Clara De Tezanos, POR MANIOBRAS DE UN TERCETO, 2019

Por Maniobras del Terceto tells an intimate story, which envelops the whole practice of the artist looks at herself and not on photography.

Clara, as we will see, we will be able to learn much more from this book than from her extensive and intense participation in photographic exhibitions, either as an artist or as a curator. Por Maniobras del Terceto -along with his latest book, Piedra-Padre, Universo (2017)- wraps up a proposal so disruptive in the artist’s practice that it turns its gaze not on photography, but on itself. But how can the first story and the author’s autobiographical attentions coexist in a single narrative?
The photographs gathered in Por Maniobras del Terceto come from both the artist’s personal archive (built for more than 10 years) and her family albums. The photos present mineral and vegetable themes (coming from the earth), celestial and canonical representations of femininity, for which Clare herself has lent herself. But these self-portraits are far from self-referential: the editing and montage of the photographs carry out a unifying interweaving of the author with her ancestors and with her position in the Universe to the point of making them indistinguishable. The author, the familiar characters and Heaven itself interchange, juxtapose and superimpose, not to tell us what has happened (that which has been decided to submerge in the waters of oblivion, but that we can intuit), but to approach its recognition. And it’s just the identification and de-identification with the characters and motifs depicted that allows us to approach everyone involved simultaneously, at the same time that he proposes this arrangement of images as a method of genealogical navigation and as a way of reclaiming the family history as its own history.It is not surprising, however, that I find in this photographic essay in decomposition any attempt to construct a natural genealogy. Clare has assumed all the absent names in a single gesture; she has extended herself until she fully appropriated all the maternal figures with the same intensity that she did, at the time, with the paternal ones (Father-Stone, Universe). For Clara, nothing of her father or mother is foreign to her, and she has eloped was only to introduce us to those who are herself.