Estíbaliz Sábada, The Garbage Girl (manteniendo el mundo del arte), 2007
Estíbaliz Sábada
The Garbage Girl (manteniendo el mundo del arte)

Estíbaliz Sábada (*1963, Spain) moves within a framework of cultural and activist artistic practice, connecting art and feminism. Her videos are direct and provocative actions, in which she faces a camera and is often accompanied by punk music. The immediate and protest character of her works transforms them into small manifestos. Together with Azucena Vieites and Yolanda de los Bueis, she founded the Erreakzioa-Reacción collective in 1994, which uses artistic expression as a protest medium to pose feminist questions through publications, lectures, exhibitions and workshops. Between 2016 and 2018 she was resident at the Spanish Academy in Rome.

This piece is a re-enactment of the performance from 1973 by Mierle Laderman Ukeles entitled The Garbage Girl, which consisted of washing the stairs of an official government building. Through the reconstruction of this action, Sábada hoped to make an analysis of the representation of women in the art world and the space that she occupies in it as an artist who understands her work in terms of ‘cultural production’. Once again, this work is about moving texts towards a new space of her own creation and thus establishing a dissonance between the image and the space where the performance is conducted.

Texts: Estíbaliz Sábada

Courtesy Estíbaliz Sábada

Document media
Video, colour, sound, 5:00 min

Issue date
2007

Tags
housework/carework, institutional critique, labour, re-enactment