Aliciaframis

For the past ten years or so the globetrotting Alicia Framis has lived and worked around the world. She has touched down in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and more recently Shanghai. She has embarked on an astonishingly varied series of individual and group art projects including video, sculpture, performance, architecture, fashion design, and photography—often involving two or three techniques for the same work.
If there is anything constant in all of this art making, it is her manifest commitment to helping others, especially women and children. Framis has conceived of social buildings for the poor, newly designed, solar-powered structures where people can meet, and, taking a page from Tracey Emin, clothing that turns into a tent designed for two people to sleep together. Yet most of all, her work has been directed to calling attention to the lives of others in need.
Framis’s two most important works refer to the status of children. The earlier paired work, Nenes amb Sort and Lucky Girls (both 2007), both represent prototype sandboxes formed from the words of their titles filled with sand from China to celebrate the Chinese girls who have been adopted by people from her native city of Barcelona. It is a notional public play space, a monument to the adopters and those adopted, and more directly, the Chinese sand metaphorically enables the girls “to maintain direct contact with their native land.”
Not for Sale (2007) is Alicia Framis’s tour de force. The work was started in Bangkok where she began photographing smiling young boys who were naked from the chest up and wore a sometimes difficult to read neck tag indicating “Not for sale.” The innocent-seeming portraits address the situations where children often find themselves at risk. Whether it is the daughter who is married off at fourteen to pay a family’s debt or, worse yet, into sexual slavery, or a young boy sent off to work in a brick yard or coal mine, or to hustle as a male prostitute, we live, Framis notes, “in a world where children are actually sold.” The phrase, “Not for sale,” recuperates and defends the dignity of children.
Framis addresses this situation through several strategies. Her portraits are printed to the scale of the propaganda pictures she found of Chairman Mao in China and of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in Thailand. The cheerful smiles of Mao and the King are reflected in the smiles of the children who are similarly photographed from just slightly below thereby placing them on a metaphorical pedestal. The friendly smiles are ironically complimented by the simple “Not for Sale” necklace—an anti price tag. Framis followed up this action with a performance piece in Madrid during Madrid Abierto 2008 that featured a sort of fund-raising fashion show with sales of necklaces going to the Little Foundation. Children wearing only pants wore “Not for sale” necklaces that had been designed by many of Spain’s jewelers as well as jewelers from Thailand and Shanghai. The children paraded on a catwalk designed with fabric painted by the artist Michael Lin using motifs from traditional Asian cloths. The multiple strategies reinforce each other and merge seamlessly with Framis’s concerns with and uses of fashion and architecture. The Not for Sale project is an ongoing one and will be continued in Brazil and elsewhere. It emphasizes in her words the wish that “No child, independently of the place of origin or social conditions, can be sold.”
With Not for Sale Alicia Framis brings all of her many talents across many disciplines into a powerful political message about the rights and dignity of children everywhere.