MIRROR MIRROR

MIRROR MIRROR is an exhibition project that arises from the popular question: Who is the most beautiful in the kingdom?

MIRROR MIRROR is an exhibition by Est_Art Space that talks about how we see ourselves and how today's society forces us to show ourselves. The phrase from the story, in which the evil witch asks the mirror, "Who is the fairest in the kingdom?" has become a daily imposition in 21st century society, full of falsehood and pressure.

The “mirror effect” in psychology is attributed to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who was interested in analyzing the identification of our own image and the formation of the self-concept. A research that focused on work groups made up of babies between 6 and 18 months, where it was discovered that they like their own image and that this generates well-being, but that such recognition is based on the comparison with the visual model of their caregivers.

Thus, the “mirror effect” would extend to social and interpersonal relationships. In Freud, the ego is precisely that: a superposition of imaginary identifications. From all this, Lacan deduces: “this first identification before the mirror is key to the formation of the ego, and is literally the origin and founder of the series of identifications that will follow later and will constitute the ego of the human being.” “That is the matrix of the ideal ego; and: that is never reached, that place behind the mirror where everything goes well can only be reached, at most, asymptotically.”

An ideal self that has become, with the whirlwind of social networks, the goal to show, in an era in which the image that the mirror returns to us is a distortion filtered with the aim of pleasing, capturing, and convincing a legion of strangers that our life is a collection of perfect situations and experiences. The real mirror, the one that returns the image to us without any cover-ups, has passed away. Our reflection has changed radically in this century.