Elena Bajo
Elena Bajo
Period of residency: October 2002
Elena Bajo’s concept-generated and research based practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works individually and collectively across installation, sculpture, painting, performance, participatory events, film, text and writing.
She uses exhibition spaces a studio or laboratories, where an experimental, itinerant, site- specific performed work unfolds, building improvised actions and choreographed movements. Having as a point of departure art production processes, working with places as they are given to her and limited by the materials available around them, Elena Bajo rearranges these found elements into a new composition, juxtaposing the identities of prefigured social and political spaces and dimensions, creating a sometimes cryptic but always revealing new code of signifiers. A re-staging of a space and time, of the past, into future events that uses chance, contingency and ambiguity of the moment.
Her itinerant practice produces spaces in which the social and political potential of architectural space and landscape is realized. Her work refuses the standardization dialectic of space and instead reestablishes its discourse according to the conditions of chance and contingency. Bajo’s works are conceptual in the sense they are linked to cognitive labor; a labor that cannot be valued and has no limits as it is the condition of precarious work in today’s neoliberal economy. Yet, her work does not simply express the dematerialization of the art object, but is a refusal of “work” and “object” altogether. Her research focuses on ecosophical moments of fracture and repositioning in an attempt to entertain fissures in a world of cristallized sensibility.
