Author: Manuel Rocha Iturbide
Title: El baño de Frida Kahlo II [Frida Kahlo's Bathroom II]
Year: 2020 -review of the work created in 2011-
Technique: stereophonic sound work
Duration: 8'42''
Unique work + 1 A.P.

4.000,00 € + VAT

This work includes:
· A digital image of the work by Graciela Iturbide, entitled Self-portrait, from the Frida's Bathroom series. Year: 2005.
· The documentation-sound work of Frida Kahlo's Bathroom (13'21'')
· A video interview with the artist (8'38''), carried out by Freijo Gallery in 2020.

ABOUT THE WORK

After Frida Kahlo's death in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera decided to close two bathrooms with objects and documents belonging to Frida. In 2004 the rooms were reopened. One of these spaces was photographed by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, using some of Frida's objects stored there, such as her crutches, a Stalin poster, a dissected turtle, an apron with blood, etc.

My accoustic idea came up when I tried to create a sound portrait of Frida Kahlo, specifically in the context of that small space of recollection that was a bathroom, where there was only a bathtub and two pieces of furniture (a drawer and a cupboard). It is not the Frida who suffers, but the Frida who is still a child, who lets herself go, who travels (thanks to the effect of water) to the depths of her subconscious world. My work is also inspired by the surrealist painting "What the Water Gave Me", made in 1938, where Frida is inside the bathtub, from which different beings and objects emerge such as insects, the empire state, a volcano, her parents, etc. All of them are icons related to the interiorization of her intense and complex life.

In this work I try to develop an interpretation of the surreal world of a Mexican artist who has always been seen as a suffering and unhappy subject. The sound portrait that I made not of Frida herself, but of Frida in her bathroom, where the furniture that kept her intimate things (like the letters from her lovers) were also found, is intended to be a new vision of what this emblematic artist left us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Manuel Rocha Iturbide (Mexico City, MX, b. 1963).

Artist, composer, researcher and curator. He holds a BA from UNAM, an MA from Mills College, and a PhD in Music and Technology from the University of Paris VIII. His music has been performed in several continents, receiving commissions from the IMEB Institute of Bourges, Arditti Quartet, Liminar, etc., and he has made sculptures and sound installations in important exhibitions such as The Biennale of Sydney 1998, ARCO, PRADA Foundation, etc. He has received grants from the Banff Center for the Arts, the Japan Foundation, etc. He has won prizes in the Luigi Russolo competition in Italy, Bourges France, and Ars Electronica, among others. He is currently a senior lecturer of the digital art degree at the UAM Lerma and of composition at the UNAM. He is a member of the SNC of Mexico.

www.artesonoro.net