“If there is to be a revolution there must be a party”.
This is how one of the most iconic and politically engaged book of the
century would start if we applied an intentional filter. The filter would hide the
parts of the slogans and sentences that got eventually obsolete in the last
decades and the book is the Little red one: “Quotations from Chairman Mao
Tse-tung”, the second most printed book in History (alter the Bible) but a book
that can only be found nowadays in China at some tourist shops.
In an attempt to build a documentary object that to pushes the limits of
documenting with images, the series “Party” presents a deliberately personal
approach to the contemporary Chinese society and adds layers of
significance by choosing a loaded platform. Using censorship to erase the
parts of the text that are no longer in use in the country’s routine, the resulting
pages become a script where the matching images build a series of diptychs
that dynamical raise the question of the real nature of Communism in China
these days.
The combination of this manipulated text and the images pairs pieces of
information that aim to portray China in a more comprehensive way,
appealing our own clichés towards the country and their bipolar political
structure. The series reproduce the matching pages of the book “Party”
published by RM and the Archive of Modern Conflict and combine serigraphs
of the censored texts with images captured by the artist Cristina De Middel
during her trips to China.
Again the artist explores the boundaries and limits in the use of the
photographic image to build truthful graphic testimonies and to raise the
debate about the construction of the opinion and History and the role that
photography has been playing so far.