Abel Azcona

Abel Azcona Marcos is a Spanish artist, specializing in performance art. His work includes installations, sculptures, and video art. He is known as the "enfant terrible" of Spanish contemporary art. His first works dealt with personal identity, violence and the limits of pain; his later works are of a more critical, political and social nature.
Azcona's works have been exhibited at the Venetian Arsenal, the Contemporary Art Center in Málaga, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Art League, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His work has also been exhibited at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka and Taipei, the Lyon Biennale, the Miami International Performance Festival and the Bangladesh Live Art Biennale. The Bogotá Museum of Contemporary Art dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him in 2014.

Early life

Abel Azcona was born on 1 April 1988, as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, in the Montesa Clinic in Madrid, an institution that was run by a religious community. It was geared towards people at risk of social exclusion and homelessness. His father's identity is unknown, and his mother, a drug user and prostitute called Victoria Luján Gutiérrez, abandoned him at the clinic a few days after his birth. The nuns gave the newborn baby to a man who knew his mother and who insisted he was the father, even though he met her when she was already pregnant and was her partner only sporadically. Azcona was then raised in the city of Pamplona with this man, who continuously went in and out of prison, and his family, which was unstructured and linked to drug trafficking and delinquency.
The first four years of Azcona's life were characterised by mistreatment, abuse and abandonment, caused by different members within his family environment, and the fact he passed through various residences, which caused several concerns about custody from public institutions of social protection. Due to this precarious situation, his birth was not registered until the age of four, in 1992, when Social Welfare intervened.
A young Catholic woman from Navarre was introduced to a newborn Azcona when she met the man who brought newborn Azcona from the Montesa clinic in Madrid to Pamplona in prison, where she volunteered; he still falsely presented himself as Azcona's biological father. She coordinated a Catholic group in the Saint Vincent of Paúl parish and was a volunteer with Caritas Internationalis. This meeting in the penitentiary center led to the baptism of Azcona when he was uncommonly old, in a parish located in front of the prison, requested by the woman, who became his godmother. She was the eldest daughter of a conservative Navarrese family ; the family started taking Azcona in when he was four years old – typically over short periods of time and weekends – after the man came out of prison and they realised how poor Azcona's situation was. They informally cared for him until the age of six, when they requested to foster him on a more permanent basis. When he was six, the situation with the man's family got worse and custody was withdrawn. An adoption request began to be processed, and he was officially adopted by the eldest daughter at the age of seven. The family also intervened to allow him to be accepted into the Catholic schools the daughters had attended. However, he had problems adapting to the family and to the school, which manifested in instances of theft and violence at the school until he was expelled at the age of thirteen.

Name

Throughout his life, Abel Azcona has been officially known by various names: Abel Luján Gutiérrez, Abel David Lebrijo González, Abel David Azcona Marcos, David Azcona Marcos, and Abel David Azcona Ema. Azcona's biological mother chose the name Abel and, when registering him at the Montesa Clinic as her own, he was first named Abel Luján Gutiérrez, using both her surnames. The child was not registered in the Civil Registry until he was four years of age and, as he had been abandoned by his mother, her partner took care of the child and registered him as Abel David Lebrijo González, using his surnames; these are the first surnames that appear legally. From then on, in different records and documents, such as at school, the second surname is shown as Raposo, that of the man's new partner. At the age of seven he was adopted and became known as Abel David Azcona Ema, taking on the surnames of his adoptive mother. The adoptive family refused to use the name Abel, since it implied a connection to the biological mother, so they called him David. At fifteen years of age, Azcona was adopted by the husband of his adoptive mother, becoming Abel David Marcos Azcona ; after a family process to invert the surnames was approved, 'Azcona' returned as the first surname, and he legally became Abel David Azcona Marcos. At the age of twenty he decided to remove the name David, as he no longer had a relationship with his adoptive family, and started using Abel again, as a tribute to his biological mother and as a response to the restrictions he felt with the other name.

