ELIAZAR ORTIZ
VISUAL ARTIST
Fotocopiados
A collective action, pamphlets installations, street art, geo-political cartography. Art as activism was the alternative to face my own concerns, this made me reflect and be active in collectivism and my political commitment.
The migrant, displaced, prostituted body, gender change, a piece that without thinking already speaks of the post-colonial.
Only Buenos Aires could give me the opportunity to explore my concerns and ideas in a fluid way, that city injects you with anger to transform its fury.
The urban space as a political scene was possibly what motivated the making of a project like Fotocopiados. The objectification of the female body is so normalized that when I found the metaphor with the post-colonial situation of Latin American countries the proposal could not be more coherent. Already my immigrant situation in Buenos Aires inspired me to do political art, it asked me to go out into the streets, to perform.
Helped with my tribe of friends, most of whom are immigrants, by pasting leaflets at bus stops, commercial posters, telephone booths and other public spaces. Flyers inspired by the original decadent pamphlets where the female sex was sold as one more product of the daily life of capital, supply and demand.
I did the photoshoot, transformed the names of the brothels, the streets of their respective locations and their telephones, by the name of the nations, their capitals and respective surfaces, the start dates of colonization and changes in dictatorships or interventions. It was the first time that I intervened my photographs with tape and my first action-performance, where in the days of the bicentennial of Argentina and October 12 we took action.
On the bicentennial we pamphlets, distributed in all public spaces where the flyers promoting the brothels were. Three friends, Michelle, Dole, both Puerto Rican, Afro-descendant, and Brilly, Colombian, indigenous descendant, distributed the pamphlets the same way as the same men (usually men who distributed them) who distributed the women's sales.
The change from the female to the male body was the first reaction of surprise, but what shocked and puzzled people the most were the details of the intervened photographs, with those historical data and descriptions. The reactions of those who took them were worth more than a thousand words, many were offended, many were violent.
I transformed the names of the brothels, the streets of their respective locations and their telephones, by the name of the nations, their capitals and respective surfaces, the start dates of colonization and changes in dictatorships or interventions. It was the first time that I intervened my photographs with tape and my first action-performance, where in the days of the bicentennial of Argentina and October 12 we took action.
That same night, the crowd gathered, a historic meeting where South American socialism gathered in maximum wave, da Silva, Correa, Morales, Mújica, Piñera, Lugo, Chávez greeted the bicentennial and embraced a left hand of a Kirchner movement that they moved the lively feelings of an Argentina as united as the ceramic that breaks and they fly to unite.
In the raging night of festivities, claims and visibility of all kinds, the most friends joined the gang, the majority immigrants who questioned the system. We made the action become collective by taking the flyers to all possible spaces: symbols of architecture, spaces with public and social functions, inside churches, at the congress bus stop, in restaurants, common places ... with the spirit that only youth and anarchism let flow; political art, only in the street makes sense.
On October 12, when we repeated the action, I only had Elise for the performance, an activist friend, feminist, Afro-descendant of Canada. She was so brave! She gave the action a different character, she appropriated it. We agreed that at the time of delivering the pamphlet, the passerby would be congratulated for her more than 500 years being colonized, the security with which the action unfolded in the hectic center of Buenos Aires was constantly breaking with the daily life that passed there.
I understood the body as a political weapon because I understood that the body is the first thing that is controlled and corrupted.
I took this project to an exhibition space, Casa Brandon, a LGTBIQ art and culture club. I was satisfied with the installations in the bathrooms of the space and the samples of the original photographs intervened, more when I compare it with street art, performance, improvisation, adrenaline, insurgency in action, it has no comparison with any art form in my later production.