February 2020

As I read ‘Drawing Blood’ by Molly Crabapple. Jennifer her given name, started her journey introducing herself. The story begins telling us information about her parents and how was her overall punk rock childhood and adolescent life in NYC. She often felt bullied and an outsider, she knew she was eccentric and out of the normal, Jennifer wanted always describes her continues drawing practice.

After high school she decides to explore the world and travels throughout Europe and North Africa where she encounters wild experiences.

When she gets back to USA she needed to start making money in NYC and also enroll into university to have a degree as an artist.

She started modeling to make some money, she moved into a room with sketchy guys in NYC. She eagerly wanted to make her way into art. She showed in a bar the event was not what she expected.

After working intensely as a model which transformed into porn and the use of her body as tool for the oversexualization of the female consumption she went through a lot of judgement and mistreatment of her body and her self image.

She had become one of the ‘suicide girls’

Molly Crabapple has made herself a tool for the porn modeling industry….

-       Affair with Jen a fellow model with a boyfriend, testing desire, lust and new experiences. Weird how to her it didn’t count as cheating Jen’s boyfriend.

-       She slept with Fred, her professor at university, a mentor she really admired and learnt a lot from.

-       She gets pregnant with Fred, she had to have an abortion. A breaking point in her life, in actions she had to go through the pain and dizziness of being pregnant, having to hide, having to abort a baby. The political was personal, she was physically ill, it was too much and shameful to explain to university and family.

-       In the end she is alone and must take care of her own body. Politicians friends or lovers wouldn’t do it for her.

On the other side there is my own story of how did I get here, trying just as Molly to stay in New York as much as possible, to have a room with a heater not rats. To live with dignity and yet, looking for that with the arts ended up laying in bed with the body terribly ill and in pain realizing that that was all I had. My own body despite scaping the Politian’s, the traditions the terrors and fears…

I just wanted a warm house.

At the moment I look at my own journey to get here, how in Florida my body was unctuously dying, living a myth… warring about my family and friends that encounter real violence and shocking traumas.
I was in bed I was under panic and terror. When I went back I saw a haze of Christmas family façade to cover all the trauma of fire on the streets. Being arrested at home, fearing scarcity, fearing the revolution and a possible war.

The political instability is very real in Bolivia, the capital city was not a good place to be at. The advice to me, don’t worry nothing is going to happen. Yet all the paranoia invades in the middle of January looking at the military cars going around the streets. In the meantime, we all gather.

Plenty of family dinners, friends in cafes and houses, apparently, we all wanted to be free, to be able to walk in the streets without fear. After two months of them on the streets on protest that threated their lives home is the safe place. A house a family united, traditions small conversations, talk about Netflix some politics, some old music that would make everyone happy….

Everyone knew something was going to explode but no one wanted to fight any longer. All of them fear the violence they saw… everyone wanted to mention some of the trauma with jiggles in their mouths but a wound in their heart and minds.

To me, going to doctors. The psychiatrist the psychologist the internist to re build the body and mind I was letting die out of all the paranoia and self-hate.

That is the reason I am here, someone else was able to see all that fear in me. Understood that it was an unconscious consumption of the self; due to stop consuming stop desiring…

Was it art the thing to desire?
I did not desire myself…

Was I being beautiful?

Was I getting purified from consumption that way?

There would have been no artwork but nothingness. The sculpture I made of myself was falling on the ground… the poem was lame and short.

I needed to write about my family, about what it meant to come from Bolivia. I somehow embodied the disease Bolivia was going through something that was building up for a long period of time, feed by it’s interior and ready to have a radical change.

The self was a battle, who am I where I come from the answer was “you have no idea”.

When I said “you have no idea” what did I mean?

-       I mean you have no idea. What it took to bring me here…. They broke a lot of rules, I was in the border of madness and death. They noticed and told me.
and what if we make it happen?
(just like I used to describe my ‘artistic practice’. There is no fixed medium, if I can think it I can make it happen!)

-       When it came down to have an idea and making it into a context of contemporary art!

-       When was I very happy for that instance… when I had the drive to think about art.

And not just the mere fact that I thought it was all over, that I realized that my practice my art had become secondary to the applications that would put me into another place.

I wanted to be transitory to space, to use the time and space.
I wanted to leave my home, my parents, to be free to be independent… I became dependent on institutions.
What was life then…

when the actual breaking point happened?

-       I had such guilt for being consumed by consumption and production. I wanted to stop making trash, stop being trash… I had a mix of bulimia, anorexia that represented my opinion of American consumerism. Take from somewhere of a cultural product or just don’t even take it, if taken excessively and abusively then vomit it.

 that I was so against… everything around me disgusted me.

Fixed plan of the “Ideal”

Wake up 5 am
yoga, cycle, beach, swim, water, coffee fruit.
work, salad, water.
night, salad, fruit.
reduction of lactose, less less meat, less carbs, no bad fats, only good fats and very little of them. Because in second year I was fat because I thought the fats nuts seeds granola were good….

I had spent time with Ricardo and Susana that summer and saw their ideal diet. Saw how diabetics had control over sugars, so my aunt taking care of Ricardo’s cholesterol.

I wanted to mimic that, that that seemed ideal and healthy, good and pure.

TO reduce the form, to be less bad.

Bad was fat meat, death, suffering, destruction.

Good was fit healthy and desirable, elegant patient, intelligent and wise. An artist that I would like to meet.

I liked meeting Nadam, I liked meeting Celia and Ruzica, I liked meeting Michael, Wendy, Jon. Was vegetarianism the common factor? No, it was how pure they were.

I became an illness, I was the evil!

So …What was the formula to death…?

-       when I visited doctors, the formula opened the Pandora box. What do you eat, do you exercise, do you have sex, what do you study what is your job…

I eat half a fruit w coffee and bread.
at lunch a eat a little carb with lettus, spinach, tomato, carrots.

A fruit.

Tomato soup.

Never finish a portion in the US, portions are too big in the US.

In Bolivia the ideal… ½ fruit, 1/2 bread, oats,

Lunch: salad carb, protein…

Tea, fruit.

3 meals a day no cheating. No eating after getting drunk…

The techniques to death…

Drink hot water instead of anything… drink hot water before every meal… with every meal.

1 cigarette a day…

Replace a fruit for a meal. replace hot water to drinks.

Exercise chooses.. .yoga, walking, cycling, swimming, dancing.

What would I be doing…

Where?

Over here or over there?
and where was there?

When did I recover the attitude?

Yesterday, when I didn’t want to do evil things. I ate banana and strawberry pancake.

When I ate salad moderately with little fat.

When I didn’t eat chocolate honey hummus or curry just because it was in front of me.

What did I actually want… I wanted the banana the apple, the lettuce the cucumber, the veggies. That was no bad. Chips bread, salt, fat was bad.

I didn’t want it!

I didn’t want bad. I wanted good times good pure and raw.

I wanted to be like an Asian child, maybe they were perfect.

Out of the eating disorder and the personal, with my family and everything that was happening was terribly politically distressful. But it seemed like a story for family gatherings in the end of the world.

My health was deteriorating. My legs were/ are no lie… in Florida, I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes.

Now I can sleep, because I eat too much at night. The truth shows in the body. I can’t hide the body.

I didn’t do enough for myself.

True. I didn’t draw, I didn’t sculpt. Yet think how am I going to build that thing all the time.

Need to organize and have an idea for the project. To think the terrible “Now, What’s next?”

“What do you want?”

-       to be alive.