El goce otro

El goce otro is a photographic essay on the body in evangelical churches in Spain and Latin America. I am interested in ecstatic experiences, power relations, and how affects shape a way of being. This world is as strange as it is close.

El goce otro (The Other Jouissance) is a photographic essay about the body in evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Spain and Latin America. Bodies that tremble, fall and embrace, oppressed and set free at the same time. I grew up inside these communities and I photograph from there, between belonging and distance, asking what happens to bodies when they believe.

The title comes from Jacques Lacan, who named “the Other jouissance” an experience that overflows law and language, and found it in the mystics, as in the ecstasy of Teresa of Ávila as Bernini sculpted it. In the services I photograph this excess appears in industrial warehouses, rented halls or on a neighbourhood street. And it happens in communities that often reserve the pulpit and the word for men. This tension (a jouissance that exceeds the norm within a structure that imposes it) is at the core of the project. The sequence alternates scenes of worship with staged portraits, objects and an archival photograph. The drama of religion is also staged, and at a time when end-of-the-world narratives have taken over the conversation, religion presents itself to many people as an escape (or a hope).

My gaze is shaped by the contradictions of belief, feminism and critique. I do not seek to expose or to defend, but to show how care and abuse inhabit every institution, religious ones included. The hand that blesses can also be the hand that strikes religious identities. El goce otro proposes the body as the place where faith becomes visible, is passed on and is also reinvented.