Cristinalcas

Cristina Lucas (Jaén, 1973)
Cristina Lucas comes to photography as a performance artist and video maker using that medium both to document her performances and to use photography to question patriarchal image structures.
In almost all of her work, she interrogates the image, accepted wisdom—as conveyed in fairy-tales—or other modes of ordering the world. Her strategy is typically through gender reversal. She takes classic scenarios or parables that have been deeply embedded in western thought and substitutes females for males in the stories.
In stories such as the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, she penetrates to the heart of the matter by inserting Eve’s daughters into the basic scenario of the fratricidal conflict between pastoralists and nomads narrated in Genesis 4:1-16, in the Qur’an at 5:26-32, and in Moses 5:16-41.
In Lucas’s retelling, “Cain y las hijas de Eva (Cain and Eve´s Daughters, 2008) are brothers but advance in the story by such different paths that no one knows if they will end up meeting. I am referring to the dualism of the story, to the official side, which is masculine and war-related in the great stories, and the feminine side, of the closest day by day. Cain finishes with his brother and this first war conflict turns him into the owner of paradise.” For Lucas, this is significant because, “without a doubt, this antecedent gives way to all the other wars in which territory is at stake and from the beginning of our days there are different cartographies and Cains that have conquered and drawn their personal paradises at the expense of others.” Thus, in the original tale, Cain stakes out his claim, marks his territory and enforces it. He is the first murderer and the new ruler of post-Fall Paradise. The Garden of Eden becomes his. . .
As noted, Lucas inserts the feminine into the tale by using stereotypical female role models, an enigmatic portrait of a woman named Cristina, several Bailarinas (Ballerinas), and various women in botanical gardens—metaphorically placing them in the Garden of Eden. Yet Lucas spins her analysis even further by alluding to more modern fairy-tales. Her image of Cristina shows the protagonist pulling her long hair up at the back as she stands on tiptoes. Here she is referring both to the classic stories of the Baron of Münchhausen and Rapunzel from the fairy-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the famous German philologists.
Lucas’s simultaneous reference to both stories is ingenious and subtle. She writes, “I have taken as references two fables, the one of the Baron of Münchhausen, who, being trapped in mud, pulled his ponytail so hard that he managed to pull himself and his horse out of the mud pit; but also that of the princess Rapunzel, trapped in a tower with her long hair, but this time, Rapunzel does not expect the prince to climb up her braids, she saves herself by jumping off the tower.” It is a double tale newly encoded as a feminist narrative of metaphorical, do-it-yourself, empowerment.
Two other closely connected pieces, Pantone (2007), a video lasting 41 minutes, and Las Licencias Politicas (The Political Licences, 2007), a series of paintings, are sub-titled “A Story of Cainism.” Here Lucas uses Pantone, the computer ordering system favored by graphic designers, to color in the political map of the world in a history of every invasion recorded since 500 B.C. She explains “each change in size implies an invasion, each change of color is a change of identity and this way, second by second, the painted areas are modified and conform to our actual world. ... It is one of those cartographic compositions that are appreciated in a different way depending on the origin of the spectator.”
Habla (Talk, 2008) is a seven-minute video that takes as its starting point Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses. In the traditional story, upon completing the statue Michelangelo struck it on the knee and demanded it talk. The female protagonist, a stand-in for Lucas and, symbolically, for Michelangelo as well, demands that the statue explain the patriarchal system of the three religions. Frustrated by Moses’s silence, she assaults the statue with a hammer, first striking it on the knee and demanding explanations. Faced with the immutable silence of the patriarch, she mounts the statue and starts battering its head in with the hammer. The young woman re-enacts both Michelangelo’s audacity and, in a Freudian twist, the Oedipal killing of the father.
The images in Lucas’s works are sublime and ridiculous yet compelling in their questioning of patriarchal systems ordering the world that have been used over the millennia to subjugate women. By force of argument as well as access to tools, Eve’s daughters, and thus Lucas and her cadre of angry young women, have their symbolic revenge.