A world in reverse: the work of Maritza Molina.

The ambiguous influence of Catholic religion in Molina's work is also explored in her video Domestication, from 2003, showing several men walking in a line as they enter a gallery. The artist, the only woman in the video, follows the men as they enter and stand side-by-side facing an audience. Their position resembles that of police suspects standing in front of an invisible witness. The men then blindfold themselves and start reciting the prayer, "Our Father." In the meantime, the video shows the semi-nude body of the artist in a horizontal position being passed from hand to hand, man to man, as if the woman's body is the communion host, here representing the body of Christ, both as the sacrificial lamb and the nourishment of the soul. The communion host and the sacramental communion have both been used by several contemporary artists, including Cildo Meireles and Rosana Palazyan, as references to the process of social cannibalism through the evangelization and acculturation of native Brazilians by the Jesuit missionaries during the colonization of Brazil. This process of colonization, evangelization, and appropriation of land continues to this day, although its mechanisms and technology have changed, becoming more ideologically subtle and perhaps more cruel in its process of extermination. In Molina's work, however, the appropriation of the woman's body as a Communion host takes a patriarchal tone in which female sexuality becomes an object of male empowerment and market consumption. As the video continues, power positions seem to shift from the two genders, making the viewer even more confused. After the woman is passed to the first man in line, he carries her and lays her belly-down on a large mirror on the floor between the men and the audience. As the men keep reciting "Our Father," Molina repeatedly shouts the phrase, "One follows behind the other," using a louder voice each time, which forces the men to quiet down. She rises up in front of the audience and tries to muffle her screaming voice by covering her mouth with a bandanna. Finally, she walks backward until she has passed through the line of men, and marches off the stage behind them. Two interesting references are suggested in this sequence: first, the fact that it is intended as a sort of initiation and catharsis, and second, that performing these exaggerated gender roles highlights the sexual intricacies between the ritualized religion and the controlling patriarchy. This can also parallel master/subject relationships in which power works to maintain the interdependence of binary roles, to emphasize bondage over exchange, pain over pleasure. Ritualized masculinity in pseudo-advanced societies reinforces the socialization of a patriarchal system in such a way that it sublimates the division of roles to become purely symbolic, sustaining natural myths that have consistently placed women as commodities in a patriarchal society. In this land of visual metaphors, Molina seems to play an ambiguous role in which she is herself the bait and the controlling player. She seems to accept the traditions that placed her at the end of the line and as an object of the ritualized male system, while voicing hysterically her idiosyncrasies and shutting her own self by obstructing the sound of her voice, only to finally resign and return to the background and to oblivion. These well-known puns reflect the ambiguous situation of women and other oppressed groups in many patriarchal societies.

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Maritza Molina's work is as powerful as it is complex, full of layers that reflect the reversal of our actions in society. Its references to the female body in today's world echoes the traps of ingrained taboos and mores that deny women their self-fulfillment and happiness. Molina's use of the body does not create a split between the body as an object of art and its social context. Instead, her presence in the work constitutes the same contextualized social environment that engulfs her whole body and life.

DENISE CARVALHO is an art critic, independent curator, and scholar who lives and works in New York City.

NOTE 1. All quotations from or references to statements made by Maritza Molina are from published statements by the artist or conversations with the author during 2007.