing we re­ally have. For some, the body will be a tem­ple and for oth­ers a sim­ple hut: our house of the soul, made of mor­tal flesh.“ Home and body, in­sep­a­ra­ble now and for­ever.

The web­site also has a fun sec­tion that in­vites peo­ple to em­u­late their favourite paint­ings. Artis­tic chal­lenges are a phe­nom­e­non on so­cial media these days. QuedAR’T a casa al­ready has a bank of over a hun­dred of these chal­lenges sub­mit­ted by its fol­low­ers. At this point, what mat­ters least is whether art mim­ics life or if it is a case of life im­i­tat­ing art.