CIFO grants Mid carrier artist

 name: Reflejos
tecnica: instalacion
10 espejos penitenciarios con texto escrito con lazer
yea:r 2023
​ 
 
 
Reflections
This project seeks to create a parallel between prisons, which are a space of high social contrast, and the symptoms of “free” society
My 10-year experience in prison for bank robbery allowed me to see and be part of the processes of affiliation upon entering prison, the loss of one’s own image and the jurisprudence of one’s own body, which becomes the intellectual property of the justice system.
Paradoxically, outside prisons, society has shrunk, the methods are much
more subtle, the walls are conceptual, ideological, religious: a simple yellow line is already a two-dimensional wall capable of social redesign.
Ever more subtle, technology and its sensors around society have transformed human beings into simple data that can be measured, like temperature. In any case, even when we are free, we end up stripped of our own image.
Creativity within prisons has always been a matter of life and death, the need of prisoners to violate the architectural limitations that have been designed to limit the human beings who inhabit them. It has allowed them to find ways to redefine their own bodies to establish new forms of communication when silence is a punishment. Simple but powerful ways to affect their environment and even the physical laws that keep them away from others.
Some prisoners sended to solitary confinement develop creativity as the only possible method to keep the brain alive and fight against vegetative silence: They insult each other honestly through the bars, to exercise their imagination - insults in an attempt to outdo each other, generate greater and greater intelligence and humor.
This work consists of a phrase written in low relief, divided along seven prison mirrors (metallic), preferably used. Installed on the wall, in sequence and at regular height.
The work seeks to put the viewer in the shoes of a prisoner because they inhabit the high contrast of the same society (a reality that everyone falsely feels distant) allowing the reflection of a “free” citizen to occupy the same mirror space that the reflection of a prisoner occupied, seeking to generate the parallelism of the uniformity of privatized punishment in prisons and the culture of control outside of them.
This work suggests that creativity is probably the solution in both cases. Because in the end
“We all live the paradox of the castaway who feeds on his own flesh to survive while he disappears”
J/Q

"I Listen Free" Performance Artist
Jhafis Quintero
 
“We all live the paradox of the shipwrecked man who feeds on his own flesh to survive while he disappears.” J.Q.
 
It is a performance created to intercept the public in their daily spaces, on the way to work, the supermarket, at train stations, in the parks and neighborhoods near the place of the artistic residence and will be expanding methodically every day until cover as much territory as possible, always outside the context of institutional walls, so that a more horizontal relationship is established with the public. As an artist, through this performance I want to offer a “service” to people, and listen to them. A dynamic that has been rapidly disappearing because we are irremediably rushing in the direction of virtuality without putting up any resistance. 
This project was born from much of my previous work in the field of art, from the experience in a prison with a ten-year sentence for bank robbery.
 Let’s say, having lived at that other side of society, I have been able to confirm and value, many things like communication, because of the high contrast of the social context of the prison which is always a reflection of the outside word, and also because humans in there without technology go back all the way to the real urgency of communication. 
The things that I was able to see and experience firsthand in a parallel society such as prisons, and now as an artist allow me to go all the way to the roots of human behavior and communication.
This experience allowed me to see and be part of the affiliation processes in prison and the eventual loss of the image and jurisprudence of my own body,  which become intellectual property of the justice system. 
A punishment particularly feared by all prisoners is incomunication, that is, the deprivation of communication. Isolation or deprivation of the ability to communicate is even worse than repetition within a prison. 
Outside of prisons, society has contracted, the methods are much more subtle, the walls are conceptual, ideological, religious. Isolation in free society is no longer imposed by an external agent, it is the subject himself who somehow chooses isolation. 
 
Creativity within prisons has always been a matter of life and death, the need of those deprived of liberty or communication to violate the architectural limitations that have been designed to limit those who inhabit it. Creativity has allowed them to find ways to redefine their own bodies to establish new forms of communication when silence is the norm. Simple but powerful ways to affect your environment and even the physical laws that cast you away far from others. 
However, in free society we have entered docilely into silence, we have surrounded our tridimensionality.
 Now as a free man and international artist I can relativize myself and see with a certain perspective the urgency of things as basic and unnegotiable as communication.
I truly believe that since the art residency is located in Lausanne, a place with a lot multicultural interaction and many different languages will be perfect to create a bridge with this performance.
 
