«A while ago I decided to change my life in the most extraordinary way possible. I looked inside and inadvertently remembered the phrase that my mother said to methe last time I saw her when she was sixteen years old: “Good luck to you, and believe me, I really hope that you are very strong and bold, so as not to have mercy on time to destroy your body and crush your soul the next time we meet again. “.
After an overwhelming emotional crisis, I began this series of images interspersed with pictorial canvases and photographs from the family archive to impel the viewer to immerse themselves in my psychology »The Wrath of Devotion is a voodoo project capable of reconstructing a part of personal and contemporary history of many women willing to emancipate themselves from the social structures that have been predisposed to them. Through written narrative, psychological manipulation exercises, against spells, self-portraits and image associations developed from adolescence to adulthood, I build a narrative representative of the history of my own madness and the reflection of chaos in my country. My work is in response to a curse cast by my mother, which involves a thorough investigation of my ancestors and reveals the fact that the women in my family have practiced witchcraft with the desire to harm other women in the same ghetto. I consider the act of bewitching as a form of psychological defense against some symbols of machismo, but after its excessive permanence and intense belief in the case of my family, in madness, manias, phobias, depression and schizophrenia. The effects come from the bad mother syndrome investigated by psychoanalysis and epigenetically inherited. In my images, women are represented as immortal and immoral beings with supernatural powers, who mark their symbolism and personality through masks, eyes, spiders, water, blood and fire. They are intelligent, intriguing, and distressing. While men seem to always be at risk. In my stories, the feminine is threatening because it seduces and in the poetics of its seduction it devours.
(B. in Mexico City, Mexico, 1993) Liza Ambrossio is a Mexican-Spanish artist who lives and produces in Madrid, Spain. Winner of the first prize in the Voies Off Award 2018 of The Photography Meetings in Arles, France (Les Rencontres de la Photographie) also is the winner of the FNAC New Talent Award, 2018; Liza is the winner of the scholarship portfolio review in the FotoFest of Houston 2018 and the 6th Edition of the (TAI) Photography Talent Grant. In 2017 she won the Discoveries scholarship of the PHotoEspaña festival and La Fábrica.
In 2018 she opens her solo exhibition “The rage of devotion” in Camara Oscura gallery (Madrid, Spain) equally in the Photomeetings Luxembourg. Her body of work mixes macabre archive photographs with cryptic paintings, performance, intervention, videos, psychology, lucid nightmares, science fiction and witchcraft that unites by free association.
Liza’s work has been published on the network of Center of the image (Mexico City). Liza has been granted a scholarship to study production residences in Iceland and the United States (2017). She has been selected for New Visions 2018 in the Cortona On The Move festival, Italy In 2018 she presented her first photobook ‘La ira de la devoción’ (The rage of devotion) edited by Desiertas Ediciones (México) and La Fabrica (Spain) within the Fotofest of Houston, Texas, United States, also selected for the exhibition of the best photobooks in Les Rencontres de la photographie the same year.