Bosque de pinos II / Coniferous forest II Painting

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 14, 1974. She is a multidisciplinary artist, historian and researcher based in Madrid, Spain since 1997. In her artistic production, Cruz explores identity issues, from individual, social, cultural or gender identity, as well as the construction of colonial discourses and their power relations, using her review of historical and bibliographical sources, as well as her own life experience as a Puerto Rican in exile. The artist continues a characteristic line of reflections in her poetics, related to the detection of the limits to which identity discourses are subject, and which are generally imposed by the mechanisms of power of cultural coercion. The continuous exploration of the colonial and postcolonial realities that cultures live in contact with the West, and that has led this creator to consider politically questioning the very social situation of the Boricua insular context, now leads her to investigate the marks that the gaze of the Other has left over his own identity. The autobiographical allusions that these resin torsos of Brenda translate may belong to the imaginary of any contemporary individual who has faced travel, emigration, the experience of living within a culture that was in principle alienated. Being A woman, mixed-race, immigrant, Puerto Rican, guarantees a pilgrimage journey in the midst of a set of cultural stereotypes where the struggle with a hyperbolic vision of the Caribbean sexual myth becomes a constant. The repertoire of procedures in the bureaucratic institutions that administer power in the old metropolises, traces its traces in the body and memory of the immigrant. Then a simple visa, a stamp, a stamp, a card, a bank card, become the material signs of the limits and borders that will accompany the history of difference, its pages already unfolded in millions of minimal stories that continue. uncompleted.(Suset Sánchez)