 
 
 
 
With a transportable bench with wheels (art object) built in such a way that it can be moved like a wheelbarrow, I will go to look for the audience wherever they are for the entire period of the 6 months of residence. I will go out every day for 6 months to look for people in their environment, the streets, which is also the artist's laboratory. 
The performance will be photographed and the images together with the object/art (Mobile bench) that ill will build there, will be exhibited. 
The motivation of this project is to return to the origins of society and rescue almost obsolete dynamics such as listening. Another motivation is to propose the artist as a figure who offers a service, although it is true that art is communication and the artist communicates, in this performance I try to go outside the traditional precincts of art and approach the public and offer them the possibility of communicating without the mediation of technology. This project is also based on the so-called “solitary confinement”: which I experienced a few times during my period of confinement. The special punitive prison without the possibility of communication. To overcome “the limitation of being one person” (Diane Arbus), the inmate opens a hole in the cell wall and speaks to the other person on the other side of the wall. Both interlocutors in communication tend to protect themselves by carrying a knife and constantly moving, thus avoiding becoming a fixed target. In these conditions it is clear that for the human being and that it exceeds the principle of self-preservation. “only by communicating do we exist” while the viewer soon understands that the prison is just an allegory of our absolute need and
infinite fear of interacting with others.

Literature

Prólogo
La casa de los geckos
Radiografía de mi mismo
“Las artes hacen cosas en el entorno. Con sus formas y sus objetos intervienen en él, cuando menos modificando nuestras formas de percibir, conocer y pensar. Y así es que le reconocemos una potencial capacidad de modificar el mundo”.
Las exploraciones de todo artista, pasan necesariamente, por una serie de dinámicas de prueba-error, de la ida-vuelta, de la ganancia-perdida, de la expansión-contracción, sin que esta dualidad implique una anulación de los contrarios o una condena a la dualidad. Mucho más que tal resultado invariable, dichas exploraciones han probado ser radiografías de un lenguaje determinado. Podríamos pasar, por ejemplo, en un lenguaje del origen o en un lenguaje de la herencia o en un lenguaje de la transgresión, entre otras muchas posibilidades. Exploración y lenguaje inscriben así en el mundo, nuestro mundo, las grafías del origen de nuestras culturas, lenguas, tradiciones y cuerpos; las herencias que nos son transmitidas o, aquellas que asumimos como destino, o como azar, y cargamos desde un tiempo pasado que nos supera.
La casa de los geckos primera incursión del artista Jhafis Quintero en los registros de la escritura literaria es una extensión de diversas de las preocupaciones que ha ido inscribiendo en su obra visual a lo largo de los años:la precariedad, la ilegalidad, la masculinidad, la violencia, la soledad, la salvación través del arte. En su pasado hacia la materialidad de la narración el artista opto por el gesto autoficional para componer de forma realista, a veces quizá hiperrealisticamente, el bildungsroman de un joven Jhafis que, a pesar de todo se convierte en artista. La casa de los geckos, que puede ser leída como novela o como conjunto de relatos, o como diario íntimo- un texto híbrido de fronteras borrosas- es una pieza más de un proyecto artístico de larga gestación y, por lo tanto no debería ser leído aislado de los otros componentes de la radiografía quinteriana. Es precisamente a través del ejercicio de lectura ampliada en el que leemos la casa de los geckos como una pieza más dentro de un mosaico inacabado, que la exploración adquirirá su sentido completo como búsqueda de un lenguaje para poder decir y desdecir la subjetividad precaria del habitante del mundo contemporáneo.

