Video art / Photographic series
Fahrenheit
During the most experimental phase of Locking Shocking, Ana Locking developed a series of photographs and video art presented at Casa de América (Madrid) and recognised in 2004 with the Ingenio 400 Audience Award.
The piece is structured as a visual reflection on censorship and symbolic violence against critical thinking. Taking as its starting point the burning of books by ultra-conservative regimes and groups, Fahrenheit constructs an imaginary world where written culture becomes a territory of conflict.
In the work, fundamental volumes of Western thought—The Bible, Don Quixote, Capital, The Divine Comedy, The Republic, Candide—appear in the hands of different characters, displaced from their usual context and subjected to latent tension. Books cease to be passive objects and become vulnerable bodies, carriers of a memory that can be manipulated, silenced or destroyed.
Far from literal illustration, the proposal operates through atmosphere and suggestion. The human body, a recurring motif in Ana Locking’s universe, acts as a mediator between knowledge and power, between cultural transmission and ideological threat. The emotional temperature that runs through the piece—implicit in the title itself—refers both to physical combustion and to the political climate that has historically attempted to stifle freedom of thought.
With Fahrenheit, Locking Shocking already affirmed a clear position: fashion and image could function as critical devices, capable of activating political readings without renouncing aesthetic power. The project thus anticipates a constant in Ana Locking’s subsequent career: the desire to place creation in a place of conscious friction between beauty, discourse and cultural resistance.
During the most experimental phase of Locking Shocking, Ana Locking developed a series of photographs and video art presented at Casa de América (Madrid) and recognised in 2004 with the Ingenio 400 Audience Award.
The piece is structured as a visual reflection on censorship and symbolic violence against critical thinking. Taking as its starting point the burning of books by ultra-conservative regimes and groups, Fahrenheit constructs an imaginary world where written culture becomes a territory of conflict.
In the work, fundamental volumes of Western thought—The Bible, Don Quixote, Capital, The Divine Comedy, The Republic, Candide—appear in the hands of different characters, displaced from their usual context and subjected to latent tension. Books cease to be passive objects and become vulnerable bodies, carriers of a memory that can be manipulated, silenced or destroyed.
Far from literal illustration, the proposal operates through atmosphere and suggestion. The human body, a recurring motif in Ana Locking’s universe, acts as a mediator between knowledge and power, between cultural transmission and ideological threat. The emotional temperature that runs through the piece—implicit in the title itself—refers both to physical combustion and to the political climate that has historically attempted to stifle freedom of thought.
With Fahrenheit, Locking Shocking already affirmed a clear position: fashion and image could function as critical devices, capable of activating political readings without renouncing aesthetic power. The project thus anticipates a constant in Ana Locking’s subsequent career: the desire to place creation in a place of conscious friction between beauty, discourse and cultural resistance.
6 Photographs / colour Cibachrome / 100 x 140cm / 2004
6 Photographs / colour Cibachrome / 100 x 140cm / 2004