Vera Icon.
Vera Icon, Non manufactum. Cyanotype on marble. Size: 60x80cm. Coco Moya (2017) Exhibition at LABoral Art Center.
This piece is part of a whole series that focuses on the investigation of a secret society of women who have tried to erase themselves from art history, the Secret Society of the City of Ladies. The organization was created following the publication of Cristine de Pizan's book, The City of Ladies, written in 1405, and dedicated to revising a history of women in a proto-feminist key, commanded by the first professional writer in France. In the book, she covers a history of women and thinkers, both real and mythological, which aims to refute the general idea that was transmitted in history books about women. The secret society that is formed next will try, however, to continue inhabiting that other city that Pizan invented, made with book-bricks. An internal, intimate, and collective city, where women would be recognized and valued. Thus, society tried to go unnoticed in the rest of the written stories, written by men, and claim another form of transmission and collective memory, intertwined in the oral, and everyday objects. Another story that took the form of a secret, a mystery, transmittable only to those who had proven to be part of it.
The blueprints are copies of some documents of the secret society where the works and lives of some of its women are archived, such as Elsa Von Freytag, possible creator of the Fountain attributed to Duchamp, or Sofonisba Anguissola, painter of the Spanish court. I have made copies of these documents on the marble tombstones using cyanotype. But both the documents and their blueprint copies are nothing more than a hypothesis that approaches the great enigma of why there are no women in the history of art?. It has always seemed to me that this erasing feat could not have been more than magic, making oneself disappear completely out of the ordinary.
Destroyed original documents of the secret society. Copies on analogue paper, 2017.
The title of the piece, “Vera Icon”, refers to the patron saint of photography, Verónica. The vera icon, non manufactum, (true image, not fabricated), describes the transition from the image of Christ to the holy shroud without human intervention, and reminds us that photography always implies two contrary discourses: on the one hand, the credibility that it arouses as a trace of reality, and on the other the magical process that occurs inside the camera, mechanical and inaccessible. Using cyanotype, an analog technique from the beginnings of photography, the process of legitimizing the transfer of photography as a vera icon, a relic of the real, is emphasized.
The abstract image of a photograph melted on marble highlights the conflict that inhabits all representation, revealing the essence of its simulacrum. Because, a photograph without an image, is it still photography? This faceless portrait of the women of the secret society, can it be part of the materiality of its absence from the History of Art, as a hole? Can the secret society exist and influence apparent reality without apparent identity?
These blueprints are a kind of milestones, they do not intend to restore the unwritten history of women, but to give weight to the gap they have displayed, the void they have filled with their silencing. It is not about claiming visibility, but rather invisibility, the potentiality of secrecy as a form of alternative and dissident organization that is determined to win in defeat. It is a way of finding in the forms, the trace of some doings that survive in them without needing anyone to be or to replicate. It is to pay homage to the mystery of women as carriers of silent knowledge, of the secret, of the secret of the city of ladies.