Mecanismo de instrucciones para acercarse/alejarse (2023); Mecanismo para pasear juntos II (2023); e Instrucciones para desvestirse/vestirse (2023) are activation performances of three performative pieces with the same titles, all belonging to Veritablement Vetements, project of the young artist María Fernández. These pieces present an intimate and evocative character, proposing to examine, in a very personal way, how clothing induces to execute certain dynamics and links between people, actions or emotions. In this sense, the works of María Fernández invite us to reflect on certain daily actions that often go unnoticed. Thus, for example, it focuses both on the action of dressing/undressing and on the psychological and sociological implications caused by clothes, while showing us how they alter our everyday life. Through hes works-clothes, which she calls Participatory Garments, she proposes an analysis of clothing in its different states: “activated”, when someone wears them, or at rest, “inactive”, folded or stored, waiting for wearing. Second-hand clothes are the raw material for her work, and this second life turns them into a kind of soft machines: capable of activating our imagination in turn immediately through actions that build an allegorical discourse with the other.
Both the Participatory Garments and the drawings, in this case the poster that accompanies Mecanismo de instrucciones para acercarse/alejarse are complementary parts of the same research process, dialoguing with each other from a playful point of view, and inducing a sense of complicity with the artist’s personal sense of humor. The photographs that accompany Mecanismo para pasear juntos II, move between the performance documentation and the user manual, and while they serve to investigate the ways of activation of their works, they question the use we give to our own garments, and if these help us to get closer or away from others. They are not instructions to activate the pieces but act as examples or notes to analyze what happens in the action of dressing or dressing someone, or approaching or away from someone. Thus, the gestures that are created with the action inevitably refer to the different interpersonal links and to the fact of getting involved and experiencing physically or mentally a process open to discovery where we feel familiar but distant.
With these works María Fernández aims to resignify the everyday gestures and intentions imposed by the “ready-made” objects already offered by the system, so that new modes or propositions can be created and thus reconfigure our way of moving through space and building an alternative discourse. And that is how they are completed, in the instant in which the spectator/participant moves while thinking, while their gestures are resignified, in turn, each garment..
The activation performances were carried out with the collaboration of the artists Adrián Escribano, Sonia Hidalgo, Sara Martín and Eduardo Urdiales, specialized in stage performance, specifically contemporary and alternative dance and theatre.