Pure Pose
2017
Displacement, Foreignness, and the Performative Construction of Identity
Pure Pose marks a shift in my practice in which the digital image moves away from functioning primarily as archive or document and becomes a performative device for examining foreignness, displacement, and the fiction of national identity. If earlier projects destabilized the image as regime of truth (Deriva) or intervened the intimate archive (Love Affair), here the image operates as a site of cultural friction where identity is staged, exchanged, and destabilized.
The project was developed during a residency at NESI – Nueva Economía e Innovación Social (Málaga, 2017), a research-oriented context focused on migration, political economy, and contemporary cultural production. There, I collaborated with Spanish artist Kike Medina Galán, whose own migratory experience inversely mirrored mine. This biographical crossing—two bodies shaped by displacement in opposite directions—became the structural axis of the work.
Pure Pose explores the roles that emerge at the intersection of nationality and mobility: foreigner, immigrant, emigrant, tourist. These categories, often perceived as natural, are revealed as performative constructions shaped by capital, media imagery, and global economies of desire. Rather than representing migration as trauma or heroism, the work approaches it as a daily regime of stereotypes, projections, and simulations.
Humor functions as a critical strategy, not as relief but as symbolic dismantling. Through exaggeration, parody, and forced performance, the project exposes the mental borders that organize the perception of the other. Foreignness appears not as a fixed identity but as a theatrical role—mobile, interchangeable, and legible only within a specific representational system. In this context, the notion of pose becomes central: to pose is to perform for an interpretive framework; there is no “pure” pose, only gestures shaped by expectation and classification.
Digital editing operates as a political gesture. National flags, colors, and symbols are fragmented, overlapped, and recombined, destabilizing the flag as a stable sign of unity and sovereignty. The image becomes a field of contamination rather than separation, underscoring the nation as an administrated fiction rather than a natural entity.
Within the genealogy of my practice, Pure Pose extends the question of truth from the image to identity itself. The work does not ask whether an image can truthfully represent reality, but whether it can reveal the performative and constructed nature of cultural belonging. Here, the logic of glitch reappears not as technical error, but as symbolic disruption: identity fractures through overperformance rather than code corruption.
Ultimately, Pure Pose marks a decisive turn toward the body as political surface. The image is no longer only edited or found; it is embodied. Displacement occurs not only in territory or archive, but in the body that poses, acts, and is read—exposing identity as a temporary, unstable, and negotiated condition.