Cristina Lucas – Touch and go

Cristina Lucas

FILTER: VIOLENCE AND ITS COUNTERSTRIKES

It is almost a landmark in Liverpool: an abandoned and derelict factory building with the company name still visible: Euro Pleasure International Ltd. In Lucas’s video ‘Touch & Go’, the building symbolizes the post-industrial city of a bygone economic era. Such factories moved to second and third world countries under pressure from the capitalist system, leaving countless workers on the street. A new Euro Pleasure International is operating somewhere in India or Mexico, with the same philosophy and the same products. In her film Cristina Lucas has Liverpool union members and their families throw stones at the former factory – artistic vandalism and cathartic protest in one.

In her work Lucas dissects political structures to distinguish between official stories, actual history and our collective memory. She dismantles historical, social, political and cultural clichés and takes a critical position on issues such as the position of women, western domination and the ambition of humankind to control nature.

www.biennial.com/2010/exhibition/artists/cristina-lucas