Movement

2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

2:11 minutes

Amapola Prada

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In Amapola Prada’s work Movement, we see three spotlit, female bodies lying inert in a darkened room, alongside three dressed, standing figures holding long, wooden spoons. Looking over the static bodies, the standing figures place their spoons in-between the women’s legs and begin moving them in circular, rowing-like motion, like the oars of a boat. The psycho-sexually charged nature of Movement is illustrative of Prada’s dream-like works, which often relate to the subconscious and other internal processes with which we express desires, tensions, and latent emotions. For Prada, our bodies are receptacles and hence the memories they carry, both symbolically and physically, are critical sources of information. In the case of Movement, the female body is portrayed as motionless and passive: akin to the wooden spoons, used as yet another inanimate tool. Movement , alongside the works Unit/y and Power , forms part of the video triptych Revolution , where Prada investigates ideas commonly associated with the concept of ‘revolution.’ Contrasting the connotations these words carry with archetypal and symbolic situations, Prada proposes a revolution that departs from the body, advocating for “the acceptance of ourselves and our circumstances past and present, without pretenses or glories.”

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As the daughter of an actor, Amapola Prada recalls frequently attending the theater as a child and noticing that she never saw herself (her body or reality) represented. On the same vein, during her studies in the field of Social Psychology at university, she noticed the lack of inclusion of non-Western subjectivities—mestizos, Indigenous, migrants among them—and their bodies across all the texts and theories she encountered. Correspondingly, Prada turned to the languages of performance, theater, and video—combining them with her training in Psychology—to investigate, departing from the body, the plethora of meaning that simple movements and actions can contain. Across her performance and video work, Prada proposes that our bodies have been conditioned and carry imprints of discourses that determine race, social class and gender, and predetermine us as individuals. Her actions are attempts to strip our bodies of these preconditions or at least position her own expression as an opposing force to the history of oppression and repression which defines her body and her experience of everyday life in Lima, Peru.

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Colors:

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• psychology.n.01
• body.n.01
• movement.n.04
• memory.n.01
• revolution.n.01
• mother.n.01