Being the son of a drug-addicted prostitute who could only see him as a mistake from the moment of his conception was a sentence that life handed down to Abel Azcona in a tyrannical and totalitarian way, condemning him, from gestation, to a placenta full of psychoactive substances and alcohol, in addition to the misery and nightmare that he represented for his mother—who not only forced him to live an unwanted life, but also abandoned him to the randomness of the road, which, in a search to find himself, or rather, to forget himself, led him to live through the nightmares of sexual abuse, physical and mental mistreatment, drug addiction, discrimination, and, at best, attempted suicide.
Being the son of a drug-addicted prostitute who could only see him as a mistake from the moment of his conception was a sentence that life handed down to Abel Azcona in a tyrannical and totalitarian way, condemning him, from gestation, to a placenta full of psychoactive substances and alcohol, in addition to the misery and nightmare that he represented for his mother—who not only forced him to live an unwanted life, but also abandoned him to the randomness of the road, which, in a search to find himself, or rather, to forget himself, led him to live through the nightmares of sexual abuse, physical and mental mistreatment, drug addiction, discrimination, and, at best, attempted suicide.
Azcona's critical and artistic thinking, and his insatiable need to understand why he was the unwanted one, the unloved one, the abandoned one, have led him to turn his artistic processes into universes that allow him to embody, in the first person and in an aggressive, wrenching and abrupt way, the possible scenarios of prostitution, drug addiction, abuse and abandonment that he believes framed his mother's life. An attempt to "put himself in the shoes" of the woman with whom he shares his genes—a life devoted to forgetting her, remembering her, understanding her and hating her. A ghost he himself has created in order to survive and give meaning to his life, in spite of himself.
Abel Azcona's processes constitute a theoretical and practical investigation of an autobiographical nature, in which he has always developed scenarios related to gestation, bonding, abuse, abandonment, prostitution, motherhood and discrimination. This has allowed him to understand his own experiences and, on many occasions, those of the people who take part in his collective actions, in which he uses the body as a tool of resistance and catharsis that confronts him with his fears, anxieties, sorrows, disorders and desires, among other mental and bodily states of the human being, drawing into his experiential acts others who also wish to confront their own demons, face them and, in this way, identify them in an attempt to overcome them.
It is impossible to speak of his work in the singular; with each intervention there are also new people, contexts and objectives that create unique processes, but with the same intention: to generate spaces for confrontation, mourning and catharsis through collective artistic and plastic acts that stem from the reality and the problems of those who take part in them.
Unwanted, is a symbolic dialogue through which the artist seeks to converse with his biological mother, who is his greatest ghost and demon and to whom, paradoxically, he has dedicated his life—the very life she should have denied him, since for Azcona abortion is the best option, and the only thing he holds against her is not having been able to be part of her infamous statistics. He considers life to be the cruelest gesture of a moralistic society, full of rules made to be judged by and broken.
This exhibition includes the photographic record of three performative processes. The first, Feed me, suggests, through breast milk and the artist's gesture of shaking and spilling it, the lack of relationship and the broken bond that Azcona had with his mother from birth. The second, Biological Meeting, is the record of seven days of contact actions with residents of Pamplona and San Sebastián (Spain), who shared wounds of abandonment, abuse and mistreatment. The last, Anonymous Vaginas, is a project carried out in New York, San Francisco and Bogotá, in which, once again, Azcona, through the collection of ten thousand photographs of vaginas, proposes his own birth from other women rather than from his biological mother—an act that allows him to seek a bond of renewal that, in some way, constitutes the possibility of being born again.
This sharp, critical body of work hopes to confront MAC's audiences, visitors and communities, prompting reflection on issues that are common ground for everyone.
The show will be open to the public until January 25, 2015.
Juan David Quintero Arbeláez
Curator