Llorar mucho (To Cry A Lot)

2017 - Painting (Painting)

70 x 29 cm

Fernanda Laguna

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Llorar mucho (To Cry A Lot) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina. It also picks up the thread of earlier works, accentuating the use of cotton, and embracing an almost cornily sentimental tone. Laguna’s work functions best in sets, rather than in isolation, and she often exhibits them next to one of her poems in order to mark their intention or tone. Her practice demands an exercise of unlearning, of embracing vulnerability. In her own words, this artwork, as well as her commitment to Villa Fiorito, follow a “path of the heart”. They shy away from conceptual strategies, and resort to care and emotion as vehicles for the compositions. They also reflect her interest in subverting notions of value and accentuating the affective quality of that which surrounds her.

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Fernanda Laguna has mobilized and influenced a whole generation of artists through her various projects since the mid-1990s. Interested in the potential of affects, her practice cannot be detached from her personal life and political commitments as a feminist. Together with Cecilia Pavón, Laguna initiated the seminal independent space Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) in the late 1990s, and with Javier Barilaro and Washington Cucurto the publishing cooperative Eloísa Cartonera. For the past 15 years, she has been active in the marginalized community of Villa Fiorito in the outskirts of Buenos Aires where she has strengthened her activism against gender-motivated violence, working with women in situations of risk, and offering pleasurable experiences to the community as a means to expand their creative potential. Laguna is interested in women’s pleasure as a political force, and in the expressiveness of popular handicrafts, often resorting to poor materials, such as ribbons, glitter, little chains, or cotton, in her works. This serves as a perfect example of her belief in art as a carrier for spontaneous expression of subjectivity and in the political weight such expression might have. In 2017 she started El Universo, a small shop where she informally exhibits and sells all sorts of objects “belonging to the universe” such as sand, trash, buried insects, earrings, wood, stickers, and a limitless list of other things.

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Colors:

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• feminist_movement.n.01
• emotion.n.01
• identity.n.01
• sex.n.04
• materiality.n.02