(…) Of Cirenaica I knew, let’s say it quickly and badly, part of her photographic work (…).
Suddenly, what I believed was only contained in one level, that is, in two dimensions, jumped into the 3D universe.
(…) In the pieces of that series I looked for points of contact with Cirenaica’s photographic oeuvre. Then I enumerated them: the presence of the body, the posture or gesture in which “her women” are perpetuated inside (re)created scenes or stages, the feminine universe: that space where party and pain, eroticism and punishment, subjection and the search for a crack implying a path of expansion or escape alternate.
(…) Reviewing Cirenaica’s evolution as a visual artist, I noticed that representation is another area of confluence between those installations and the photos. At the beginning, photography included a sort of performance. Were her acting studies the nutritional source? Cirenaica played a role before the camera and thought about the photo too: lights, stage, direction of the production. Cirenaica was also as a sort narrator-character, a collective enunciation device. I think that, at the beginning, she was not aware of this detail: the photo as a visceral act and not as a platform or a denunciation. Installations make up the other area where theater is the influence: properties, scenography, spirit. Of that stage, I would not want to overlook that anger, inconformity, reaction, even revenge, are present, as a supposed testimony of life or biography. There are no specific details granting temporariness to most of her photos nor are they circumscribed to a geographical area.
In her work, a woman is not “a Cuban born in the sixties.” The lives of not a few women are reflected in that mirror. (…)
In these series a girl appears on stage, a man too: another significant detail. A different type of beauty (glamour?) should not be overlooked either: the blue, the green, the pink accompanied by hard pigments; the youth, freshness and irreverence of a girl and the almost inexpressive face of a man—who will appear travestied and will be used as a sort of mannequin or support for objects that are not sharp now, but apparently innocuous (a pure ludic act or a gesture of revenge?). Variations of naivety; a story flowing unhurriedly, but under the surface of the abyss: repressed desires, the notion of what is not love and happiness, the imposition of limits, the cloister, submission again, the need to escape, a small cry on the throat of a woman bearing the name of a city, the name of a philosophical school: Cirenaica.
