THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE STRANGER

Artist Madeline Jiménez Santil (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1986) has developed a visual lexicon that seeks to communicate through geometry, tonality, and material, the ways in which abstraction is utilized to transform human groups in social disadvantage into strangers. For Jiménez Santil, the groups of people that have been politically subjugated throughout history (treated as objects, plagues, dangerous, soulless beings) are presented in the dominant discourse as unintelligible, physically monstrous, just as their voice, language, and way of talking has been catalogued as noise. Besides considering the ideological weight this estrangement has over a group of people, the artist develops in her graphic practice the ways in which an abused body breaks, taking into consideration Pierre Bourdieu’s words: “Political submission is inscribed in the postures, the folds and creases of the body, and the automatisms of the brain.”

In some Caribbean countries, from where the artist is from, a literary movement has developed in which social and political trauma manifests through fantastic elements of magical thought, science fiction, and humor interwoven with historical reality. Jiménez Santil’s work shares this temperament. The strange creature in the façade transforms SAPS into a building that stands out in the clean line of Tres Picos street, even though its fascinating aesthetic is grounded in social relationships that have given rise to catastrophe.