Abel Azcona’s mother was a heroinómano prostitute. He saw him born when he was 18 and after trying to abort him three times, something that the artist defined in an interview with this newspaper as “the greatest act of love” that he had received “never.” And he justified it: “To me, like other children who were born in the eighties of heroinómos mothers, forcing me to be born despite the fact that my mother wanted to abort three times, they were taking away a right, the right not to be born in a certain scope of violence and abuse. I would have been better not born. ” Then, a few days later he left him. He didn’t know more about her until October 2023, but he hasn’t known her yet. On April 1, 37 years after abandonment, it will. Isabel Gómez will meet her son in a performance in the Circle of Fine Arts of Madrid.
The meeting will be the end of a “procedural work” that the artist began on October 19, 2023 and has lasted so far. In last year he invited his biological mother to tell his paper testimony. The result is a text that included in two of his personal exhibitions and that began: “I abandoned you because it was wrong, I was very afraid, I didn’t know what I could do, I had no one to support me. They were all against me. ” He also put it in the focus on the contemporary art center of Malaga last year and as a step prior to meeting. There, while they filmed her, the mother spoke, in a living voice, her origins, her hometown and the beginning of her history.
Semíramis González, specialized in performance and feminist art, and curator of the piece, describes the act as “a final step to an emotionally painful process and in which only performance can serve as a catalyst for those emotions that causes such a reunion.” And it points out its relevance: “The interest of this action, which completes the circle of the different steps towards the mother, is not only the encounter between the two, for the first time, but everything that the figures of both represent.”
The artist had already done something similar when, in 2021, he searched and convinced Manuel Lebrijo, the ex -partner of his biological mother, an alcoholic man and drug addict, to accompany him on a documentary trip to the past. Lebrijo and his girlfriend had kidnapped Azcona, just three years (in reality what they did was not return it to his adoptive family after spending a weekend with him), to take him first to Madrid and then to the hometown of Lebrijo, before of being located and detained six months later by the Civil Guard. The two made that tour together. And all that was the exhibition material Return to the father And that included a performance in which Azcona took him by the hand for a few minutes, but then he released him to continue his life.