Gloria Oyarzabal

Woman Go No’Gree

Gloria Oyarzabal (ES)

Empires, by nature, embody and institutionalize difference, both between metropolis/colony and colonial subjects. Imperial imagery floods popular culture. Gender categories were a kind of biologic “new tradition” that colonialism institutionalized in Yoruba, Igbo and many African cultures. Infantilization of women as part of the Western patriarchal system was also exported with the colonization of the mind, configuring a state of vulnerability, facilitating dependency. In 1987, more than a decade before queer theory, Nigerian writer Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, freeing the subject position of “husband” from its affiliation with men, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Can a daughter be considered a son? Can a woman take another as a wife, openly complying with the requirements marriage tradition imposes on the groom?

© Gloria Oyarzabal, White Privilege - Wild (On Exotization, Hipersexualation, Victimization, and other - Zations), 2018

At a time when gender and queer theory are partially stuck in an identity-politics rut, these theories warn against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures and questions the concept of gender itself. Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí, another Nigerian feminist writer (The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses) attributes the biologizing of difference to the primacy of vision in European intellectuality, basing its hierarchies on binary distinctions: male/female, white/black, homosexual/ heterosexual. Stereotypes are anti-truth. Beauty norms are often measured with Eurocentric values, white beauty narratives and ideals of beauty (thinness, youth) that are strongly racialized. Whiteness is reinforced as the norm, “otherness” becomes something fetish and “exotic”. Erotic, sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, tradition, domestication… all these aspects, with their own lights and shades in each society, should come out on the same level in order to compare. Can we assume social relations in all societies are organized around biological sexual difference? Beauty canon, modernity, stereotypes… and can we decolonize feminism questioning the Eurocentric gender categories in a universalistic and trustable manner?

Various artworks of the artist were exhibited at the National Museum of Finland, Korjaamo Culture Factory, Kaapeli, Karhupuisto, Tähtitorninvuoren puisto, and JCDecaux Finland.

© Gloria Oyarzabal, Pink Girl - Stripes (On Exotization, Hipersexualation, Victimization, and other - Zations), 2018

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gloria Oyarzabal is a Spanish artist photographer with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UCM (1998), who diversifies her professional activity between photography, cinema and teaching. She is co-founder and programmer of the Independent Cinema La Enana Marrón (The Brown Dwarf) in Madrid (19992009), which was dedicated to the diffusion of author, experimental and alternative cinema. Oyarzabal graduated in Conservation and Restoration of Art in 1993. She lived in Bamako, Mali for three years, developing her interest in the construction of the Idea of Africa, History of colonizationdecolonization, new tactics of colonialism and African feminisms (20092012). After her Master’s degree in Creation & Development of Photographic Projects at Blankpaper School of Photography (2014-15) her work has been shown at Organ Vida (Zagreb, HR ), Format (Derby, UK), Fotofestiwal (Lodz, PL), Athens Photo (GR), Lagos Photo (NG), PHE PhotoEspaña (ES), Thessaloniki Photo Museum (GR), Bitume Festival Lecce (IT), Encontros da Imagem Braga (PT), Odessa Foto (UA), Kaunas Foto (LT), among many others. In 2017 Oyarzabal was selected for the artistic residency Ranchito Matadero Nigeria-South Africa, where she developed her latest project about African feminisms in Madrid and Lagos (NG). That same year she won the Landskrona Dummy Award, which allowed her to publish her first photobook, Picnos Tshombé. In 2018 she was the winner of the Encontros da Imagem Discovery Award, the Community of Madrid Grant and got a PHmuseum 2nd Honorable Mention. In 2019 she won the Images Vevey Dummy Award, the PHOTO IS:RAEL (IL) Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, the PHOTOMED PRIZE and the FOTOFESTIWAL GRAND PRIX (Lodz, PL).