Output details

El Perfume de la Ausencia (The Perfume of Absence)

This output, a retrospective exhibition (1995-2013) and accompanying publication, is the outcome of theoretical and creative research that explores the fragmentation and fluidity of identity caused by prolonged periods of displacement and migrancy. As the artist journeyed across Argentina, the United States, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, England, Croatia, Estonia, Belgium and Jordan, she systematically documented her evolving experience of displacement through the continual production and exhibition of small, fragmented, printed art works and artefacts, notably small dolls, created in different places using a laptop, digital printer and found objects: a portable studio. These ‘wandering prints’ and portable objects allowed Mandrile to explore the relationship between these processes of displacement and their realisation in art works and also to engage in an ongoing dialogue with academics, writers and curators from different countries and cultures concerned with new approaches to print media and the visual representation of migrant experience, who responded to the work presented in each site. This successive series of works that echo forwards and backwards, build towards a larger narrative: of fragmentation and dispersal but also the tentative possibilities of an eventual re-construction of identity.

Mandrile was invited to work with curator Elvis Fuentes on two major retrospective exhibitions in New Haven and Cordoba that contained a broader display of the accumulated artefacts. The accompanying bilingual publication contains a series of essays and an overview by Gill Saunders, Senior Curator of Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which explore the significance Mandrile’s mobile works as a contribution to the enhanced knowledge and understanding of the visual aspects of nomadic practices in different cultures, addressing what Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves identified as the migrants’ ‘secret wound’ and Stuart Hall as the representative postmodern experience of displacement and the fragmentation of identity in an increasingly mobile, dislocated contemporary culture.