Yapci Ramos
I Don't Mind, 2018

The driving force behind her work, curiosity is found at the heart of the creative process of the Spanish photographer and videographer Yapci Ramos, whose work revolves around notions of gender, sexuality and identity, sometimes going so far as to draw from the depths of the intimate. The gaze is facing the camera, the confrontation with the spectator immediate. As background sound, a succession of several orgasms. If we can regret the literal approach adopted by many contemporary artists who venture into the field of eroticism or sexuality, the work of Yapci Ramos on the contrary comes to reconcile us with the representation of these concepts through a method that refuses any excessive simplification. Since the artist’s bias is to represent these orgasms by voice rather than by image, the viewer is invited to form a mental image for himself from a purely auditory stimulus. A subtlety in the staging that does not preclude the narrative depth. The experience thus lived by the spectator returns us to the uniqueness of the orgasm which, specific to each individual, is nourished by all that constitutes our intimacy: desires, fantasies, etc., and of the active part which presides over the existence of this pleasure.

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Above all, in I don’t mind, they invite us to reconsider pleasure through the prism of spontaneity and empathy, in contrast with a society where individualism increasingly affects our relationships with others but also our experience of reality: overabundance of technology, fleeting social relationships, etc. Choosing to represent the notion of desire no longer from the perspective of a partner but to focus on all these moments of intimacy that we can have with ourselves, is to remember that today, every day we discover a little more what loneliness means and how fragile our interactions are. Body envelopes, individuals and society become one. The video installation thus reflects the functioning of our contemporary societies and reminds us that the notion of intimacy, which appeared jointly with that of the individual in the 19th century, has not ceased to be the prerogative of our postmodern society which, more than any other before, gives it a major importance.

Excerpt from an essay by Lisa Toubas, for Curiosités Contemporaines.