Fabiola Torres-Alzaga

Her most recent work has focused on cinematic representation and its blind spots, as well as their impact on the construction of a societal imaginary. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Hollywood emerged as an industry with certain political and moral interests, deciding what could be seen and what should disappear from the screen in order to preserve a morally acceptable society. This regularization, driven by the Hays Code, expelled dissident sexual identities from the cinematic landscape and decelerated women’s emancipation in the development of a more varied society.

In response to the established canons of representation, certain films have inaugurated new fields of perception within their narratives. The limitations of cinematic forms dissolve in the face of explicit, frontal imagery and other relationships arise between lines of dialogue. If the shot frames a reality, the use of the offscreen invites spectators to imagine other possibilities.

The Uninvited suggests a phantasmal space inside a house, following the aesthetics of film noir. The artist built a set especially for the filmed shot, producing spatial fragments of the uninhabitable. Torres-Alzaga’s interest lies in intertwining visual glazes with spectral aspects of gothic literature, which film has taken up through the horror genre and the use of the figure of the ghost—diaphanous and difficult to perceive—as a dweller in the crevices of the establishment. An absent presence in which dissident bodies could generate other ways of perceiving.

Artist: Fabiola Torres-Alzaga (Mexico City, Mexico, 1978)
 
Curatorship: Virginia Roy