Performance in progress. Designed for 4 interventions in 4 European cities. London, Brussels, Madrid and Athens. Primigenia IV, a duel at 4 points of the Rose of the Winds. 

Rocio Boliver, also known as La Congelada de Uva, is a performance artist from Mexico City. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was well known in Mexico as a model and television personality, but abandoned the mainstream after 1992 for a more precarious, provocative, and uncompromising life as an artist at the margins of cultural acceptability. Her performances stage unique combinations of physical risk, unabashed femininity, body horror, and sexual frankness, resulting in actions that are partly improvised, unrepeatable, sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, and always political.

Rocio has presented her work in Europe, Asia, North and South America. Since 2012, Rocío’s performances have focused on the ageing female body – a body, and a body of work, that she describes as ‘between menopause and old age’. She aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironical way, inventing her own deranged aesthetic and moral solutions for the question of ageing. Shame, disgust, embarrassment encounter pleasure, laughter, beauty, in often dizzying and un-navigable recombination.

All photos by Kosmas Kosmopoulos

ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture is an initiative of Athens School of Fine Art’s Labs 11 & 12, powered by Onassis Foundation and the City of Athens Development and Destination Management Agency.