LIZA
AMBROSSIO
Mexico
The witch stage
“In my memories, I know that I saw on TV the faces of a group of hysterical women. I was still in elementary school. They were mothers from somewhere in northern Mexico. They were choking on words as they sobbed because their daughters disappeared. They were kidnapped and murdered. Those girls were lured by advertisements in the newspapers and on their city streets looking for young, thin, tall, and beautiful women. They all became a catalogue of necrophiliac beauty. Offered to be harassed, humiliated, and raped even after their deaths. While they were recorded on home videos by nationals or foreigners, who chose their victims by a photo in a catalogue and paid their captors large sums to carry out their most repulsive desires.” Liza Ambrossio
In a world that struggles to let fragility and poetry die, The witch stage is presented as a thermometer of social decomposition and ironizes some principles of psychoanalysis that Sigmund Freud called “phases or faces” within his theory of psychosexual development. These principles are in turn mixed with conspiracy theories, social denunciations, thoughts, prejudices, the misogynistic questioning of the notions and symbols of witchcraft, criminology, traditions, punishments, uses and customs, and a pretend synchronous representation of global feminism that touches different geographical areas. Crossing Mexican, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese imagery, Ambrossio allows herself to explore visual similarities of a story represented so that it seems forbidden. A story that is a pretext to the unwritten right to commit violence against women and the feminine. She leaves non-textual hints of territories and cultures, with no apparent connection beyond their exacerbated telluric belly. These hints lead Ambrossio to Derrida’s seismic lexicon in which she remembers emphasis that, “a tremor can be the result of something that It has affected you or the tremor without apparent explanation can also affect you.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Ambrossio (b.1993) began her artistic practice at the age of sixteen when she asked a housekeeper in her mother’s house to steal photographs from family albums to buy them. In Mexico City at the time, Liza was portraying her passage from adolescence to adulthood and was looking for ways to survive from a distance during the process of emancipation from her family. Meanwhile, she worked as a photographer in the early morning hours, covering murders for a local newspaper. In these moments, she discovered that the hell she holds inside is the same as outside. After her BAs in Political Science and Design in Mexico and the USA, she was awarded the Descubrimientos Scholarship for an MA in photography and artistic projects at the PIC.A PHotoEspaña. Her universe incorporates symbols alluding to witchcraft mixed with her written narrative, photographs, installations, and videos that she unites by free association. It is driven by theories on psychological manipulation and its influence on the continuation or rupture of the power professed by different social structures. She also seeks in her work the exercise of sinister freedom that has a strong relationship with chance and instinct, and involves the destabilization of female canons that threaten the possibility of exceeding ethnical, sexual, moral, religious, and political limits. Her work has been reviewed by The British Journal of Photography, El País, GUP, and Vogue Italy. She is the author of the books The rage of devotion and Blood Orange.
