Apart from hailing from Empordà, what do Tura Sanz and Esther Pi have in common? Both artists openly assume creative narratives alternative to the mainstream, challenging the hegemonic discourse of traditional art history; the work of both women addressing the ethnocentric, patriarchal perspectives that reinforce certain values over others.

The contemporary history of sculpture is widely known: Since the  1950s a torrent of sculptural tendencies have flooded the chronology, which was clinging to the tradition of originality and innovation. Critics sought to explain the complex scenario by showing how new sculptural work has related to its precedents. As Rosalind Krauss said, “With time it became more difficult to generalise. In the seventies artists started to create sculptures out of strands spread on the floor, sawing logs and taking them into the gallery or exhibiting tones of earth dug in the desert […] According to that scene historians and critics began playing the trick of creating their genealogies going back millennia instead of decades. Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, Toltec ball courts, Indian funerary mounds… anything could be taken into court as a witness of the connection between art and history in order to defend the artistic basis of the new sculptures.” With the genealogical obsession came a denial of the death of western conservative patriarchal art at Auschwitz (as T. Adorno had enounced regarding poetry). In other words, contemporary sculpture was justified in its “strands spread on the floor, sawing logs and taking them into the gallery or showing tones of earth dug in the desert” precisely because it was an orphan. Its basis wasn’t in any category of ‘heroic blood-soaked past’, nor in a futurist utopian dream. 

The works of Tura Sanz and Esther Pi deal with the question of how to  reset art, after its crash with history and refusal to admit defeat. In it we find an alternative ‘ethical’ approach, rather than an ‘aesthetic’ concern, which grew out of movements in Britain in the 1980s and became known as ‘care ethics’. Its main focus is to understand ethical problems from a gender perspective. Born out of the feminist movement, ‘care ethics’ is a philosophy which addresses social, moral and economic issues from a feminine perspective. At its root is the purpose of bringing women’s voices into the field of ethics, and to demonstrate that ‘feminine’ values and sensitivities can be used to tackle ethical dilemmas. 

Political scientist Joan Tronto (‘Moral Boundaries’, 1993) defined it as  “A generic activity that encloses all we do to maintain and repair our world in order to live in it as best as possible. This world encloses our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all elements which we intend to connect in a complex web to make life sustainable.” That’s the point: between the will to change reality and the passive acceptation of it as something given to us, there is a kind of subtle activity that rebuilds the world by patiently weaving it so carefully—a way of facing reality without violence and believing that it’s only possible to walk on this earth if we care for all things. 

With all this in mind, Sanz and Pi are developing ‘care sculpture’ out  of concepts of ‘stitching together’ and ‘repairing’ going beyond ethics towards solutions. From that point of view it’s relatively easy to link their proposal to creators like Louise Bourgeois or Gertrud Goldsmith: the apparent fragility of their ‘sculptural bodies’, the care of the materials, the holistic conception of landscape, femininity understood as an origin or a source of life—all of it embodies the possibility of an alternative sculpture. In the words of Esther Pi, “My work is always reflecting on everyday dualities, I create dialogues between relationships and human fragility as well as about something really strong that encourages me to carry on looking for the essence of every single thing. My focus is on nature and the human body as a part of it. My aim is to present work that invites the viewer to open themselves to self-awareness. My artistic project is a way to slowly sensitize our closest reality and to expand it.” //