Alexandra Ortiz Wallner
Berlin, primavera 2017

Prólogo Los dueños del mundo
Hace un par de años Jhafis Quintero publicó Máximas de seguridad, un manual de instrucciones para sobrevivir en la cárcel, producto de una rigurosa y exhautiva investigacionde campo. El instructivo abre con la sentencia de “conoce a tu enemigo como a ti mismo” pudo llamarse  también“ La confraternidad del cuchillo”. La serie de consejos para salir vivo de la cárcel empezaba con la regla de oro:lo primero y mas importante que debe de hacer al entrar a prisión es conseguir un fierro (preferiblemente delgado, pequeño y fácil de transportar) mediante trueque de sus objetos de valor dinero. De allí en adelante, acompañados de ilustraciones deliberadamente artesanales, se suceden consejos que, bien leídos, son máximas construidas con el material radioactivo de los proverbios.
Los dueños del mundo es el paso logico. Esta vez. Jhafis pasa del manual a la práctica, del concepto al apodo (que en prisión tiene más valor que el nombre de pila).
En estos 16 relatos desfilan las personas de carne y hueso que entran a esa dimensión en la que el espacio se comprime y el tiempo se licuifica. Calixto, Chupi, Locho, Blue, Sietenalgas, Muñecachocha, el Pana, el Ñato, Popeye, Bolsa de leche, Navarrote, Teacher. Todos ellos son dueños de un mundo que nadie quiere ver.
Policías y ladrones”, en papeles intercambiables, conviviendo en ese cuarto-de-chunches, esa especie de embajada no deseada de toda sociedad. A partir de relatos laterales, de una narración de primeros planos, Jhafis sin rozar ni la Victimización ni la misericordia, entrega un libro que camina por la sombra,  un libro subrepticio, un libro con fierro adentro. Sin olvidar a los hombres solos de José León Sánchez, digamos que Jhafis Quintero está más cerca de Gregory Corso que de Gean Genet. Digamos también que es un libro hechizo, como las armas que se inventan los presos a partir de cepillos de dientes, encendedores, lapiceros. Esta colección de relatos está hecha de esos objetos encontrados.
De eso y del tiempo físico de las cárceles.
Luis Chaves
Zapote, octubre 2009

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Sculptures

​Domus Sanctorum
​

“Domus Sanctorum” (Casa de los Santos)
escultura interactiva  Jhafis Quintero  realizada en colaboracion con la niversidad de arquitectura de Torino Creando belleza y bajo la curadoria de Daniela Rosi y Tea Taramino
En nombre del ladre, el tiro y el espíritu landro. Amén
En las favelas de Venezuela desde los años ´60 los lugareños beatifican clandestinamente a algunos de los jóvenes delincuentes que en vida ayudaban con el producto de sus robos a la gente más necesitada, generalmente estos muchachos nacidos y criados en un medio ambiente amorfo viven destinos pre diseñados que no superan los 25 años de edad. Mueren abatidos por la policía de manera espectacular (requisito necesario para la beatificación).  Diez años después de la muerte de estos muchachos, se inicia el proceso de beatificación, se construyen estatuas de yeso a su imagen y semejanza, incluyendo cicatrices y tatuajes. Se les llama popularmente La Corte Cale o Santos Chamos , se van popularizando a través de historias y reconstrucciones de sus vidas y milagros, se les rinde culto en los cementerios y sitios como casas espiritistas oficiales, donde las personas acuden en masa. Los fieles les brindan principalmente anís, cigarrillos o marihuana como parte del ritual, no solo para pedirles favores tradicionales sino también para pedirles protección de enemigos y bendición en sus actividades delictivas.  Estos santos son popularmente conocidos como los Santos Chamos. ​

Prótesis'        (Prosthesis, 2015, instalation)
 which transforms the gallery space into a prison corridor, with the quotidian objects of prison survival -cigarettes, a mirror, a sharp knife, reshaped into sculptural innuendos passed through the resin prostheses signifying bodies constructed in parts and never in wholes, temporary structures or survival and need. Through the brutal mechanism of the prison cells, by no means an experiment in re-socialization, the social is not altogether destroyed but adapted to a new reality. The evolutionary quotient of a species plays a significant role here, violating the institutional body of metal and concrete, and reforming its architectures of control into a new, richer public domain, with its own rules inscribed beyond the pale of the law; this new prosthetic body is an autonomous entity, free from constraint. Placing an incision marker between art and everyday reality

denuncia secreta/dibujos en cemento | 2011 | Pencil, marker and engraving on concrete

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This piece is part of a series of drawings on wood panels covered with special concrete and using basic tools like pencils, markers and sharp objects, just like inmates do in jail.

