La culpa

La culpa consists of ten colour digital photographs. Taken as a series, the images present different stages of guilt in relation to women’s bodies, Western beauty standards, the relationship between body and food, and the adjustment disorder that this feeling can produce, as well as its relationship with self-esteem and proprioception. The subject is particularly relevant to me because of my interest in identity, gender, the inequalities between genders within patriarchal society and mythology. The work reflects on the culturally inherited burden of guilt carried by women as a result of the treatment of their gender within patriarchal society, as well as on the physical ideals of Western culture and the acceptance — or rejection — of both one’s own body and sociocultural prescriptions.

In our culture, the concept of guilt has a profoundly religious background. Religion can be understood as a cultural system that brings together the experiences, meanings, beliefs and forms of expression through which a group organises its relationship with the transcendent. Across time and in different parts of the world, societies have structured that relationship in many ways. Contemporary Western societies have deep Judeo-Christian roots and, because of the political and social organisation of the West throughout history, many religious concepts from Judaism and Christianity have become part of our cultural inheritance. We now regard them as familiar elements of our civilisation, even though their origins are explicitly religious.

Throughout history, groups in power have always used whatever mechanisms of social control were available to them, and religion has been one of those mechanisms; hence the important symbiotic relationship that has often existed between religion and politics. Today, power groups establish forms of social control suited to the age in which we live, and since the Industrial Revolution large industrial corporations have played a major role in shaping society. Many of these corporations are multinational and hold considerable influence within states, establishing systems of control and management aligned with their interests.

In Western society, these large multinationals not only operate within particular sectors of goods and services; in many cases their companies span multiple areas of production and the media, increasing their influence over society. As has long been the case in the West, power is distributed in a pyramidal structure, with rulers at the apex and the ruled at the base. Here, ‘government’ does not refer exclusively to political institutions, but to the social system as a whole, constructed so that this structure can continue. The philosopher Noam Chomsky argues, in this context, that at least eighty per cent of the population must be trained to follow orders rather than think (Manufacturing Consent, 2015, 2:12), and that large media corporations establish the general framework within which local media operate, more or less adapted to that structure. They select subjects, emphasise what they choose, filter information and determine the limits of what may be said. They determine, select, shape, control and restrict in the service of dominant elites (Manufacturing Consent, 2015, 3:00–3:54).

Within this social context — in which Judeo-Christian roots and their concepts of good and evil, gender, sin and so forth underlie our society, while power elites decide what is shown to us, how and for what purpose — many people find that their own identity remains opaque even to themselves. At a time when educational, political and economic systems sustain the pyramid of power described above, the individual must make an extraordinary effort to know themselves, to learn to think outside the box, and to accept, love and value themselves without being carried along by a directed tide of triviality in which self-knowledge and self-worth are dismissed and a false sense of belonging is offered in exchange for surrendering one’s own identity. La culpa emerges from this sociocultural context: a world in which the individual, responding to what large corporations place before them — food, education, information and so on — rejects their own body and must immerse themselves in knowledge in order to reach a different awareness of self.

The project as a whole depicts the purchase of a meal in a fast-food restaurant, the time taken to eat it and the relationship subsequently established, when the participant looks in the mirror, between food, body, proprioception and guilt. The collaborator who modelled for the series chose to take part in order to explore her own identity, the acceptance of her physical body and the connection between that body and feelings of guilt.