La Anfitriona
( 2010. ArtOn, Madrid )

The elegantly dressed Hostess welcomes visitors with a small snack.

The Hostess's wrists, ankles and neck, trapped by wristbands and a leather necklace tie her body to the physical space with innumerable fine elastomer threads, like a tense spider web.

This living installation, the centre of which is the artist's body, forms a network of elastic threads that prevent free access to the public room. The public is obliged to establish a close physical relationship with the materials (body of the performer and threads) in order to roam the room, remain in it or access other areas of the premises. On the other hand, the artist is constrained in her movements to the limitations of elasticity of the elastomer, by the number of people attending the session and by their trajectories in space.

Unexpected situations can occur in the bodies and the inhabitants of these: imbalances, stumbling, messes... all of them gracefully ambiguous.

The plastic proposal is developed on another level by searching through the Internet in forums, blogs and web pages on the theme The Perfect Hostess, which resulted in the compilation of a whole series of quotes that outline a stereotype based on a series of characteristic features from the collective imagination.

The Perfect Hostess is in general a woman who hides her feelings and personal problems to make the evening of her guests pleasant; a woman who prepares her house as a sanctuary, which promotes pleasant relationships, carefully watching for the avoidance of tensions between attendees; apparently unimportant relationships that hide the great political power of this mediator par excellence.

Another nuance configures the woman as the perfect sexual hostess: voluptuous, complaisant, uninhibited, sexually open to each and every one of the desires of her partner of the moment; nothing bothers her and her appetites are postponed as irrelevant depending on the perfect development of the relationship.

In this way, the Hostess, enduring the tensions of her ties to space, receives the attendees with great kindness, introducing them to each other, and provides them with a topic of conversation under the motto:

And, evidently, it behaves like The Perfect Hostess.