With this work I Intend to exorcise and transfer to the concrete my daily anxieties, reflections and fears. practice i have learned for 10 years in jail and now i can mix with my artist experience.
This type of graffiti has a vital significance in prison, it is the only way to make contact with yourself, to materialize the body that in these unusual circumstances ceases to belong to oneself to be subject to judicial punishment and therefore owned by the judicial system for the duration of the sentence.
These drawings help keeping the essence and do not allow us to forget who we are outside these sites. It is a way to perpetuate memories transferred as an indissoluble tattoo on the walls of the prison, which are a second skin that the prisoners inhabit.

Pasarela | 2010 | Installation
This sculpture installation deals with the way public institutions design people. Walking across this object people lose their identity, individuality, and become part of a general design.
This is inspired by structures that you can find in airports, banks, public offices, etc..
The red carpet is an ironic allusion to an invitation you can not refuse because if you need a service you have to carry out the ritual of being designed by these objects.

This project is inspired by the book of Franz Kafka, the Colony, but also in the prison experience, not as a goal but as a metaphor with the intention of keeping a more universal “lecture” of the piece.
The object is an interactive sculpture: a stationary treadmill, re-designed with the intention of using some particular aspects of the popular notion that these machines already have and combine them with others that are suggested in the new design.
The machine has a post with a support for the hands that requires submission as do the inmates in prisons to be handcuffed. At the top is a box where it enters the head, so the machine designs the position of the body of those who use it , but in a physical level as well when the subject start walking on the treadmill, it activates a device that force you to hear a popular religious discourse through a speaker located inside the cabinet.
The voice refers to the pay of a wicked man and the rewards of God-fearing man (Psalm verse 1). Then the design is completed: it is not only physical but also mental.
Once the head is located inside the box, the subject only can see out through an small hole in the front of the box.

La maquina | 2011 | Installation

'Bulova' (2015),
homonymous with shackles in prison slang, the boots trapped in the shackles are painted gold to refer to the monetary value of mass imprisonment today, in which prisons are run for a profit by private companies, little interested in the re-socialization of the inmates but whose profit margin is based on the perpetual incarceration of young population at risk, turning their bodies into private property. This now global for-profit-model, has extended the technological dominion of the body into a multimillion dollar business and imprisonment into a corporation beyond the control of the state. With the authority of the state disempowered and millions living under the globalization of debt and economic inequality, the prospects of liberation for those anonymous labor bodies behind bars, incarceration has become a political issue of the first order, alongside immigration. 'Reforma' is more than a journal from prison or an anthropological survey. By examining the conditions that underlie the global prison system today, Quintero provides a scathing criticism of the modern institutions of society and how their mechanisms of control, intertwined with the financialization of democracy, degenerate in the bio-political condition. This bio-power, practiced by modern states and corporatism, in order to subjugate bodies through regulatory environments, strips not only inmates from an objective world, but all those -artists included- whose living space is privately owned. The artist, however, leaves a space open for 'reform': Amidst the incredulity and instability of being in the present world, there remain a lot of vital spaces for human communication, albeit often oblique, which occur in unexpected manners and reshape what it means to be human, in unique, miraculous forms.

Videos

​Mirror video-(2017) duration 1: 27 minutes
 still image
https://vimeo.com/182384723
 This video talks about the “relationship between the architecture of prisons, designed and conceived to limit, and the creativity of prisoners to overcome these limitations. The small gesture of a subject sentenced to silence in a prison that is already a punishment per se, transforms a heavy concrete and metal wall into another “being”, an entity with whom he interacts. Thanks to the creativity of this prisoner, he is no longer alone and the wall is no longer a wall. This piece addresses the issue of isolation with great precision, evidencing how creativity allows us even in the limiting moments to find ways to re-signify our own bodies to establish new forms of communication, simple but powerful ways of affecting the environment and even the physical laws that sometimes they hold us away from others.

