Eugenio Merino and Avelino Sala propose an installation, Felpudos (2020), conceived especially for Just Mad, in which fourteen doormats welcome visitors by inviting them to step on the machist phrases of famous philosophers and scientists.
Already in the late seventies Jenny Holzer resorted to a “guerrilla” technique similar to that of Merino and Sala with her Inflamatory Essays, with which she flooded different surfaces in order to subvert inherited hegemonic principles. The notion of proclamation had been adopted by feminism before, but without yet abandoning strategies and codifications hitherto considered masculine….
For the philosopher Celia Amorós “to conceptualize is to politicize” and, in this case, the discursive space chosen by Merino and Sala, their doormats, is a place between the public and the symbolic, a space of transit, while at the same time turning it into a subaltern space, more linked to gesture than to function. The artists thus appropriate this space to put on the shoes of an otherness, that is, that of women who have been subjected to a heteropatriarchal status quo.
Thus, the artists’ invitation to trample the sociocultural basis of machismo is understood as an exhortation to rethink the role of a society that has been forced to assume an inherited system whose backbone continues to be present, for, as Griselda Pollock pointed out, “what we learn about the world and its people is ideologically constructed in conformity with the social order within which it is produced.”
Blanca de la Torre
