Claudia Casarino

Claudia works from the conceptual point of view, reflecting on gender issues and the consciousness of the body - put in tension by borders and forced transits. Her work deals with interpreting the universe of women as a subject of social transformation.

She has exhibited since 1998 and has done so in 5 versions of the MERCOSUR Biennial, the Biennial of Havana, Tijuana, Busan, Cuenca, Curitiba, Algeria, and Venice, as well as the triennial of Santiago and Puerto Rico, and in various exhibitions in galleries, museums and cultural centers of Asunción, Santiago, San Pablo, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Milan, Amman, and London, among others.

Her work is included in the collections of the Museo del Barro, Victoria & Albert in London, BID in Washington DC, Spencer Museum in Lawrence, CAAM, Las Palmas. and Casa de las Américas in Havana

Body of Work “This concise text on the work of Claudia Casarino only seeks to outline, through some of her projects, just one vector of her complex production: the one that refers to the representation of the body that, once again, points in the direction of a dense set of problems weaved by social, political, and existential knots. By speaking about representation we are already touching upon a central subject: the perverse interplay of presence/absence (in this case the exhibition/disappearance of the body).

 Other conflicts revolving around this subject appear in the first place: the body’s impossible presence and, in the face of this essential vanishing, the strategies of fragmentation, displacement, and transparency (that which is spectral, undecidable about the body). The figure of space with which the body competes to impose its image, and fundamentally, the figure of clothing, that acts not so much as a metonym for the body than as a metaphor for its successive concealments, are also manifested. 

In second place, this central question directs us to another: that of the uncertain limits of contemporary art, whose precarious status appears threatened by foreign content: identity and memory, history’s ravings, or the harassment of thought. Over the background of these ponderous matters, the figures (the phantoms) Claudia invokes have to do with her position and personal map: gender, violence, estrangement, subjective construction, that is, death. The criticality of her work refers not so much to the weight of these contents as to their being questioned, in crisis, before the gaze.

In 1998, this then young artist presented a series based on the photographic image of her own naked body, exposed in lighted boxes that erected a tower almost 10 feet high. It is a dislocated organism: its representation leaves gaps and protrusions that are impossible to assemble. However, self-representation may appeal to other tactics. Claudia turns back on her initial scheme: she minimizes the body up to the limit that marks the possibility of comprehension and locks her belittled figure in boxes that barely allow to glimpse it, making it transparent and ratifying the specter-like quality of her incomplete presence: her archaic destiny of a disincarnate image (1998).

 In 1999 the body is withdrawn. The garments that substitute it not only invoke it, through the ploy of exact metonymies, but also conceal/betray its lack and, in its name, renegotiate agreements with space and assume new signifying positions. This delegation opens multiple paths. On one hand, the shirts are tensed with threads in the scene of commercial window displays or port containers (III Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, 2001). Labeled, exposed in window displays, imported from an abstract metropolis, the shirt becomes the sign for a decentered position, but also an announcement for a fetish restored by the commercial brand, apt to circulate as a substitute for the omitted body. On the other hand, the shirt is reflected onto another shirt, blending itself with it to create a new, mixed garment. It now supersedes the human place remembering in midair the trajectory of an embrace; representing the paradox of encounter that desires and fears otherness, seeking to maintain its sense of self while risking to become the other.   

Afterwards, the same garment attempts to fade, even though it stops tangled in the furthest limit authorized by its weave. A set of twenty white tulle dresses (2005) defies the gaze, that in the near absence of matter standing in its way, pierces the light tulle sieve and runs into the sharp shadows projected by the mesh onto the nearby wall. The dresses reveal not only the emptiness of the human body, but also the absence of its own matter, which appears substituted by its reflection. In another installation (2008), the white dresses become domestic uniforms and the tulles turn black. In both cases the body is whisked away: the faint mass of overlapping veils, in one case, and the dark signal projected by the uniforms, in the other, veil/reveal the absence of its recipients. These recipients are present through the clothing’s delegation, that fills in for the omitted figures. Such representational mediation opens a scene beyond the scene. The white gowns stamp the shadows with stately levity; the black ones, the uniformed status of subordinates.