Eternity Video- duration 3:57minutes.
still image
https://vimeo.com/699120850

 'La liberté est relative'  video 2014  duration -  3:54 minutes 
still image 
this video approaches freedom under the guise of the false liberties associated with artistic practices, examining the nature of the contemporary, bound by an institutionality that censors and markets, where it is increasingly difficult for art to address itself without banisters. The sword of Damocles, from a story of the Roman philosopher Cicero, making allusion to the peril faced by those in a position of power, hangs from the artist's head, as a reminder of that freedom and power Quintero regained after prison, and that is now constantly in question for an artist. Bridging the gap between his erstwhile experience and his current practice, the meaning of freedom is addressed as a fundamental lack in modern society, extrapolating the jail corridors to the outside world.

collection
“spidres”
Video 01:34


https://vimeo.com/142504664

My experience of 10 years in prison for bank robbery allowed me to see and be part of the affiliation processes in prison and the eventual loss of the image and jurisprudence of one's own body, which become the intellectual property of the justice system.
 
Outside of prisons, society has contracted, the methods are much
More subtle, the walls are conceptual, ideological, religious: a simple yellow line is already a two-dimensional wall capable of social redesign.
Always more subtle, technology and its sensors around society have transformed human beings into simple data that can be measured, such as temperature.
In any case, even if we are free we end up stripped of our own image.
 
Creativity within prisons has always been a matter of life and death, the need of those deprived of liberty to violate the architectural limitations that have been designed to limit the human beings who inhabit it. It has allowed them to find ways to redefine their own bodies to establish new forms of communication when silence is a punishment. Simple but powerful ways to affect your environment and even the physical laws that contain them away from others.
 
In this performance the imprisoned body breaks the institutional architecture of confinement, that is, it violates that second skin of cement and metal and seeks to find its own humanity in  others.
This work immediately reminds us of the film 'Un Chant d'Amour' (1950) by the novelist Jean Genet.
As the only means and means, the body is elevated to the condition of sensory and sensual, turning metaphysics on its head: the soul is not imprisoned in the body, but is released outwards solely and exclusively through the body.

​

https://vimeo.com/191271900
​Metamorphosis:| 2015 | Video | 0:58 min

This video It has to do with the limits, not only those physical, mentals, religious or conceptuals, but also the bi-dimensional ones like the yellow lines commonly used to redesign the masses. This video also talks about the eternal and constant struggle between architecture (limits) that has been designed in some contexts to limit the human beings that inhabit it and their creativity to overcome it. Finally, the inner distance that this struggle generates in some, with the artificial ideas that they have been cultivated within them, sometimes allows them to seek alternative ways for a real change. Prisons or any type of reclusion does not work, what works is creativity exercised in the right direction.

Discipline:| 2015 | Video | 1:38 min
still image
https://vimeo.com/227369696
This video is inspired in my own experience and shows one of the fundamental exercises to survive in extreme situations such as imprisonment or worse the isolation that can become a prison within a prison. Inside prison it is need a lot of creativity and discipline to survive and maintain sanity and even a coin of little value can make huge difference. In some places like prison there is a battle taking place, a battle between creativity and the architecture designed to limited

All the way : | 2014 | Video | 2:43 min
still image
https://vimeo.com/699100838
This video talks about the value of a trip despite the interrupted images from that particular perspective that still having a fundamental value. As in all my art works, the video “All The Way” is the result of my experience in confinement and the study of human behavior in circumstances where people have no choice but to be human. Repetition is the real punishment of prison, and everyone's goal is to avoid it by any possible way. Unfortunately all the possibilities to create different combinations and and renew the reality expire very quickly leaving them all immersed in a still image. An option to escape from this image is the trip to the hospital in prison cars, they are small but there are small gaps and holes where prisoners can see glimpses the outside, images interrupted by the speed of the car. These fragmented images of the outside are the big prize, the possibility to break the routine for which all the inmates are minded to hurt themselves self stab, slash his wrists, etc. Many techniques have been developed to be taken to hospital and so repetition. the traveler recognizes the little that is yours when he discover how much he has not had and never will have, repetition is every where in prison, even of course in the free life, different depending on the context but not longer repetition. I also think of Kavafi saying that Ithaca is not a destination to reach, but all the way to. who observes this video will see from the perspective of a prisoner who are scaping from repetition paying big prices. The viewer became the inmate. The phrase repeated several times during the video through a walkies talkie Watch your self that has several possible meanings, look at yourself, but could means also beware. In the usual darkness in such transports only radio communications security is a sound that never lets you forget that the freedom is always been conditioned.

