Mimetic
Exercises
2014-2023
Collaboration project with Alejandría Cinque
Alejandría Cinque (Madrid, 1990) and Laura San Segundo (Madrid, 1990) both studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and have collaborated regularly since 2014 across multidisciplinary projects, in parallel to their individual careers. While each artist explores distinct territories in her solo practice, their joint work revolves around the re-reading and recontextualization of existing images, particularly those that form part of the visual history of Western art. Starting often from works by other artists or from institutional and archival collections, their practice aims to shift established uses and meanings, investigate symbolic codes, and bring them into the present through a contemporary, playful and critical lens.
Their ongoing project Mimetic Exercises brings together several series that delve into archetypal genres in art history —such as still life and portraiture— with a particular emphasis on colour, the interplay and friction between images, and the dialogue between tradition and the contemporary. Through strategies that juxtapose academic conventions with gestures of humour and game-like experimentation, they explore how canonical imagery can be reinterpreted, transformed and made resonant within a current visual and conceptual context.
After completing the series Mimetic Exercises I (2014) – during which Alejandría dyed his hair over six months while I created a series of still lifes in dialogue with him – we were invited to participate in a residency at DDZ Studio with the aim of exploring still life from an experimental perspective. The result of our work there was the series Mimetic Exercises II (2017)
In Mimetic Exercises II (2017) we reinterpreted paintings from the Prado Museum collection from a domestic perspective. By establishing a dialectical relationship between past images and contemporary codes, and using different objects and ourselves as models, we transformed the symbols of death and the passage of time from the Vanitas into ironic, playful, and absurd images that simultaneously convey the ghostly presence of our culture and inherited morality.
In 2022 we were invited to participate at the exhibition La casa como reflejo en un espejo, curated by Henan Xin at the Sala de Arte Joven de la Comunidad de Madrid. For this exhibition, we carried out the series Mimetic Exercises III, an installation in which we used the gesture of offering a glass of water as the backbone of all the pieces.
On one hand, we reinterpreted Goya's La maja desnuda through a performance in which a naked body rests on a pedestal filled with towers of glasses like a veil of glass that distorts its skin. A sound piece records the sounds that emerge from the contact with the performer's skin, creating a cozy atmosphere through the intimate act of moistening someone else's skin. While offering a glass of water is a courteous act when inviting a stranger into a private space, the action of washing someone else's body implies a level of intimacy that goes beyond social norms.
On the other hand, we reflected on how the intimacy of home is often threatened by contemporary housing circumstances. Two photographs symbolically and psychologically represent the desired home as a system on the verge of collapsing, one's own space on the brink of fading away. These aseptic images present objects not as certainties but as devices charged with poetic possibilities, with no more artifice than their own materiality and their disposition in the empty, unreal space of the still life
