Imagining perversely with Madeline Jiménez Santil’s Art

Madeline Jiménez Santil’s creations blurs the boundaries between drawing, sculpture, and performative objects. The installation My Dick Can Speak Your Language functions as an interactive device, inviting viewers to activate the piece through “glory holes” that disrupt the immaculate grid of each panel. This disruption embodies tensions between Cartesian rationalism, which takes reason as the basis of knowledge, and dembow, a musical genre originating in the Dominican Republic with roots in reggae and Jamaican dancehall. From a young age, the artist excelled in mathematics, often studying to the rhythmic beats of dembow artists like La Insuperable. For her, music and mathematics were never separate or hierarchical. This connection is evident in her work, where the significance of dance and music creates a harmonious interplay, reflected in the titles of her pieces. Meanwhile, the grid on the panels evokes the duality of Cartesian binarism.

Jiménez Santil actively resists the colonial white gaze that prescribes how Black female bodies should behave, speak, move, and represent itself. She proposes a liberated body: free to imagine and desire and imagine without seeking to please anyone but herself. Thus, her pieces function as an alter ego, an avatar of her body, where dance becomes a meditative tool for self-knowledge and affirmation.

Contaminating the Matrix

Designed to engage with New York’s cultural context and the history of Western modern art, specifically minimalist art, the piece presented at LA TRIENAL marks the culmination of an eight-year research process. My Dick Can Speak Your Language incorporates mechanical elements —with screws and—that resemble an unfinished engine. A machinery in progress that represents ideas of speed, energy, and strength. At the same time, the work operates as a device that can be penetrated, used for gossip, or as a way to eroticize the structure. In particular, the hole has a disturbing power, for it challenges traditional museum spaces, sparking a wealth of interpretations. “I was interested in contaminating the museum with a device that invites people to imagine perversely,” says the artist.

The “glory hole” arises from the need to explore how the history of art intersects with her body and vice versa, as well as the idea of transforming art into something exciting and thrilling. Rejecting the term “appropriate” due to its ties to academia, the artist prefers to speak of “contamination.” From this perspective, she finds cracks in art history to intervene and contaminate from within. Painting and traditional art objects are contaminated by physical movements and genealogies of non-white bodies, — bodies upon which a specific narrative has been imposed and whose desire for art has been denied.

Body and Multiplicity

From a young age, Madeline Jiménez Santil has been drawn to art and its history, even as its exclusivity marginalized non-hegemonic bodies and experiences. Rather than seeing this contradiction as a limitation, the artist perceives it as a space of great freedom to construct something new. Dancing within this contradiction is pleasurable for her. “Dancing makes me deeply aware of a geography and my body,” she explains, “it is a form of meditation.” Context, body language, and music are key elements in her work, as they act as generators of knowledge, which she then translates into groundbreaking artistic expressions.

Her work confronts norms and stereotypes of what a Black artist should be. This act of resistance comes at a cost—years of anonymity and an ongoing struggle to be seen in a world that overlooks and excludes those who refuse to conform to its expectations. This resistance fuels her work, which embodies autonomy and creativity. Her pursuit is the construction of her own world-system, made up of structures, drawings, vibrations, and sounds—particles that shape her personal universe. By avoiding labels, she allows her pieces to exist in multiplicity. They can simultaneously be drawings, devices, sculptures, or “penetrables”, constantly transforming and resisting confinement to a single, fixed purpose or interpretation. For Jiménez Santil, binaries hold no relevance. Purity does not reside at one point or another—what exists are the endless possibilities found in the in-between spaces of existence.

Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 is open for viewing at El Museo del Barrio, New York, USA, from October 10, 2024, to March 16, 2025.

Madeline Jiménez (Santo Domingo, 1986) is an artist living between Mexico City and Santo Domingo. In her practice, she imagines the transformation of objects and artistic conventions when in relation with a body that carries a different history.

Esteban Pérez (Quito, 1992) is an artist based in Berlin. His work explores alternative modes of attention for relating to the more-than-human world and landscape.

Translation: Jess Oliveira