 Sisyphus: video | 2014 | Video | 1:49 min
still image
https://vimeo.com/699111737
the video shows a man running in circles tirelessly, endlessly. In the repeating time perception becomes atrophied, this is what happens in prison, inmates lives eternally the same bad moment, there is no difference from one day to another. Even if the sentence is for a few years, for the inmate it is eternal.

Title Text.

Hombre que camina| 2013 | Video | 2:08 min
still image
https://vimeo.com/413558812​
The video walking man is inspired in the prison experience, it has to do with the search for freedom, walking through small spaces usually in the inner yards inside the walls or in cells.
It is a ritual where we walk from one wall to another, again and again, the spaces are small but usually they walks on the memories, places or paths they walked when they were free.
There is also an important exercise of appropriation of the space, we measure the space with footsteps, same places: inner yards, cells etc in the way of apropiation of the space. Is very important because it is this  place were the person have to stay for a period of time and   becomes an extension of the prisoner.
Always the architecture: walls, metal bars, became an extension of the inmates body, there fore the important of this walking ritual.
​

​La Hora Garrobo| 2013 | Video | 2:21 min
still image
​https://vimeo.com/366451160

This work like all my art works is deeply inspired by my own biography and in the universe of confinement of the human been. This piece also talks about the return to the vital and important things that in freedom loose their natural value maybe because we take them for guaranteed.
La Hora Garrobo is about the importance of a simple and basic fact: the right to the sunlight.
While I was in a maximum security cell years ago I could experience together with the other inmates the absence of direct sunlight. In the inner courtyard the roof was covered with concrete, in the middle there was just a single hole. Every day at the same time the sun passes over that hole.
This light that came into the inner courtyard was very appreciated by all prisoners, it was a kind of religious moment, or perhaps even magical, everyone will feed on this light, naked in the ground under those sun rays even though in those circumstances and context that meant vulnerability, it was so an important issue that ends up moving the instinct of self-preservation in a second place the few minutes that took the ritual.
For humans the connection to the sun is life. That connection is vital especially for inmates in that conditions, every time they see the sun moving also they feel that the time is moving, passing and the sentence getting over.
In the sun is contained the perception of time and the promise that we are free from any eternity.
There is something inside of this ritual that is valid for all human beings: to see the sunlight always meant freedom.

Knock Out | 2012 | Video | 1:11 min
still image
​https://vimeo.com/182385216

This video addresses the difficulty of establishing real contact with ourselves, at least in a profound way.
The constant struggle that we keep within ourselves.
In the video, the difference in planes in which the subject is fighting against himself (he exists in a three-dimensional plane and his shadow in a two-dimensional one) make any real contact impossible. The interaction is maybe just an illusion that allows you to move on

"He suffers the paradox of the castaway who, to survive, feeds on his own flesh while he disappears"
JQ

 Sweet powder | 2010 | Video | 2:35 min
still image​
Through a very complex process for their purposes, Entity X instructs a Man X. Fully do not know the background of this relationship as well as the content of these instructions and its ultimate goal, but we see that Man X transcribes what dictates the Entity X on what looks like a huge glass full of dust. Everything is complex but it's all empty. Is the representation of the contents but without content. It is the paraphernalia of communication but communication. In this exchange flourishes the spine of the absurd. Why this apocalyptic mask has the power and control? Why the half-naked man complies an order of unknown origin? In this bizarre representation, all that happens for sure these signs are temporarily marked on a fragile surface. No message. The message is dust.

No i | 2011 | Video | 1:45 min
still image
vimeo.com/699113713
Two contiguous entities try to recognize each other: one male and one female. Both represent the eternal strife of the word that implies dissatisfaction that streamlines the language and run a failed dialogue that draws on various sources languages; Spanish and Dutch. Both entities speak but not communicate. The problem lies not only in the absence of common codes, but that, under a relentless repetition, whatever they say has broken away from its original meaning, becoming unintelligible even to those who speak Spanish or Dutch. The words blur and become meaningless mere sound. "Tu eres mi, quien soy yo” (You are me, who am I)". This exercise is exhausting and exasperating: they are invisible to each other, unreachable, untouchable... while remaining one side by side.

