Edgar Alfonzo-Sierra’s review provides a clear description of a work crucial to the production of Nela Ochoa (b. 1953), an outstanding contemporary artist from Venezuelan known primarily for her work in video and performance, and for mixed media works. Ochoa’s production interrogates the female body as well as the notion of identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and female bodily experiences like menstruation and pregnancy. Lejana (1999) is inspired by Julio Cortázar’s story Lejana, diario de Alina Reyes [in English entitled “The Distances”], which had a great impact on the artist when she read it in 1983. Insofar as the work also entails an exchange of identity between two women (the artist and the beggar), it has a social content as well; it addresses the real experience of the drama of begging and of extreme poverty.
Alfonzo-Sierra reviews a key work in Ochoa oeuvre, one that brings together many disciplines and aesthetic languages present throughout her work. It partakes of the artist’s early experience as a choreographer, the notion of installation as theatrical space, a literary and theatrical sensibility that reconstructs excerpts from Cortázar’s text. The work also pays tribute to dance and to video because, as Alfonzo-Sierra explains, “those two disciplines are joined here in that, before the work took the shape of an installation, Ochoa tried to make it a choreographic piece in a process that culminated in the product to be exhibited at the Museo Alejandro Otero.”