Through her practice, Cristina Lucas (Úbeda, 1973) attempts to expose how power systems operate and the way they influence us. Adopting both macro and micro approaches, she analyzes the main political and economic struc- tures of our world and uncovers their contradictions.

All of her projects are the result of intense, long-term research processes. In her work Lucas confronts and challenges the constructed narrative, the one we accept as factual or natural, searching for cracks she can use to shatter it. That quest for a fissure in the official story undoubtedly has something to do with her feminist convictions.

Back and Forth surveys Lucas’s career from the mid-2000s to her most recent pieces, created especially for this occasion, with a particular emphasis on works that appropriate systems for classifying and organizing reality -maps, flags, colour charts, the periodic table, stock market indices, etc.-in order to highlight, in a very Foucauldian operation, the close relationship between power and the control of knowledge.

This exposes some of the less obvious connections between the construction of nation-states, the idea of economic development and progress, and the exploitation of individuals and territories, and opens our eyes to their devas- tating consequences: wars, globalization (which erases all singularity) and climate change, to name but a few. Lucas shows us that the current economic system, far from being an abstract concept, affects us quite directly and always leaves marks on our bodies: the very bodies which, like her Composiciones (Compositions) series, are made of the same elements that big industry is now selling or modifying to turn them into lucrative commodities.

Sergio Rubira