Cathy Burghi was born in Montevideo-Uruguay in 1980. She studied art at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, and at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. However, Burghi has developed most of her work in France where she moved to in 2007. Burghi’s work is made up of drawings, installations, performances, among others, which makes her a multidisciplinary artist, and her areas of interest are cultural and female identity, memory, and migration. Burghi has made many individual and collective exhibitions in museums and galleries in different countries and presently she lives in Florianópolis.
My drawings are inhabited by mutating bodies, revealing their fragility, their monstrosity, their power, their beauty… they are machine bodies with surprising combinations, emerging from the dictates of a single way of being, to exist beyond appearances. I draw daily, and in this exercise I construct series of multiple possibilities that tell what it is like to be a body… Like an algorithm, these series explore what is it like to be a desiring body when you are a woman. Socially educated and conditioned to (only) be a desired body. What is it like to be a body that gestates, gives birth, enjoys, dances, and survives what a woman has to be… The cult of beauty to which we are subjected by the patriarchy leaves us perpetual prisoners of dissatisfaction, making us easier to control and subjugate. Probably renouncing other, more expansive and joyful ways of existing…
Inhabiting drawing is a way of taking ownership of my existence, liberating my desire.
