A critical reading by Margarita Aizpuru

Rosa Brugat Batlle (La Junquera, Gerona) is a multidisciplinary contemporary Spanish artist, focused fundamentally on photography and video art and their expansion into installation territories, as well as performance and video performance, and, in recent times, in the fields of electronics and Artificial Intelligence to develop her visual narratives.

A creator with a broad creative career, she has been developing projects and artistic works in which she has taken interest in and focused on various social issues, providing a critical and questioning vision on economic and class exploitation, racism, discrimination against other cultures and disadvantaged social groups, sociopolitical dominance, as well as those referring to the subordinated role of women in societies, and sexist and gender roles and stereotypes, from feminist approaches.

 

We could cite numerous examples of photographic works, video creations, video performances, or live performances that endorse those interests and approaches, among them those that make use of a critical, social, political, and anthropological visual narrative, though without ignoring a technical-aesthetic precision and a vibrant visual and poetic drive. This involvement has even led her to research and carry out works in other countries and societies to immerse herself in their cultures, people, and issues, denouncing situations of dominance, poverty, and colonization—something that already occurred in her exhibition project, which I had the pleasure of curating, Fatima's Dreams, a photographic, installation, and audiovisual exhibition centered on the lives of some Berber families from Tafraoute Sidi Ali, a small desert village near the vast expanse of the Erg Chebbi dunes in the Western Sahara, but from the perspective of a young Berber girl protagonist.

 

A perspective, the latter, that we also observe in the work included in this MAV catalog, Surveillance-control (2022), with which she won an honorable mention in the international photography competition Annual Photography Awards, and which follows the path of her visual discursive interests imbued with both social conscience, critical vision, and denunciation of the situation in which certain slaughtered, controlled, and dominated societies and cultures find themselves under world powers and military, political, and economic interests, while at the same time offering us the image and innocent gaze of a child. A Black boy or girl, symbol of non-Western societies, with big sad eyes, and full of fear, but yearning for freedom, imprisoned behind an iron bar, of apartheid, exclusion, control, in a context of dark nature, of blackish tree branches and trunks in the lightless night, while being controlled by a drone, symbol of dominance and violence. Darkness like the one that prevails in the lives of so many children in Gaza, in Sudan, in Lebanon, and in so many places, where suffering and despair are part of their days, without the world doing anything to prevent it. A forceful, precise, deep image that moves consciences and cries out for action, while penetrating the deepest part of our emotions.