 The garments that comprise The Sleep Disorder (2011) also work the colors and non-colors of clothing. The nightgowns adjust their tones ranging from white to bloody red through a spectrum of hues that invoke the tonalities of the human body, incarnate; at times, disincarnate. The layout of the fabrics, overlapping in part and in part half-open or folded, adopt the image of torn skin; the ruptured cocoon of a chrysalis, the flaky scales discarded by serpents; the skin left by fugitives, exiles, and Paraguayan migrants whose dreams of prosperity are almost always broken. Body and dress are one, says Lacan. Now both are skinned by a gesture that seeks to reveal the empty place they guard. That same void—that of representation, which cannot be covered nor shown—is exhibited/cloaked in the complex architecture of overlapping and half-open garments titled Pynandí (Bare Feet) (2010). The work—a reference to Uruguayan artist Juan Manuel Blanes’s La paraguaya (1879) (Paraguayan Woman) —points to the spectral presence of women after the Paraguayan War (1864-1870); a survivor planted on her bare feet and barely held up by her own rags. In the other extreme, infant dresses made of gold silk reproduce a trousseau that expects a girl, already destined to the social standing of her feminine identity. The small body is not here yet, but on the other side; she does not know that her brilliant image has anticipated her (2006).

 In this course—incomplete, barely sketched— body and dress exchange their textures, the symbol of their colors, their spaces and histories, perhaps even their odors. Claudia employs the aesthetic of clothes conceived not as design, but as an alibi, or a subterfuge, maybe even as a shield. Nocturnal or immaculate shield, bloody, golden or transparent, capable in each case of reflecting, rejecting, or recovering a moment of the lost body. In the gap opened by that lack, the artist can inscribe (in white, as she does in other works) the contours of that which representation has misplaced.” Ticio Escobar - August 28, Asunción

Pm / Am is a work that is articulated as a feminist questioning of the oppression imposed by the power of the heteropatriarchal capitalist system.Presented for the first time at the Tijuana Biennial, Pmam, through the use of tulle basted with cotton threads, Casarino reflects the invisibility of the double working day for women.

Women do that 'invisible work' that makes the world work. The work that remains indoors: cleaning, cooking, taking care of children and many other works associated with caring for others. Her story explains the constant use of the woman's body as a space and scene from which to become aware of gender issues and of the body always under tension.

A version of this work was installed in the former Hotal Italia brothel in Asuncion. Thus confirming the invisible double working day, at night as a sex worker and during the day as a caretaker of household chores, hence the name. The shadows reflected on the wall continue the drawing and thereby reaffirm it. Just as they reaffirm the universe of women as a subject of social transformation.

BIO

Claudia Casarino (Asunción, 1974).

She studied visual arts at Universidad Nacional de Asunción. Since 2006, Claudia has been director at Fundación Migliorisi an institution that conserves, promotes and diffuses art and design.  Among her recent solo shows are Mala Hierba / Yerba Mala in collaboration with Claudia Coca (Galería del Paseo, Lima, 2020); Iluminando la Ausencia (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las  Palmas, España, 2018); Trastornos del Sueño (Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, 2017) and Contrafuga (Centro Cultural de España Juan de Salazar, Asunción, 2017). She has participated in  multiple collective exhibitions such as Futuro Volátil (Casa Naranja, Córdoba, Argentina, 2018); Entre el Mañana y la Muerte (Museo del Barro, Asunción, 2017); Migrantes (En el arte  contemporáneo) Hotel de los Inmigrantes (MUNTREF, Buenos Aires, 2015). Casarino has also been part of Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico (2015); I Bienal de Asunción,  Paraguay (2015); 54 Bienal de Venecia; Trienal de Chile, Museo del Barro, Una mirada múltiple, Santiago, Chile (2009); V Bienal del MERCOSUR, Porto Alegre, Brasil (2005) and VII Bienal  de la Habana, Cuba (2000).

She has done a residency in Gasworks, London. In 2011, Claudia received the honorable mention from the national award by Bellas Artes Paraguay. Her work  belongs to different art collections that include Casa de las Américas, La Habana; Fundación Migliorisi, Asunción; Centro de Artes Visuales, Museo del Barro, Asunción; Colección de Arte  Contemporáneo del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo; Victoria & Albert Museum and Spencer Museum, Kansas.