Me quiero No me quiero
still image
​https://vimeo.com/227369518

This video talks about the greatest of the virtues and the worst of the defects in the human being. The ability to adapt. the same person can adapt to be a victim or a torturer.
  a subject's left hand threatens his own right hand while he chants a popular phrase in children's games or love stories "I love myself, I don't love myself".
He is right who claimed that we are ultimately our best friend and at the same time our worst enemy.

 
We only exist when we communicate| 2010 | Video | 1:12 min
still image
​https://vimeo.com/191271377
This video is inspired by the so-called “solitary confinement”: special punitive imprisonment with no possibility for communication. In order to overcome “the limitation of being just a single person” (Diane Arbus), the inmate opens a hole in the wall of the cell and screams to the other on the other side of the wall. Both partners in communication tend to protect themselves by carrying a knife and avoiding becoming a fix target, while the viewer soon understands that the prison is just an allegory of our absolute need and infinite fear to interact with the other
​

Performance

Protesis | 2013 | Performance Opening Biennial the Venezia 

Prótesis 
Un ejercicio aprendido en el contexto de la prisión. Una dinámica que tienen los prisioneros para poder comunicarse. Al final el hecho de estar en una prisión hace lucir a cualquiera culpable de cualquier cosa inclusive reunirse para hablar en situaciones especiales, hasta la comunicación puede ser un delito. Estando bajo la tutela de una institución con una visión monocromática en el sentido moral todo lo que ellos hagan dentro de aquellos muros termina siendo por la naturaleza del espacio, prohibido.

Durante la noche, cuando las celdas están cerradas, es imposible comunicarse o pasarse un cigarrillo, o dinero... Entonces hay un personaje, uno de los más importantes jerarquicamente hablando en cada una de las celdas, un tipo que desarrolla la habilidad de tirar una bola de plomo amarrada a un hilo desde una celda a la otra sin ruido. A veces las distancias son de 10 metros o 15 metros y la bola siempre tiene que pasar a través de varios grupos de barrotes, de obstáculos, evitando como es natural ahí la atención del policía. Una vez que la bola de plomo llega al alcance de los otros habitantes de las celdas vecinas la comunicación está establecida. Se amarra lo que se quiere enviar y se enviá hacia el otro lado, jalando el hilo en una dirección hasta que “el producto” llegue a las manos justas.

De ahí proviene el nombre de mi perfórmance: Prótesis – esa práctica se vuelve una asistencia, un auxilio a la imposibilidad de comunicarse en las formas usuales, una asistencia diseñada exclusivamente para resolver una limitación. Como lo seria una muleta a una persona a la que le falta una pierna.

En mi perfórmance yo utilicé esta dinámica prohibida en aquellos contextos y la implementé en el contexto arte: entregué al publico obras originales (dibujos firmados) durante los días de inauguración.

(Floozie's procession | 2010 | Performance is another word for prostitute)
Jhafis Quintero & Nathalie Ho Kang You
This performance aims to make visible the situation of women living the red light districts in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The content of this performance uses the characteristics of the popular religious processions given in Latin America and some European and Asian countries. Within the importance of a procession this performance contextualizes this together with the codes the city of Amsterdam while driving on bicycles.
In the performance of the procession another performance will takes place in a niche carried on a bicycle. Every act taken place in this niche will be filled with offerings to the tangled and untangled emotions of the life of the Floozie and in honor to the Floozie.
From the start of this procession the parade travels around neighborhoods to finalize this procession by giving a sculpture to the city of Amsterdam, the Floozies, and her public.
Related to the women of the red light districts the sculpture as well as the performance is a representation of the ways we can see these women. The exposure that lives within this phenomenon carries also the forbidden sin.
Floozie, the name of the piece, will deal with this ambiguous context by honoring instead of forbidding this act. Floozie provokes this confrontation with her public using religious motifs.

