In Damnatio Memoriae, Spanish artist Alba Lorente invites us to take a close look at the various techniques she uses in her artistic practice.
Alba Lorente (b. 1994, Zaragoza, Spain) lives and works in Madrid. Her work is born out of a brutal and destructive experiment capable of producing an image in perfect balance. Her work revisits the destructivism movement that, during the 60s, claimed the compatibility between the desire to destroy, tear, break, with the pleasure of creating and building. Following the principles of this movement, Lorente bases her artistic practice on the extraction of material. She does it with abrupt gestures that end up forming an image but, above all, a methodology of anthropological understanding. She graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Zaragoza (2016) and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Research Program of Contemporary Art at the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao.
Lorente’s most recent project, “Damnatio Memoriae,” is influenced by the traditions of Ancient Rome that were aimed at erasing the life of an individual, seeking their historic death, and pretending to get rid of their memory. To do this, they destroyed all kinds of images, monuments, writings, and appointments of the subject who was thus, condemned to oblivion. Her project aspires to give a different point of view to the term, one that defends the destructive act not as a condemnation conceiving it instead as a method of creation and both personal and pictorial learning.
Music: Paloma Pitaya
Video and Edition: Kevin Cuadrado & Alba Lorente