Vitrina @ Maria Teresa Hincapié. 1990

- HINCAPIÉ Maria Teresa, Vitrina (The Shop Window), 1990.

Maria Teresa Hincapié (1956-2008, Colombia) started her artistic career in the theatre as an actor. During the mide-1980s she shifted her attention to performance art and started investigating non-representational psychophysical practices; moreover, she embraced life as an artistic practice. Hincapié as other Colombian creators at that time, was mobilized by Colombia’s extreme socio-political situation. The murder by drug cartels in 1982 of the Minister of Justice at the time, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was a major event in a long history of violence involving governmental forces, drug trafficking syndicates, guerilla groups, paramilitary forces and civilians. Hincapié used her body to respond to and resist a state of acute violence. 

In Vitrina, during a six-hour period, Hincapié successively dirtied a store window with lipstick and cleaned it with soap. Dressed as a cleaning woman, she wrote sentences, drew her silouette emphasizing sexual parts, and stamped kiss marks on the glass. Her tasks addressed the invibility of the cleaning woman’s labour, the extreme appeal of commodities framed by shop windows, the objectification of the female body, and the political verve of a performance artist.