Priscilla Monge

In her own words, much of Monge's work is concerned with uncovering things, about telling what cannot be told. About the unspeakable.” Her work reveals the violence and pain that can exist in the everyday; narratives that are sometimes so ubiquitous yet so subtle, that they are often too painful to speak about. 

 Although graduating with a degree in painting from the University of Costa Rica in 1995, Monge has since embraced a wide variety of mediums including textiles, video, installation, and photography. When asked why she turned from her conservative training to focus more on conceptual modalities, she said she needed to be able “to talk about certain things”. This response is often seen quite literally in her work, with text playing a prominent role; a letter delicately emboridered on linen or meditative phrases carved into marble books. For Monge, the written word is a safe space in which she can uncover and discuss what is often unable to be said out loud. 

To explore the “unspeakable” she often turns to materials in the domestic and scholastic sphere. She employs items such as fabric, chalkboards, soap, and fine china to weave delicate yet arresting narratives of cruelty and innocence, blurring the lines between love and aggression, pleasure and oppression. For her, these everyday materials hold “the possibility of being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time”, allowing her to explore the small everyday atrocities that can permeate our lives.

"Priscilla Monge evokes the purity and streams of menstrual blood, covering a white room with snow-white sanitary napkins... Room for Isolation and Protection, the work presented at this edition of the Venice Biennale, seems to deepen in that reflection about the ways in which violence develops. On this occasion a subtle and complex violence is approached, one that arises within, a metaphorical context of self-aggression, as a conflict of the feminine. It is a square space, entirely lined with sanitary napkins. The piece has been conceived as an imitation of the upholstered quarters used in psychiatric institutions to protect the patients from hurting themselves by striking their bodies against the walls. Inside this enclosure, voices like vague whispers and unrecognisable muttered words inhabit the room as the deadened echo of an internal discourse. The space also refers to sound-proof rooms, meant to create the conditions of silence, and where that same silence makes audible the physiological sounds of the body, breath and vascular circulation. Metaphor of an (impossible) representation of silence, this work becomes a space to experience the void in which the internal emerges.

The use of sanitary napkins as a material or as tools is not new in her work. She has adopted different but always perturbing formulations...The sanitary napkins used to build the space of Room for Isolation and Protection allow for the sliding of significance towards multiple readings. On the one hand the white colour isolates from interference in order to refer directly to the blood-red as its complementary, containing violence as a derivated symbol, "normalizing" the blood as an indicator of femininity, transforming the blood-red into a virtual content and stripping it of vindicating feminist connotations. The feminine as gender becomes an affirmation of a sensibility built from a bodily interior. That same affirmation confirms values expressed in the contradictions that cultural contexts represent to the feminine. Corporality and culture: the silenced world and the discourse, the body's voice and the rules of culture. On the other hand, the sanitary napkins establish a close formal analogy with the bricks in a wall of immaculate purity: protection and repression, isolation as muzzle, the inner voice as an echo of silence...The lightness of purity and the condensation of the obscure concentrate in the sanitary napkin. Contradictions of meanings, polar and complementary at the same time, generate associations that illuminate the symbolic levels of behaviours and discourses. The colour white and the neutral and aseptic texture of cotton place us in an extreme narrative minimalism and in an intense conceptual density. The work condesnates very clearly Priscilla Monge's working process, showing how the mingling of conceptual strategies with appropriating processes tend to generate a critical and reflexive content, of a visual character, linked to the experience of a daily life illuminated by symbolic and significant undertones. 

In a way it is about free-readings and reinterpretations of strategies and techniques; one could speak of a perverse pop hypridised with a conceptual minimalism. Simplicity hides complexity, just the same as lucidity hides confusion or innocence hides perversity."

Satiago B. Olmo, "The Perverse Lucidity," La Biennale di Venezia. 2001.

In the Museum of Latin American Art's 2017 virtual exhibition En Visión: Picturing the Self, Monge's photograph Maita in a Gold Dress/Maita en un vestido was featured alongside other works that question selfhood.

"Maita in a Gold Dress portrays a doll modeling an elegant ensemble, yet her make-up was not applied carefully, perhaps on purpose. Maita may symbolize a little girl playing dress-up, or somebody who feels pressured to look beautiful and provocative. Monge’s photograph speaks to the unattainable standards of femininity that many women encounter in today’s society."

-Museum of Latin American Art

"I was reading a lot about the role of Costa Rica in the central American conflict during the 80’s and 90’s where we proclaimed a so-called neutrality. As I was investigating, I came across the testimonies of witnesses and survivors that declared for the human rights committee and commission of truth after the war.