1+1=1

Elena Garrigolas

Interview by C. VanWinkle

November 27, 2022

Please describe the prompt that you responded to. How did you feel about it?

It was a one-second GIF on a loop: two hands holding what I believe is a mouth with the Earth inside of it. It didn’t look as if the mouth was eating it, it rather looked as if the Earth was slowly sinking into nothingness because the mouth really wasn’t connected to anything.

I always tend to analyze the colors in art. The lips are gold, so it made me think about wellness, which then led me to capitalism, consumerism, and finally to the environment. Climate change, possibly? To be honest, the first thing I thought about was hypocrisy. I then thought about how the main problem lies with the rich. But it’s such an extended topic to talk about that I feel like it’s not in my hands to say anything. The world is just messed up, humans are messed up. We are consumers. We think as individuals and destroy everything we touch. That’s part of what I talk about in what I draw. I like to exaggerate to get the point across. It’s fun! I’m a little bit dramatic, but it works.

So how did you get started on your response?

I immediately knew that I didn’t want to make it about climate change. All I could think of was the earth as a concept: home. And what is home to me? My family, the house I grew up in, the people I let in my life, and my own body.

The first thing I did was write some random words and ideas in a little sketchbook. What kept repeating were the words “mom” and “house.” Actually, instead of writing the word “house,” I drew tiny houses and a body morphing into their bed. I then started drawing without any previous sketches. I found myself doing four drawings at the same time, so I made them talk to each other to tell a story.

Ah, that’s a cool approach! You submitted multiple images. Can you walk me through them?

I sent three pieces and I would’ve sent more if I’d had more time. I feel like there wasn’t enough with just one drawing. Sometimes we need to use other techniques or disciplines that we’re not used to in order to express something in particular. To me, it would be doing little animations or collages of different drawings. I did the latter in this case.

In the first piece, you can see four images: a girl on her bed between two mattresses with her arms hanging, almost touching the floor; three weird-looking female bodies hanging on the walls, stretched by what seem to be their legs; a face surrounded by many hands; and a little girl on her bed with a baby doll that I dressed up in my old school uniform.

The second piece is a girl peacefully laying on the grass and a man falling onto her. 

The third one has two images. There’s this pregnant woman, whose belly has a face with cockroaches coming from her mouth, and she is sitting on a path that leads to a house. Next to that, I did a figure that’s standing on top of a screaming, mutilated head.

As I mentioned before, I talk about my body, the house I grew up in, the people I’m surrounded by, and my family. My relationship with these elements has never been easy. I grew up as a quiet girl. My parents sent me to a Catholic all-girls’ school from birth and I never really fit in. It was a brainwashing school. I never related to anything that they said, and as I was growing up, I started to develop my own way of thinking, which wasn’t what my parents wanted or expected. I spent 18 years of my life living in a bubble all alone. My communication skills really went down, and my trust issues went up. Drawing was the only thing keeping me sane. It was the one thing that I was good at.

I’ve always had trouble keeping people in my life. My relationships with guys, once I turned 18 and went to college, were to validate myself. I always ended up doing things I didn’t want to do, and I really felt miserable in my own skin. I started to feel like my only value was my body. I became an object.

When you’ve always been silenced and insulted for every little thing you do, good or bad, you start to develop really low self-esteem. So in the last image, even though the figure has a penis, it really is my mother stepping on me. The bed represents that safe space where I would always cry. Those hands surrounding the face, the man falling onto the woman’s body, and those stretched naked bodies represent the feeling of being used as an object. The rest are allusions to my school days. I could really talk for hours and hours about that.

I bet! Your work often explores gender, sex, and the human body. It’s surprising and disturbing and exciting. I would consider it body horror. Has this always been an important theme for you?

I love the term “body horror.” I tend to say that I talk about the body as a space of trauma. There's this quote by Kate Millet that I really like: “The personal is political.” And what is more political than our own bodies? I always create from the personal to talk about what affects us all, which helps me to comment on current affairs.

I take my work more as a personal diary and a safe space to order my own ideas, opinions, and thoughts on anything and everything. It really gives me a perspective of self and it helps me grow as a person. When you’re constantly thinking about everything, drawing about it, reading, discovering, researching what others have to say about a topic, it really is a non-stop cycle of endless information. It makes you contradict yourself, which is always good, and it gives you different perspectives on life, people, bodies.

Do some people see your work as controversial? Are you controversial?

Expressing myself always scared the shit out of me, so I suppressed my feelings for a long time. The thought of my parents catching me doing something they didn’t consider “good” was terrifying. What led me to speak out was my final project in college, where I talked about my experience growing up in a conservative, religious environment. That was back in 2020, and I haven’t stopped since then.

The negative responses I get from my family and other people really keep me motivated. Every time I get criticized for any drawing, I’m already thinking of what could disturb them even more. Some people really don’t want to see reality as it is. I also get some nasty comments from men, sexualizing me for what I draw, which makes me realize they don’t really get the point of my drawings. But I’m not here to educate anyone. On the other hand, I also get nice comments from people relating to my pieces and it’s always a nice and comforting conversation to have. That’s my fuel.

That’s what it’s all about! I love when my work is meaningful to someone. How did you come up with the title of this piece?

Everyone knows that 1+1=2, but in the real world, we come across a different result where 1+1 could give any number. The union of two people can produce a child. Mixing two substances can give another completely different one, such as blue and yellow creating green. You could say that I do the same with my drawings, where abjection is more than present. The viewer is attending to what Lacan called "the Real", which, according to him, is what reality tries to suppress: sexuality, death, horror, and delirium. So I take a recognizable element, a truth of this cultural reality, such as myself, a family member, or really anybody that participates in society. And I degrade it by fusing it with an element from the more ambivalent Real, invoking the taboo and violence that the observed reality arouses.

What would your advice be for a new person participating in Bait/Switch?

I would say to not overthink it. Anything that comes to mind is valid, even if it’s unrelated to the piece. I think that’d be even better. It’s really interesting too, to create an ongoing conversation that leads to different topics. Art is so subjective that no one would ever guess what my response was really about unless they read this interview.

Absolutely! Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, but most of the time it’s not. It makes me curious as to how the next person is going to interpret this work and respond. I guess we’ll find out in the Spring!

Call Number: C85VA | C87VA.ga

Elena Garrigolas: I’m a 24-year-old artist from a small town in Girona (Catalunya, Spain). I studied Fine Arts in the University of Barcelona and I graduated in 2020. Since then, I’ve been drawing non-stop and started to create my own world.