Secret Strike. Bank Building Utrecht, 2004

A secret strike, as these works show, consists of stopping for a moment, freezing whatever activity one is carrying out and acting on the context from inactivity. In that sense the work refers to the possibility of changing a given reality through a small personal gesture. Specifically, that gesture is the fact of stopping for a few seconds, of ceasing to be productive, in short, in a context where productivity and results are the main purpose, since the spaces she focuses on are mostly big artistic and economic institutions. A secret strike is a tool of great symbolic power which, for a few seconds, opens up the possibility of a totally different, personal, reality, not marked by timetables or external precepts. At the same time it only makes sense as a response, a small rebellion against the system to which each of the protagonists is subjected. It is both a liberating metaphor for the definition of a personal space and a powerful aesthetic tool that runs through the history of art from classical sculpture to video by way of photography.

Specifically, Secret Strike, Bank Building Utrecht, the second of the works done in the series, is one of the best examples for explaining the transgression of this secret gesture. If we were to think of the work as a hypothesis, the question would be: what would be the consequences for the world economy if all the workers of the leading bank in Holland were to stop work for a few seconds? The answer once again is more symbolic than functional, but the power of the work lies in placing the spectator in the tension involved in contemplating that hypothesis as a possibility.

Moreover, the journey through the bank, which we can observe from the board of directors’ table to the canteens and from the surveillance room to the cafeteria, contains moments in which the incident takes pride of place and what is activated in the observation is a more voyeuristic instinct that makes it interesting for us to go where we are not allowed because we do not belong to that particular society. These moments of the gesture and the accident are contrasted with the ones when silence becomes an unbearable noise and in a way a metaphor for a possible global economic crisis, brought about once again by a gesture. It is as if we were allowed to observe the first principle of chaos theory according to which the beat of a butterfly’s wings can whip up a hurricane.