ethics of care is a video work recorded at a rave that took place at the Sala Nasa in Santiago de Compostela on May the 14th 1999.
It also contains elements from the text “El ojo saturado de placer: sobre fragmentación, porno-evidencia y brico tecnología” (1999), which help to frame the theoretical context in which the work develops. This work invites to think of assemblages-fragmentation as an active political practice and reflects on the construction of the transformative pleasurable gaze through a transversal understanding of standardized media representations (in porn, advertisements or in the traditional arts).
The pornographic image, which is a type of representation usually linked to the fragmentation and shredding of the bodies (which even afflicts violence upon them), can be rediscovered as a way to contest the artistic nudes, it can oppose the continuous and coordinated body created by the traditional canons. This image can be read as a way of resistance, as a strategy against aesthetics through saturation and excess of evidence obstructing the voyeuristic gaze. This can help us find gaps in the hegemonic forms of power in which we can filter not only our critiques, but our political attitudes against the standardized gaze.
ethics of care constitutes a work that analyzes control and normalization, it also reflects about the instrumentality imposed by capitalism and the imposition of productivity through the body. It brings into question the limits established between that which produces pleasure and productivity, the social and the domestic spheres, shifting away form the rigid postures that some feminist discourses are proposing in order to revalorise the different ways of taking care of the body which are normally carried out by women.