Paola Rodríguez Lopera
Paola Rodríguez Lopera (b.1992) graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Pontifical Xavierian University in March 2017. Her thesis, “La feminidad no solo se refiere a mujer. Deconstruyendo un concepto” (Femininity does not refer only to women. De-constructing a concept), presented six months before, was her first solo exhibition.
This work is nothing but the foundation behind an experience of her own. Due to her sexual and contextual condition as a lesbian woman in a conservative environment, such as the Colombian society, it is possible for her to gather together the varying possibilities in which gender and sex express themselves. In essence, the artist exposes that sexual constructions are not binary.
Without intending to compensate or reconcile a said range of identities, Lopera assumes this diversity has an unresolved agenda of visibility, voice, and action, which has been deliberately silenced or diminished from contexts that go unnoticed in turn, given their normalisation or common acceptance.
Understanding there is a spectrum between the feminine and the masculine, the artist Paola Rodríguez Lopera exposes these three constructs in her work as changing, dynamic, and performative, with the capability of revealing themselves in multiple scenarios, places, moments, bodies, genders, and sexualities. The gender expressions –their different and particular manifestations –are the protagonists in her search for delivering the bodies from social stigma and expectations conditioned by sex.
Lopera’s work depicts different moments through familiar representations, where the perpetual element of this multiplicity of femininities and masculinities is evidenced, thus diluting the inhabited body.