​A - sociales | 2010 |
I was invited to participate in an art magazine from New York, Atlantica (n. 55), to make a work about prisons.
I worked with prisoners in La Reforma, Costa Rica. Department of maximum security, where most of them are locked forever, or they can not live with the other inmates because they are extremely violent. 
I asked them to make a self-portrait in the way they want to be seen by others and the way they see themselves.
They made drawings as self-portraits and signed it. My only intervention was to add baroque frames as a metaphor for being behind bars (they are framed), outside the frame is written the sentence number.
Somehow the inmates loose their humanity and become a number of a sentence.
 The title used is a terminology that Michel Foucault uses for this type of people, “asociales”, what actually means criminals; this terminology is no longer in use.
 In this case, I played with the sentence “a sociales”, to create the word socials. 
They are ghosts inside prison’s walls and probably nobody except their relatives will know about their existence, a mistake, a wrong design erases them, but through these portraits they are made visible.
Art gives the possibility to move the position of the characters in life field. I Try to work with it, give a different perspective for people who only have limitations. Now they are in an art magazine no more as prisoners but as artists.

​Máximas de seguridad | 2006 | Hand book / Performance

This book brings together a series of hand drawings and text in a small compendium of instructions to survive and get respect in prison, I gave it as a performance during the visiting days several prisons in Costa Rica, sometimes clandestinely introducing them into the prison. The tips contained this manual works in almost any prison, but also helps to survive in "the outside" where the stabs are no maybe physical but often metaphorical.
The book is intended for newcomers who once inside a prison have no idea what to do.
Learn the existing rules in prison gets you in a very life-threatening situations and learning mistakes are fatal always. In Prison facts of life are brutally simple.
Through a performance with the small book i place in the hands of rookies in some prisons the ten years of experience I have those issues. ​

El santo del tren | 2009 | Performance
this project is about the creation of a saint, "the saint of the train", and takes advantage of the Latin American enthusiasm, in this case in Costa Rica, for embracing religious manifestations (virgin apparitions, angels, etc.) very easily without further questioning.
Using the power of rumor I designed a gay saint of one meter and half, wearing contemporary clothes and made of cement, which was placed outside near the train rails in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. Afterwards, I dressed myself as a priest, got in the train for several days and handed a prayer and biography with the geographic position of the ‘fake’ saint. As a result, the saint was immediately accepted as absolute truth by people, making it clear how we are manipulated by churches.
Later the local church forced the museum to remove the sculpture from the streets.

Artist for rent | 2008 | Performance
​This is a performance in which I participated by invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Costa Rica, the idea was to approach a neighborhood of the capital of this country where people used to vandalize any cultural approaches. I visit the neighborhood and decided to work with the fountain located in a park that since colonial times has been a metaphor of the image of the town. I found the fountain in bad state, so used the budget for my project to buy pool paint. I printed a shirt with the legend “artist for rent” and together with the locals, we painted the fountain, and finally designed a legend "be careful with what you wish for, it could come true". This because while we cleaned we found some coins in the fountain.
In this project I exercise my belief that art must be participatory and not a cultural invasion.

Photo

Egresados | 2007 | Photo montage
​A photo montage in memory of fellows who disappeared or got murdered inside jails.
A cityscape built with the General’s Cemetery mausoleums as a city for those prisoners who died in anonymity.
Playing with perspective and dimension I recreate a city and use shadows to represent them.

​In Dubia Tempora | 2004 | Printed book and marble sheath

Work carried out collectively with the writer Maria Montero.
It is an artist's book of large format, showing images of objects and instruments made ​​in Costa Rican jails with prohibited material or waste. These images, obsessively refined, clean, elegant are accompanied by texts of great intelligence and irony, addressing its subject in an unexpected and original way which refers to the language used in criminal cases.

painting

Porno pollos | 2005 | Oil and acids on copper | 60×40 cm

La vida te da | 1999 | Acrilic on canvas

This work embodies an important change of "disciplines" in my life, a transition that was formed over the course of ten years. It was conceived as a kind of shield of those representing the nobility. I needed to create a distance between me and the place where I was, so despite showing the deconstruction I was living in and still live, it is a self portrait in a noble format.

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