Your name
Gloria Oyarzabal
Place of birth
London, UK
Place where you live now
Madrid, Spain
3 words to describe you
Aware Active Engaged
Why do you take pictures?
To understand and advance
Where do you get your inspiration?
In scepticism, self-questioning reflections and also in fascination and illusion.
Who are your influences?
The voices of those who stand up against a dictatorial, imposed and oppressive status quo.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Usually one project opens the door to the next. It appears as a consequence of a reflection linked to the whole personal process of decentralisation and self-decolonisation in which I have been immersed for years. If something makes me uncomfortable, makes me uneasy, I deal with it.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Ideally, a self-questioning in the viewer. On a perhaps more realistic level, simply a listening and raising of curiosity about a past that affects the present. And, who knows, by bringing together many consciences of responsibility, a less hierarchical society, more attentive to harm and pain to humans, a more careful future may be achieved.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Those who question and denounce (although there will always be a preference for those for whom I feel a formal and aesthetic affinity).
Is there anything you want to add?
Thank you for this opportunity. I hope that my small contribution will be useful to bring about some change. I encourage everyone who has the privilege of being able to raise their voice against oppression to do so within their means.

USUS FRUCTUS ABUSUS (La Blanche et la Noire)
Project statement

In Roman law, ownership was defined as the full, absolute, perpetual and exclusive enjoyment of an object or corporeal entity. Usus was the right to make use of the entity, Fructus to receive the fruits, Abusus to dispose of it according to the power to modify, sell or destroy it.

Museums originated as institutions more than 300 years ago, when royal collections became accessible to the general public, thus becoming instrumental tools in the construction of identity and the definition of nation. Given the colonialist origin of many of their collection’s narrative, then knowledge creation and collective/individual memory come into conflict. A review of the relationship between anthropology and museum collections assembled from a plundering colonial past, leads to the conclusion that for decades these spaces have reinforced exoticism and distinction, intrinsically related to supremacist discourses.

Is the concept of the museum universal?
Intrinsically related to "otherness" and the colonisation of the concept of woman, is the responsibility for the risky representation of black women in the history of Western art.

Stereotypes of black sexuality: audacious, available and servile.
The odalisque leads to a larger discussion of race within art and art spaces.
And as a starting point my enthralment with the painting La Blanche et la Noire by the French-Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1913). Inspired by Manet’s Olympia and Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave, it depicts the Sapphic love between a sylph and a black woman. Unlike his predecessors, Vallotton dispenses all exotic references.

Is returning what has been plundered and looted, both in terms of objects and identities, an urgent, universal and feasible question for all? Ownership, restitution, reparation, recontextualisation? Who has the agency to give, return, lend, adjudicate, rename?

gloria oyarzabal
@gloria_oyarzabal