Raquel Manchado
Spain, 1977
Lives and works in Madrid, Spain
Visual artist, art director, collector of misogynist artefacts, newspaper archive scavenger and editor of Antorcha Ediciones, where she researches symbolic violence, misogynist and heteronormative aspects in graphic humour and popular culture; at the same time she publishes books, fanzines, libelles and facsimiles, among other unclassifiable things. Since 2017 she has given talks and carried out critical screenings of the images from her archive, which constitutes the main medium of her work.
Her art practice is based on the critical analysis of an extensive archive of old illustrated humour postcards of different dates and origins. These popular images, most of them anonymous, would be equivalent, in the pre-internet era, to today's memes, given their viral quality, their omnipresence in public and private space and their role in propagating messages using a false neutral tone.
Who are you laughing at? Humour, like all language, is not neutral, it imposes a point of view on the world. Like proverbs, sayings, songs and popular oral narratives with which they share a viral nature and mass dissemination, these humorous images support a set of cultural representations about social and gender relations, a normative discourse, a didactic warning, a prescription of what is normal for the construction of commonplace.
The situated observation of this set of images reveals the use of graphic humour in popular culture as an effective means of transmitting symbolic violence: disseminating and naturalising imageries and discourses and imposing empathetic blind spots. The drawing softens the harshness of the message and the comicality of the format gives it a powerful power of normalisation: the form easily conceals the content. The volume of the archive reveals the pre-existing structure through the accumulation and repetition of motifs, pulling back the veil of normality to see for the first time what has always been seen.
Solo exhibitions at Freijo Gallery:
· 2022 Archive of Illustrated Misogyny. LZ46 program
Group exhibitions at Freijo Gallery:
· 2023 How to continue?