1 image 70 x70 cm; 4 images 33 x 33 cm
In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima. Her research highlights the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to the domestics. The project offers an analysis of this room, its size and its position in relation to the rest of the house. This study is based on houses constructed between 1930 and 2012. The project examines a selection of 60 houses by presenting the architect’s project, the front of the buildings, floor plans, comparative dimensions of the rooms. The choice of presenting a composition of several photographs of various dimensions recalls the aesthetic of conceptual photography. It is disturbing to go from the formal beauty of the images and of the architecture represented to the revealed reality, showing the deadlock of modernist architecture carried on in contemporary architecture. Daniela Ortiz’s work creates, without any indulgence, spaces of tension which explore the notion of social class, race and nationality accentuating the fact that societies are built on the notions of inclusion and exclusion.
In order to reveal and critique hegemonic structures of power, Daniela Ortiz constructs visual narratives that examine concepts such as nationality, racialization, and social class. Ortiz’s work is always formally evolving, while maintaining a grassroot activist commitment. Her recent projects and research take up colonialism as it relates to European migratory control systems and legal structures that incite and perpetuate violence against racialized communities. Her artistic practice has turned to focus more on material and manual work, developing art pieces in ceramic, collage, and in formats such as children books in order to distinguish her work from eurocentric conceptual art aesthetics. She has also developed projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers.
The Rebellion of Roots by Daniela Ortiz depicts a series of situations in which tropical plants, held hostage in the botanical gardens and greenhouses of Europe, are protected and nurtured by the spirits of racialized people who died as a result of European racism...
Previously, Ortiz produced a series of photographs related to her research on the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to domestic servants in the modernist architectural houses of South American upper class families...