The world of Virgin Mary is summarized in several keywords:
body, sex, spirituality, peace, machine and reggaeton
.
They are concepts that, scrambled, offer a violent contrast -relaxation and hard music seem incompatible-, but to which she has applied a coherent framework within a multiplatform artistic project located between hard techno clubs, social networks such as Instagram and Only Fans, and art galleries. Virgen María is the stage name of María Forqué,
daughter of the di
film director Manuel Iborra and actress Verónica Forqué
, and it all started when I was studying Fine Arts.
«I painted and drew, I was good at it.
But it didn't fill me up.
On a trip to New York he connected with a group of
performance
and
body art
- «In my work, my body is the work», he indicates- and began to explore the idea of the nude as a settlement of accounts with the traumas of the past.
"I grew up fast, I developed a lot of breasts in school, and they forced me to wear loose clothing to hide it," he recalls.
«
They told me that my sexuality was something negative
, they harassed me and I developed dysmorphia and anorexia.
I wanted to be a girl again. ”If we look at her
Instagram account
, all of it is, as the writer JG Ballard would say, an exhibition of atrocities, be they comic or grotesque.
Each image shows a deformed Virgin Mary: with multiplied eyes, with her skin covered in cockroaches or 10-cent coins, in the shape of a centaur or with several scissors stuck in her back.
One of his collaborators is Filip Custic, the author of the cover of
Evil wanting
of Rosalía.
Maria responds to the type of young
millennial
that, so saturated with the stimuli of the digital frame, instead of the return to the analog, what it longs for is a hyper-reality.
"Reality bores me"
, he says, “and that's why I'm going to a world of perversion and darkness.
I like Japanese anime, eroguro, the weirder and more disconcerting the better. ”Eroguro is that branch of Japanese popular culture in which horror and eroticism are mixed, an aesthetic of two centuries that goes from the drawing of Hokusai in the that an octopus penetrates a woman with its tentacles, to movies like
The empire of the senses
or Suehiro Maruo's manga.
Virgin Mary also goes to
deviant sex, physical pain and prosthetics
to complement her speech - through surgery or temporary grafts, like a metallic cat tail she now uses to promote her new song, Meow, and the result is there: admired by many, hated by many others, she has become one of the strangest underground artists on the web. The Virgin Mary project has two more ramifications: one musical and the other erotic.
The second is divided into two profiles of the Only Fans social network, one personal (blex69) and the other for collaborative projects, in which he shows his privacy -on a subscription payment- and a mild variant of pornography.
"What I do is sex work," he clarifies.
«
Erotic art and porn are two forms of the same expression
.
I have not gone any further because it has not been the case.
My red line would be damage to my body, I am not considering self-harm. ”But he has experimented with other forms of pain.
In 2019, Virgin Mary performed at the Sónar festival and her performance -a mix of a Pont Aeri-style machine and a Gilbert & George-style expo of human statues-, while generating confusion among the public, caused her a complete numbness, "because I couldn't move for an hour." In her shows, she appears in a bikini, sometimes naked, adopts a reclining, hieratic pose like a Buddha, and her only movement is that of her hand to mix channels.
What it sounds like is a whiplash of kick and noise at more than 180 beats per minute, with reggaeton grafts. «I started going to discos
Light
at the age of 14 [María was born in 1990], and the only thing that played was mákina and reggaeton.
Then I went out at night, by Fabrik and such, and the music was hardcore, hardstyle ... I saw the DJ as a Moses, or a Jesus Christ, who preached with the music.
When I thought about being the one who was there, it was clear: it would be the Virgin Mary, because
My name is Maria, but at the same time I am the opposite of a virgin
».
He first used the alias Beta_0 Verónica Forqué's cannabis confession in
Saturday Deluxe
- but has chosen loud and repetitive music as a mantra.
«There are people who can't stand it, it's normal, but it helps me to be at peace.
I go into a meditative state, into ecstasy. ”His spirituality is syncretic.
She uses the name Virgin Mary not as blasphemy, but as a partial allusion to her patchwork religiosity.
«My mother spoke to me of God as the whole: he is love and he is everywhere.
Light and dark are two sides of the same world
.
I believe that we are all one, that we have a soul, we are infinite and what matters is love.
And so he envisions the future of his project: to flow with the world, to live in the present.
"The constant metamorphosis," he concludes.
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