Minerva’s Daughters is a collaborative project developed by Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque, and commissioned by PhotoESPAÑA. The project was designed as a site-specific intervention for the National Museum of Romanticism in Madrid, focusing on the role of women in European Romanticism. After multiple visits to the museum, Laura and Alejandría chose to center the work around its billiard room, using it as the core element to shape and articulate the project.
In a bourgeois Romantic house, the billiards room was a space meant for male sociability. Only the men played, while the women watched the match, quietly seated around them. This segmentation by gender was symbolically reproduced by the Museum itself by hanging a gallery of period women’s portraits on the walls surrounding the billiard table.
Beyond the evolution in Romantic ladies’ fashions, this small gesture also updates the collection’s discourse and brings the gender issue into the present. This issue is essential in the project that Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque have planned to engage in dialogue with this unique space, as well as with the ideology of an era of which we are still the heirs.
Minerva’s Daughters is an installation and performance-based photography project in which several players figuratively play a billiards match. Through different actions—from the uniforms worn and the transformation of the watching into an active exercise to the mythological figure of Minerva as the narrative and conceptual thread that constructs and directs the players—the match becomes a battlefield to struggle for the emancipation from that corporeality associated with nineteenth-century femininity.
Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque, both born in Madrid in 1990, are multidisciplinary artists whose collaborative work disrupts the boundaries of traditional art historical genres. Drawing from their individual practices—Laura’s conceptual and poetic explorations in photography and Alejandría’s experimental stage performances—they unite their distinct artistic voices to create work that merges the classical and the contemporary, the academic and the playful.
Their collaboration began during their studies at the Fine Arts School of the Complutense University of Madrid and has evolved alongside their independent careers. Together, they explore themes such as the dissolution of artistic archetypes, the dialogue between images, and the interplay of tradition and modernity. Their shared interest in color, juxtaposition, and the fluid merging of disciplines creates works that challenge conventional notions of art and invite fresh perspectives.
Individually, Laura’s photography focuses on transforming the everyday into evocative visual meditations, blurring the boundaries between the personal, utilitarian, and artistic uses of images. Meanwhile, Alejandría’s performances investigate the deformation of the normative body in staged environments, combining electronic music with queer theory. Together, they bring their unique artistic voices into a dynamic partnership that reimagines art’s historical and cultural narratives.
Copyright © Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque all rights reserved
