2023-04-25 19:02:19
INTERVIEW WITH FLORENCIA ROJAS
Mary Good
Mary Good. Give us a few brief brushstrokes of who you are and what you do. How did you get into the world of art?
Florence Rojas. I was born in Argentina thirty-eight years ago. When I was very little my parents moved to Torremolinos, there I grew up. I went to the music conservatory throughout my childhood and much later I entered the world of visual arts through photography.
Mary Good. You are an artist, a lover of walks, meetings with friends, music and movies. Can you tell us about your interests and how you link them to your artistic practice?
Florence Rojas. I have many interests, I am very curious. I like to relate issues that are apparently far away, such as botany and history or politics. That freedom in the face of knowledge is very entertaining and fills my life with very diverse people, books and content. Like most artists, I really like music, movies, visiting exhibitions, reading… In addition to this interest in culture, I have always felt a certain discomfort towards the world we inhabit. This kind of political rage together with my interests in the sensitive and the artistic are two important torrents that meet in my work.
Mary Good. Among the projects and exhibitions you have carried out, which have been important and decisive?
Florence Rojas. There is a line of work that emerged with the Luna-Lager Bunker project in 2016 and that I continue to this day. I suppose that the last project that I finished and exhibited last year has been the most relevant so far. Avenida de los Poblados, without number It is a work on the site where the Carabanchel prison was. What I did was approach the terrain by layers: from the subsoil where a Roman site is hidden, to the sky or roof of the prison where the dissidents of the Coordinadora de Presos en Lucha rioted at the end of the seventies, passing through the wild flora that has grown from the rubble of the building after its demolition in 2008. To dissect this space so dense in content, I collaborated with an interdisciplinary team made up of archaeologist Laura Fernández, activist Sonia Dorado, landscape designer Tábata Pardo and artist Elisa Brown.
Mary Good. What kind of projects or proposals would you say yes to without blinking?
Florence Rojas. What makes me most excited is participating in proposals with artists I admire or who have similar interests to mine. Soon I am going to participate in a collective that I think will be great, with artists from various generations who have addressed similar themes, it has not yet been communicated so it should not say much more.
Mary Good. Does your line of work establish a connection with your way of understanding life? If so, do you think art is transformative?
Florence Rojas. My work is nourished by my biography and my way of understanding reality, there are direct connections, although I do not like to star in the proposals or reveal from which biographical episode exactly each of my works comes. I don’t know if art is transformative, I think that in almost every gesture there is a political power, even if it is micro-political, and I try to take advantage of it.
Mary Good. Thanks to working on different projects, such as individual and collective exhibitions, could we say that you find it positive to share, learn and grow collectively?
Florence Rojas. I love working with people, I like to form interdisciplinary work teams to address specific issues. I did so in the project “A fire in the subsoil”, in which I established the method that I later also developed in “Avenida de los Poblados, sin número”. I collaborated with the historians Cristina Cabrero Poch, Cristina de la Casa Rodríguez and Ana de Oliveira Escalonilla, with the landscape designer Tábata Pardo and with the telecommunications engineer Ana Arboleya. Together we went from bottom to top to Madrid’s Dehesa de la Villa park. I believe that art can be a place where different types of knowledge can come together more freely than in the academy where knowledge is compartmentalized.
Mary Good. References… Two creative artists.
Florence Rojas. Zoe Leonard y Eva Lootz.
Maria Good. A collective and artistic proposal.
Florence Rojas. Forensic Architecture and its proposal “Cloud Studies”.
Maria Good. An event that has marked you.
Florence Rojas. I experienced a strong situation of police repression. It was a starting point to begin to reflect on institutional violence, spaces of repression and forced confinement.
Maria Good. A curator, cultural space and artistic trend.
Florence Rojas. Jesús Alcaide develops together with Javier Orcaray and Gabrielle Mangeri the Silver project in the city of Córdoba. They invite the community to propose lines of creation, thought, action and research on the improvement of both rural and urban contexts. They work on issues of ecology, sustainability and equality and offer new visions of contemporary cultural production and alternatives for critical and creative thinking.
Maria Good. An inspiring film, book, song and landscape for your work.
Florence Rojas. Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais Blood Wedding of Lorca, I would tear my eyes out of Juanita and the ugly, the desert of Tabernas in Almería.
Mary Good. What clichés, idealizations and stereotypes do you think we fall into when we advocate for diversity and inclusion that, deep down, does not materialize? How can we disable them?
Florence Rojas. In general I think it is more interesting than the praxis be inclusive or diverse. Identity discourses are already widespread and have fortunately reached Congress. I think it is time to assume them in the way of working, in addition to appearing in the specific content of exhibitions or artistic proposals.
Mary Good. What connects us creative women in the Spanish artistic context? What do you think makes it easier for us to come together and come together?
Florence Rojas. I don’t think there is a single connecting thread. Some of us are connected by friendship, others are connected by feminism, others are connected by common interests… Associationism is not a specialty in the contemporary art sector, we work in a very lonely way, we should form more alliances instead of favoring competition somewhat ridiculous neoliberal in which we sometimes enter.
Mary Good. What strategies do you think allow us to alleviate the needs and difficulties in this current context?
Florence Rojas. The best strategy is to support us, help us, listen to us and never look the other way; all that is also part of the race and marks the trajectory. Getting involved and being loyal to your fellow professionals defines the artist you are and how you position yourself.
Maria Good. Can you tell us about your projects in advance, especially the one you are carrying out at the Matadero Madrid Residence Halls?
Florence Rojas. I am developing the third part of a trilogy focused on the city of Madrid. This last chapter entitled “Esqueje” has to do with the Aluche Foreigners Internment Center. The project began in Morocco, where I took some cuttings from a plant considered invasive in the Spanish state. After planting them in the studio and starting to think about migration policies and border laws, I narrowed the investigation to the old prison hospital of the Carabanchel Prison, currently reused to house a jail for migrants. At the end of June I will present some results at the open days at Matadero.
For more information: https://florenciarojas.com
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