Carmen Schabracq works in different media in which the performative plays an important role. She collects stories from different myths, traditions, her own experiences and uses them to recreate collage like visual narratives.
The mask is a recurrent object and theme within her work, which she uses to explore the complexity of human identity. Every human exists out of many faces, all of whom originate from the perception of the other. A mask is a tool for a ritual or performance, to become ‘the other’.
The other does not exist: this is rational faith, the incurable belief of human reason. Identity = reality, as if, in the end, everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same. But the other refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth. —Antonio Machado
CARMEN SCHABRACQ 