GABRIELLE PARÉ

s someone who has intimately felt the limits of culture, bureaucracy and language on my body, eroticism has been an antidote, a means to feeling powerful. In my practice, I am interested in evoking the erotic in myself and, hopefully, the viewer. I mean this not in a sexual sense, but as Audre Lorde describes in her collection of essays, "Sister, Outsider," where the erotic is instead the sense of feeling powerfully alive. Eroticism has transgressive potential; it is about breaking the rules, which "takes you outside the borders of reality and the limitations of life," describes psychotherapist Esther Perel. 

My artworks are my expression of that power. In "Void if Altered," I work conceptually with the constraints official identity, distorting a passport photo and a birth certificate. In this series of lightbox photographs, I forced unexpected dimensions into the flat surface of biometric documents. These became bendable proofs of a person, resisting the bureaucratic flattening of a person and authoritarian insistence on identity. 

I am also interested in the limits of language. Words are an essential tool for communication, and single words contain multitudes. The language project "sam-grunn-else," co-run with urbanist Tina Lam, highlighted the miracle of group communication. Eight participants from different fields, countries, and mother tongues came with eight distinct frameworks to understand our words. We negotiated the meanings of six selected terms and invented new ones, resulting in a collectively written dictionary published by ROM for kunst og arkitektur.

Cultural identity is a limit. The Spanish word "mestiza" is simultaneously a pragmatic description of my mixed Filipino heritage, a violent reminder of colonial trauma in the Philippines, and an expression of love by my grandfather, who called me "his mestiza." One word, three meanings. In works such as "a mestiza and her particles," I try to voluptuously convey all of these nuances in a way that invites reflection, not judgement. In my practice, I push dimension, rather than flatten things into any single interpretation.