Famous for her installations, videos and monumental drawings, the artist use to create participative projects and addresses solitude and violence in our society. Her works are indicative of a fundamentally utopian practice that seeks to offer radically healthy alternatives to a tumultuous and unsatisfactory status quo.
When Ana Gallardo was five, her mother, a Spanish visual artist, passed away. She was just 38 years old. Since then, Ana has been a survivor. Her father, a poet, quickly re-married ; at 14, Ana was already an active worker and at 17, she had been legally emancipated. A self-taught artist, she began her education in different artist's studios and started to exhibit early on, but it was only in 1996, when she was the same age as her mother when she died, that Ana?s poignant political work started to flourish and she was able to articulate her visceral, urgent message with a maximum economy of means.
Over the last decade, her monumental drawings and participatory projects have enacted a practice of silent denunciation : an art that draws attention to specific social processes of abandonment and indifference, exploring opportunities to transform the status quo of micro-societies. In A boca de jarro (Point blank, 2008), Silvia Monica, a transvestite prostitute, realized her dream of becoming a real performer in a proper theatre. Her lyrics were a condemnation of child abuse and the experience (of creating and participating in the work) helped to prepare her to quit prostitution.
Gallardo's projects have also focused on how to ensure a dignified old age for all; In her project A place to live when we become old (2008 to date), she conceives her own retirement home ; a place where, enlightened by the wisdom of her elders, she will eventually achieve the fullness of an old age as rich and luminous as any earlier period in life. The work shown at the 56th International Venice Biennale, El pedimento (2009-2015), is inspired by diverse rituals in Oaxaca, Mexico, in which people make offerings to deities in the hopes that they will grant them favours. The artist invites the public specifically to think about their future old age and to mould a figure that embodies their preoccupations or desires for the future out of clay. For the Biennale, where Gallardo presents the last chapter of this project, the artist has chosen to invite prisoners from the Women's Prison of Giudecca, in Venice, to work with clay made from earth, water and compost : the compost produced at their vegetable gardens where they grow their own food and then sell it at the prison entrance via a cooperative.