The Dis-enchanted project, what if reality actually dissolves Before our eyes? Jean Baudrillard. The artist has always liked divas and femmes-fatales. My grandmothers spoke often of these actresses and admired them openly as if they were real. They created a collective imagination, which inspired the wonderful illusion that the universe they inhabited was real. The problem was, that they never told me the truth about them and I always had a distorted 61 image of these divas. I was forever duped. From my earliest youth, she created a world in which these women existed. She imagined they went through life in fur coats, pearls, and luxury cars. She felt great admiration for the control she believed they had over their lives, in every way. She always related power with beauty. She was drawn to their temperamental, cocky, controversial, mysterious, dramatic, and scandalous natures. For her, these characteristics clearly symbolized the emancipated woman. After She began investigating, She discovered Baudrillard and I realized that, sadly, throughout the history of cinema we have only ever seen the female image of the actional character. Divas and femmes-fatales don’t exist. They’re just an illusion behind a screen. They are the result of a simulation. They have always pretended to be real while playing a role. She found it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Their images were so real to her that she was fooled by cinema, advertising, and the female role models imposed by the media. Her only reality was an illusion behind a screen, a loss of reality and illusion, a place where everything is screen and appearance. So what are these divas really like? They aren’t real people; they’re actually artificial, lonely women admired only for their beauty, their fame, and their wealth, not for who they really are, which causes them great unhappiness. Through appropriation and phrases linked to illusion and disillusion, She hopes to show what life is really like for divas and femmes-fatales. She chose to photocopy photographs of several silent lm actresses (Pola Negri, Louise Brooks, Tallulah Bankhead, and Vilma Banky) and then decided to reproduce them in drawings, copying them again... Because the original never existed! Each of these pictures includes dedications written by the women in them. Her intention is to change their discourse, using phrases from Baudrillard that resonated with and, one way or another affected me. She always imagined herself as a diva or a femme fatale in another life, which is why She included a drawing of herself dressed as a diva. And although it’s a picture of her, in it she play with a character that is part of her auction. The artist feel the need to speak on behalf of these silent actresses who (62) had no voice and so She invented these phrases. These women were slaves to their images. They weren’t really temperamental, cocky, controversial, mysterious, dramatic, or outrageous; those characteristics are not real. In fact, they were slaves to a system that didn’t allow them to be emancipated women. Power is not part of beauty, or so She believed. They are nothing more than a superficial image, a product of charm and the appearance trap. They are forever chained to their art quality. These divas represent nothing more than disenchantment to me. As Baudrillard put it: “The great stars never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence but because of their absence. They are dazzling in their nullity and in their coldness the coldness of makeup.”
Pola Negri I. From The Dis-enchanted series
Pola Negri I, 2016
From The Dis-enchanted series
Ink on paper
Image size: 16.5 in. H x 11.6 in. W
Frame size: 20 in. H x 16 in. W x 1 in DPaloma Castello’s body of work brings life to a different narrative to an object’s past. She is interested in playing with memory and relating it to the present, creating an atmosphere between reality and fiction. Her family and social background have a powerful influence on her work, she was surrounded by objects and anecdotes inherited from her ancestors, those objects inspire endless surreal stories. Her work emerges from these experiences; they are evidence of her “auto-fiction”.