The artistic practice of Barbara Sanchez Barroso can be viewed through her multifaceted engagement with the world: as a feminist, artist and traveller, but also booklover and cinema enthusiast. Her heroes are writers and poets – such as Virginia Woolf, who declared that as a woman, she had ‘no country’, yet despite this displacement, she claimed the entire world as her home. Barroso – who for a while had left her life behind and moved to a community living in natural surrounding far removed from anything she had known – also endorses Henri David Thoreau’s experiment in living in the woods – a retreat from civilisation as a form of inward migration. However, Barroso’s true inspiration comes from the stories of ordinary people whom she encounters in her daily life. Through them, she challenges social stereotypes and gender roles, balancing the poetry and vulnerability of the personal against the urgency of the political. Her works are interdisciplinary; the video narratives – with their performative approach and literary influence – at times expand through objects in the space, as if her stories transcend the boundaries of life into fiction, and from a myth, travel to arrive in real time.
Anna Smolak, curator
