Marisa González, technology, social awareness, and memory of waste

María Luisa González, better known as Marisa González, was born in Bilbao, Spain, on July 18, 1943. She is a multimedia artist, a pioneer in the use of new technologies applied in artistic creation, as well as an important reference in feminism and electronic art, since for more than four decades her work has been included in various exhibitions that reflect on new technologies in art, feminism and the discarded.

In 1967 she moved to Madrid to study at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando; from there she graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts, in 1971, the year in which she went to the United States with the purpose of studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in new technologies applied to artistic production, where she was a student by Sonia Sheridan (1925- 2021), an American artist who initiated the Generative Systems Program (which unites art, science and technology), introducing students to various reprography techniques with graphic arts, xerography (photocopier), fax , using these machines together with other devices such as the Polaroid camera, the video monitor and biofeedback (a system of sensors that allow different physiological data to be monitored in real time), with the aim of producing images immediately, in real time.

It is in the 70s when electronic technology begins to facilitate the creation of images in real time and to establish an interesting relationship between art, science, and technology. The use of electronic equipment and industrial photocopiers since then have contributed to the interdisciplinary approach of the Fine Arts, exploring the creative possibilities of the tools that produce instant images.

Marisa González has developed her entire career in the visual arts working with the photocopier, fax, photography, electrography, video, and the computer. Her work, carried out since the early 1970s, maintains a constant technical, formal, and conceptual, that can be seen in almost all of her visual discourse, in which the use of technology is common, the theme of social awareness, particularly feminism, and the notion of recycling as a memory of what was discarded.

Marisa learns from Sonia Sheridan to work with new technologies; and between 1974 and 1976, when she studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, she began to develop her feminist theme with her teacher Mary Beth Edelson (1933-2021), an American artist, a pioneer of the feminist movement, considered one of the first feminist artists of that generation. With her she began to do committed works of feminist orientation. Together with her, Marisa developed proposals in which she fuses photography and performance to denounce gender violence, and later, as an individual exhibition, she made La descarga, exhibited in Washington at The Dupont Center Corcoran Gallery, in 1975; Other exhibitions within this theme have been, Son de ellas, 2005; Ellas, filipinas. Female open space invaders, 2010; Registros domesticados, 2015; and La vanguardia feminista de los años 70, 2021.

Regarding the theme of recycling, the artist explains that (...) “the creation process originates from the discovery of an object or image that has been discarded in my environment, in my daily reality (...). My gaze has always been closer to containers than to luxury shop windows. The attraction for imperfection and for the abandoned, for what is going to disappear, to become extinct, awakens a sense of recovery, rehabilitation, reconversion in all areas, not to manipulate its form, but to be observed from another point of view (…)".

Marisa does a kind of archeology with abandoned objects, spaces, landscapes, and buildings, which she records on video or through photography, in an attempt to catch it, to retain it, to reconstruct that memory. Proposals within this visual narrative are, Memoria y destrucción de la fábrica, 2001; Lemóniz, restos del naufragio, 2003; and Naturaleza agredida, 2006.

The reproduction of images, their fragmentation, repetition, and serialization, is a procedure typical of Marisa González's visual discourse, present in all her work. Her most recent exhibition is titled Piel y Pulpa, 2022, made up of installations and images of fruit, whose proposal focuses on capturing the perishability and transience of things.