I Fly, Therefore I am is an exhibition that acts as a framework for reflecting on work by the artist Diana Coca between 2013 and 2019. During this period, an important change occurred in this complex artist’s work, made up of equal amounts of photography and performance art, and it is this change that we will focus on. The transition that Coca’s work underwent, both spatially and in time, during the above years will serve as the basis of this somewhat comparative descriptive analysisof the development of a complex discourse full of subtle nuances.

Concepts like journeying, borders, feminism, surveillance, freedom, movements and trances can be associated with her actions–of an initial spontaneous corporal kind–, made in response to philosophical reflections on her experiences and interactions with different characters found in different parts of the world at different times.

The exhibition is not intended to follow a linear chronological pattern, but to offer a comparative conceptual insight into her work, highlighting aspects used instinctively by the artist to weave rich discourse on the events that have shaped her life. In the artist’s words: This journey is not a search for a fixed identity, but first-hand confirmation, in the flesh, that identity is a construct in constant transition. This motion allows me to take a step back and to observe my own prejudices, inherited norms and unshakeable beliefs from a critical distance in order to question them: unlearning and de-structuring myself in order to restructure myself from a different place, in transitional movement, far removed from conventional notions of borders, countries, gender, race, class or identity, to finally evolve into a being made up of multiple layers. In this form of artistic production, the occurrence that I present and represent is very close to life, like a living body that influences and is influenced. Hence, it becomes more difficult to identify art and beauty, challenging those who speculate about art but not about what goes on inside the artist.

Mercedes Estarellas