IDALIA VÁSQUEZACHURY

WRITTEN BY MARÍA DE LOURDES MARIÑO

Idalia Vásquez-Achury's photographs inhabit an intermediate space. The in-between effect of having no directions, coming from nowhere, and heading who knows where is central to her visual imagery. This act of permanent transition is what her camera captures at different stages. Vásquez-Achury appears to have found out, like French writer George Perec, that there are “spaces of every kind and every size, and to live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.”

These images of transition and of perpetual becoming display the opacity of a sense of self captured in its transience. In this sense, the differentiation of intimate and public in Vásquez-Achury's photographs is irrelevant. Everything appears public and intimate at the same time. Maybe this is why her work feels like the documentation of a performance; we can see her there, capturing the moment of transition, attempting to address the performativity of being without getting trapped in exclusionary categories. And yet, as Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons remind us, “identity could be a tragedy,” and identity does feel like a tragedy here.

The experience of self-definition attached to an idea of wholeness in Western culture has become a question of affects and relationality in Vásquez-Achury’s work. As a result, subjectivity is bent, fragmented, feeble, inadequate. Knowing that Vásquez-Achury is not just photographing herself, but her own life, makes even more powerful the fact that her face is covered, blurred, pierced, and sewed in the creative process. It is a brown body that does not fit in, and the internal violence of its transition ends up disrupting its ability to speak. The racial performativity of affection becomes Vásquez-Achury's perfect armor; yes, it is about feeling brown, feeling down in the academic tradition of Cuban American writer José Esteban Muñoz. The politics of brownness in the intimate experience of displacement is essential to experience Vásquez-Achury's photographs, but that intermediate space of vulnerability is just the beginning, always the starting point

INTERSECTION # 1 (above)

Inkjet print on self-adhesive material. 10’

12,980 MASQUE (left)

Archival

THESE IMAGES OF TRANSITION AND OF PERPETUAL BECOMING DISPLAY THE OPACITY OF A SENSE OF SELF CAPTURED IN ITS TRANSIENCE.

UNTITLED (above)