Josefina Labourt

How do we deal with the strangeness of having/being a body and being surrounded by other bodies and in turn by ideas and words in the context of language? How do we relate to our own body and the rest of the materialities that surround us (food, other bodies, etc.)? How do we adapt our matter to social demands and deal with our somatic and emotional anxieties and discomforts? What meaning do we convey to what the body expresses, to the visible signs of the constant transformation of our own matter? Where does my body end and where does the other begin?

My practice develops these questions by exploring different forms of the corporeal through processes that relate and overlap diverse materials, languages and operations (collage, oil, cartapesta, resin, video, words, etc.); resulting in a rehearsal of a mise-en-scène of the body and its physicality, on the borderline between desire and abjection, empathy and rejection. I’m interested in exploring the interstices between THE SKIN, the liminal concerning an exchange, between bodies, between the body and language, everything that escapes from our language but moves us, from a different side. I think of my work as a corporeal presence in space, as interstices where subject and object are confused. When the spectator comes across my work, they may encounter a visceral and affective experience, that may disturb the normative symbolic aesthetic order as well as the corporeal perception of their own body.

↓ Josefina Labourt at Liste 2023 ↓

PIEDRAS presents a solo show by the Argentinian artist Josefina Labourt (b. 1985, Buenos Aires) featuring a set of works conceived specifically for Liste. This installation project brings together a group of paintings and sculptures that continue with Labourt’s current research on the collective and personal imaginaries of femininities and old age. By appropriating and distorting the meanings and forms of representation around this theme, the artist seeks to mobilize an affective experience in the (embodied) spectator who encounters the work. Skin is a key element in this, as a vulnerable surface loaded with history and meaning, a border that both separates and enables an encounter with Otherness.⁠

Josefina Labourt's work builds experimental representations of the passage of time on corporalities. Her work stems from an investigation into the constant evolution of matter, the relationships between bodies and their material existence, language, somatic or emotional discomfort, and old age.

Her recent work is made up of pieces that are fragments of human bodies, living organisms, or objects that do not belong to a single identifiable nature. It is loaded with an aesthetic research derived from processes and materials that come from different disciplines. Through textures linked to the marks brought by the passage of time, her works are significant for thinking about which bodies are the ones that matter.