Alfredo Zapata De Jesús
Mi madre fue la única testigo
(2023)
Video, audio
00:05:33
*DURATION HAS BEEN REDUCED FOR SHOWCASING PURPOSES
Mi madre fue la única testigo presents physical violence towards a phallic object. The artist reacts to the increasing violence in Puerto Rico towards everyone that is not a heterosexual cis-gender male. He proposes phallocentrism as an absolute cause of evil. Through the piece, violence is declared as the answer towards phallic related offenses. Symbolically, he renounces his phallus and destroys it while his mother supervises the camera. Like his mother, any other spectator is turned into a witness of a crime against a phallus.
As part of his research, he presents an academic article that analyzes the ways women are violently depicted on Puerto Rican proverbs, exposing how sexism has been rooted in our slang.
La construccion social de la imagen de la mujer en el refranero puertorriqueño
Author(s): Wenceslao Serra Deliz
Source: Caribbean Studies, 1989, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (1989), pp. 67-100
Published by: Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25612960
Sections of the article are presented as essential references for the piece. It explains how women are often depicted through proverbs as the cause of all evil.
Alfredo Zapata De Jesús
CDM
(2023)
Audio
00:01:36
CDM is a sound piece mainly formed by audio tracks of the artist’s mother reading examples of proverbs from the article. The artist and his mother inverted the words and read the proverbs using men as the parting point instead of women. This way, men are presented as the “cause of all evil” through Puerto Rican colloquial speech spoken by a woman.