Casa Azul (Blue House)
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Dates2016 - 2017
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Author
"Casa Azul" (Blue House) is part of a socio-visual research about the life histories of five trans women imprisoned in one of the male penitentiaries in Mexico City. The project shows the process of identity construction and corporal practices of people whose bodies are considered doubly abject: due to their identity and to their condition of seclusion. Since it is mandatory for prisoners to wear blue, they have called the jail “the blue house”, alluding to the imprisonment they suffer in their own male bodies.
In men jail, it is forbidden to have feminine objects, but throughout corruption, imprisoners smuggle some things. By doing this, these feminine articles in a male jail become resistance tools against an environment that imposes them masculinity. Finding a biology manual from the 1990s in a prison’s classroom triggered the development of the parallelism with Biology, a science that recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life.
The general staining procedure with hematoxylin-eosin used in histology paints tissue samples in pink. To the photographs printed in cyanotype –old printing system, characterized by the Prussian blue color– microscopic photographs of healthy cells processed in pink taken in collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Research of Bellevitge (IDIBELL) were joined. Thus, if the blue evokes the exterior and the imposed identification, the pink stands for the interior, for the self and the self-determination. "Casa Azul" shows the binary, the eternal struggle of these people to be what they are: women.