from outside to insight
Hardcore Art Contemporary Space
Miami, FL

For more than two decades, Nela Ochoa has been employing body references in order to portray the movements of society, inviting viewers to reflect about human condition beyond the traditional aesthetic experience. Based in the work of Françoise Delsarte (1811-1871), she has explored the potential of gestures at the same time she pioneered video art in her native land, Venezuela. In this way, Nela Ochoa has created an ‘artistic solar system’ in which the body takes the place of the Sun. Videos, photographs, installations, paintings and sculptures, stand for the orbits, while gestures, radiographs, and genes indicate the planets. Moving around these worlds there are the moons denoted by dance, religion, femininity, violence, ecology and science.

Since the mid-80s, when Ochoa started using and experimenting with video equipment, she has been taking advantage of technological and visual innovations, mostly related to the medical field, such as x-rays, echocardiograms, magnetic resonance images, as well as genomic formulae published and distributed over the Internet.

Genetic-echo (2006), the most recent work of the artist, presents a computerized video-animation based on Edvard Munch’s The Scream personage. By reproducing hundreds of Munch’s figures organized in four different colors, the artist illustrates the genetic sequence (ATCG) of a gene linked to anxiety and dancing . Every few seconds, about three to eight Munch’s screaming faces are interchanged with frightened faces of people found by Ochoa in on-line news reports. The choreographic appearance of human victims among Munch’s emblematic characters suggests a tragic but intriguing analysis. Munch’s archetypal image is hermeneutically updated by means of its use as a scientific instrument and a device to mirror the horrors of our time.

Following a similar path the artist has made Casualties (2006), an installation comprised by five enormous fabric sacks. Each skin-toned sack was shaped to display a transfer-print of an x-rayed torso. The x-rays expose gunshot wounds of the chest. On top of the images, there are strings of letters corresponding to genes related to aggressive and addictive behaviors. The arrangement of Casualties, hanging like meat in a butcher’s window, questions the significance of life revealing a deep concern about the violent period that most of the world is facing today. Both Genetic-echo and Casualties evidence the need of decoding and understanding the origins of violence; the homeland of violence; the same violence that plays a part in the early video-installations of Ochoa, such as Baño de Sangre (1993) and A plomo (1994), and still lingers in her daily life and artistic practice.

The intersection between violence and femininity seems to be explicit in Lejana (1999), and I could be you could be me (2006), two videos where Ochoa performed as a homeless woman in the streets of Caracas and Miami. The performance was inspired on a short-story called Lejana (distant), written by Julio Cortázar , which describes the relationship between a wealthy woman and a homeless alter-ego. In the first video, Ochoa walks along the city of Caracas while being observed with rejection and pity. In the second video, Ochoa walks through downtown, Miami, coming close to pedestrians and giving away sheets of paper printed with the text ‘I could be / You / Could be me’. Although most of the people tried to ignore and avoid Ochoa’s persona, those who accepted the piece of paper got disconcerted when they read the subversive sentence. By carrying out this action, the artist deconstructs the distance and semantically encircles the participants. In Jung’s terminology, Nela Ochoa embodied the archetype of ‘the shadow ’, that side of our personality which we do not consciously display in public and is often projected onto other individuals. However, the way Ochoa undertakes and integrates the role of the rejected is not necessarily following the ‘homeless’ usual type. In contrast to homeless individuals, who happen to be ‘invisible’ and ‘vulnerable’ for most of society, Nela confronts people and shows them that part of them which they persist in avoiding and rejecting. She adopts a violent posture to illuminate the shadow of the others; to tell them the unspeakable truth; to make them complete the performance.

Similarly to Lejana, the artist made a video installation titled Las Ruinas Circulares (1997), based in the homonymous short-story , written by Jorge Luis Borges . The story refers to a man who falls asleep and dreams of creating and giving life to another man. After a long period of time, someone wakes him up just to find out that he himself is the dream of someone else. Las Ruinas Circulares (The Circular Ruins) encompasses a round video projection placed in a dark room surrounded by sand and ashes. The video starts with panning and showing different angles of a Yanomami hut located in the Amazon jungle. Text fragments from Borges’ story alternate with the images around the spectral pose of Ochoa, who appears and disappears wearing a blue poncho in a meditative attitude. For Lacan, we are who we are only in relation to other people. Our knowledge of the world comes to us by way of other people; the language we learn to speak preexists us, and to a great degree our thoughts conform to preestablished concepts and linguistic structures. In this sense, the lonely and ghostly figure of Ochoa in Las Ruinas Circulares manifests the invisible and omniscient presence of ‘the other’. As in I could be you could be me and San Joaquín es un gesto (1985), Nela carries the role of the solitary and ambulant woman, suggesting that she could be operating from an archetype like the ‘wild woman ’, the archetype that embraces the female soul, the source of the feminine.

After exploring Nela Ochoa’s cultural universe, the voyager might discover a dimension where anima and animus maintain a positive balance, where dance and science revolve harmoniously around the body, encountering the body of culture within the body of our time, from the outside to the insight.

Yucef Merhi, Curator