FABIOLA TORRES-ALZAGA
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC)Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Las desinvitadas (The Uninvited), 2023, HD video, black-and-white, sound, 12 minutes 9 seconds.
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga’s “Las desinvitadas” (The Uninvited), loosely inspired by the eponymous 1944 American horror film about a haunted house, explores the political implications of rendering something, if not invisible, then out of sight. The nod to cinema is made evident thanks to the darkened gallery where two sculptures—wooden fragments of a wall and a window, each held by a metal structure, suggesting they were sectioned from a larger set design—are dramatically framed by film lights. Naturalistic drawings, carefully traced in graphite and achieving an outstanding chiaroscuro, hang next to each sculpture. One, Fragmentos de la cuarta pared (rama) (Fragments of the Fourth Wall [Branch]), 2024, illustrates a leafy bough held by a metallic arm; the other, Fragmentos de la cuarta pared (cortina) (Fragments of the Fourth Wall [Curtain]), 2024, faithfully depicts a draped curtain hanging from another metallic structure.
Those works are immersed in the eerie soundtrack that emanates from Las desinvitadas, 2023, a looped digital film that is the exhibition’s centerpiece. Nestled at the back of the exhibition room, in a small video gallery separated from the sculptures by a diagonally placed sheet of drywall (an oblique reference, perhaps, to the “Dutch angles” in German Expressionism and film noir, which skew the camera for diagonal shoots to engender an anxious feeling), it shows the interiors of a house photographed in stark black and white and decorated with silhouette-patterned wallpaper, old-fashioned furniture, sconces, and ornate picture frames. A tracking shot takes us from the space outside the fantasy world of movies—where the cinematographic artifice is revealed by the apparition of cameras, lights, rails, and other equipment—into the deceivingly natural realm of the house. We see no one inside it; doors open, leading onto more doors, revealing a space devoid of inhabitants.
In “Las desinvitadas,” Torres-Alzaga skillfully deploys her craft as an illusion maker. However, she is less interested in film’s cunning deceptions than in the film industry’s ability to dictate social norms by keeping dissidence—chiefly sexual and gender identities that fail to conform to conservative values—out of frame. The exhibition ponders the pervading impact of the Hays Code (the Motion Picture Production Code), which from 1934 on regulated the representation of sex, crime, costume, and religion, among other things, in Hollywood films. The Hays Code is directly responsible, for instance, for Betty Boop’s transformation from a confidently sexualized flapper to a conservative housewife. Overall, it helped stymie women’s emancipation by promoting patriarchal, heteronormative mores.
The slow pace of the camera, surveying the set with a clinical eye, grants viewers time to wonder about everything outside its machinic field of vision. Horror and noir films rely heavily on out-of-frame strategies: Fear and suspense are induced by the sense of a presence that remains unseen. In Torres-Alzaga’s exhibition, the cinematic frame thus is envisioned as a curtain—a recurring trope in her oeuvre—that conceals certain interactions and delicately places a veil over specific relationships (mainly queer ones), pushing them to the suggested narrative fringes or limiting their existence to mere innuendo.
While these dynamics were certainly present in the cinema of the 1940s and ’50s, they still linger today. Have las desinvitadas—all these uninvited female characters (for in the Spanish title, these undesirables are gendered female) and others who failed to adhere to the socially accepted behavior—turned into ghosts? In the penumbra of the gallery, I read a wall text saying, “If the shot frames a reality, the use of the offscreen invites spectators to imagine other possibilities.” Hopefully, this proposal will help las desinvitadas turn from specters to actual corporeal beings.