Early works

Azcona's first performances were created in the streets of Pamplona in 2005 when he was a student in the Pamplona School of Art. They all had a critical spirit and were an objective of denunciation. During these early years, Azcona turned his traumatic experiences into artistic works. In 2011 and 2012 his artworks started gaining greater relevance, but in 2012 he was admitted to two psychiatric clinics, one in Barcelona and the other in Pamplona, where he stayed for some time as he had deep mental issues and had made a serious suicide attempt. When he came out of the centres, he made a performance demonstration, totally naked and sitting on a chair, to interrupt traffic on one of the main streets of Pamplona. Since this, he has carried out some works in the streets periodically, all of them with the same critical spirit and intent to denounce, with themes such as abandonment, violence, identity and sexuality. He has been detained on various occasions for these.
Azcona's adoption was characterised by complicated situations and a lack of attachment to the family, until he abandoned it definitively when he was eighteen. He then returned to Madrid, living in poverty on the streets for almost two years. During this time he occasionally committed crime and practised prostitution, but also carried out artistic works in the streets of Madrid.

Artistic works

''Empathy and Prostitution''

Empathy and Prostitution is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. It was created and first performed in the Santa Fe Gallery, Bogotá, in February 2013. The work had a second performance at the Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo, an artistic space in Madrid, in November 2013, and there was a third performance at the Houston International Performance Biennial, in February 2014. Azcona was inspired by his biological mother, a prostitute, and sought to empathise with her and with the moment of his own conception. Azcona offered himself naked to the galleries' visitors on a bed with white sheets, so that they could exchange intimacy or have sexual relations with him. Photographs, drawings and documentation of the work were part of the Art Is Hope charity exhibitions in Paris and Pride in New York. The depictions of the performance piece have been exhibited in museums such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Perrotin Gallery, and also displayed at the Piasa auction house in Paris. The New York exhibition and auction at Paddle8 promoted sexual diversity and featured artists such as Haring, Bourgeois, Goldin, Mapplethorpe, Warhol, and Azcona himself. In 2017 there were also exhibitions in museums such as the Tulla Center in the Albanian capital Tirana. The Juan Gallery in Madrid, which specializes in performance art, included this work in a retrospective exhibition, The Extinction of Desire, which focused on works with sexual themes.

''Someone Else''

Someone Else is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. Following on with the same concepts as Empathy and Prostitution, the inaugural 2014 Queer New York Arts Festival was opened with a work by Azcona entitled Someone Else. In this, physical or even sexual contact with the artist was required to enter the venue of the event, which was held at Grace Exhibition Space and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. This work was chosen by critic Hrag Vartanian as one of the top ten of the year in New York City.

''The War''

The War is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. In 2016, Azcona activated his last sex-themed piece in this series, La Guerra, which premiered at the Intramurs Festival in Valencia, Spain, which was again inspired by prostitution, criticism and sexuality. On this occasion, Azcona offered his naked body, anesthetized by the use of narcotics, so that the visitors could use it freely.

''The Streets''

The Streets is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. At the end of 2014 and the early part of 2015, Azcona performed the work as a process where he prostitutes himself on the streets. In it, he explored a change towards becoming the figure of his mother, taking hormones and engaging in prostitution. It began in the Santa Fe neighborhood of Bogotá, with the process continuing in the cities of Madrid and Mexico City. The performance emerged, as with the rest of his sex-themed works, as an exercise in empathy with his own biological mother. It was also a social critique, where the artist explored the limits of his body by repeating patterns of sexual abuse, things which occurred in his own childhood and in the life of his mother.

''The Shame''

Developed along the West Bank Wall in 2018, in The Shame Azcona installed original fragments of the Berlin Wall along the Israeli wall in the West Bank, which forms part of the barrier built throughout Israel to separate the Palestinian lands. Azcona made a metaphorical critique by merging both walls in the work. The actual installation, as if it were a piece of land art, currently remains along the wall, and has been exhibited in different countries through photographic and video art. The work has been criticized and denounced by Israel.