Barcelona, March 5, 2025 – Fragility, memory, and self-exploration emerge as fundamental axes in the work of Judit Chulià Orduña, known as Hina Vagina in the artistic field. Through her work, which moves between installation, performance, and sculpture, the artist engages in a visceral dialogue with the body as a symbolic and political space, turning it into a material that resists, remembers, and transforms. She explores the intersection between the intimate and the collective, between vulnerability and strength, establishing a language that questions the normative structures of power over corporeality.
Hina Vagina has been working in action art (performance art) since 2017. However, in 2019, her practice became more established through a series of works that address skin as an archive, inherited fragility, the limits of identity, and self-exploration as an act of resistance.
Among these are Morbidezza interior (2019), Proteger la fragilidad heredada (2023), Psiquisme efervescent (2024), and Autoprotección (2024), pieces that have been presented in various spaces for artistic creation and reflection in Barcelona. In these works, Hina Vagina constructs narratives in which the body is subjected, exposed, protected, or dissolved, raising questions about the commodification of skin, imposed memory, and the power structures that shape the perception of identity.
In Morbidezza interior, an installation developed as the final project of her studies in Applied Mural Arts at Llotja (Barcelona), the artist reflects on the relationship between the body, memory, and symbolic violence. The work consists of a series of personal writings tattooed onto pigskin and encapsulated in resin, drawing a parallel between the commodification of the human body and the exploitation of animals.
Using skin as a material support reinforces the idea that the body is a space where experiences are inscribed—where marks and scars serve as witnesses to both personal and collective history. This piece addresses the fragility of the body and its exposure to power dynamics that seek to control and define it.
Inspired by the notion that skin is both a barrier and a witness, the work explores how bodies, particularly female bodies, have historically been subjected to processes of objectification and consumption. The relationship between animal and human skin becomes an inquiry into systems of exploitation, exposing the parallels between industrial production mechanisms and the violence exerted on corporeality.
In 2023, her research into vulnerability and memory took on a more performative dimension with Proteger la fragilidad heredada (Protecting Inherited Fragility). Presented during the open studio event at the Roca Umbert art space residency in Granollers, this installation explores how fragility is passed down from generation to generation, becoming an intangible yet deeply rooted inheritance between mother and daughter.
The piece combines ephemeral elements and fragile materials that evoke the precariousness of memory and identity. Through a spatial arrangement that suggests instability and constant transformation, the work invites the viewer to question whether vulnerability is a burden to be carried or a quality that can be transformed into strength.
The transition between performance and installation takes on new depth in Psiquisme efervescent, presented in 2024 at Malpais (Barcelona) alongside Alex Rigol. In this work, the artist delves into the exploration of emptiness as an essential element for evolution and transformation. By combining projection, sonic sculpture, and performative action, she creates an immersive experience in which the boundaries of identity and space dissolve.
The body and its surroundings act as agents of change: the characters on stage represent the struggle against imposed barriers, while the sonic sculpture and water tanks serve as symbols of wear, persistence, and the erosion of time. The installation unfolds as an ever-evolving organism, where sound, light, and movement generate a choreography in which matter is transformed, and the body rethinks itself in relation to its environment.
In Autoprotección, a performance presented at TPK in Barcelona in December 2024, the artist delves into the exploration of self-portraiture as an act of resistance and reconstruction. In front of a mirror, she sketches her own face, burns the drawing, and encapsulates the ashes in containers that she later distributes among the spectators. Through this gesture of fragmentation and dispersion, the artist questions the notion of identity as something fixed, instead proposing a vision in which the body transforms, conceals itself, and dissolves over time and in the memory of those who witness it.
The piece plays with the idea of self-preservation as a survival strategy, exploring to what extent fragility can be transformed into a mechanism of resistance. Through direct bodily expression, Hina Vagina raises questions about the boundaries between public and private, exposure and protection.
Influenced by theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Catherine Malabou, and Karen Barad, the work builds on the idea of identity’s plasticity and the body’s interaction with its environment as a form of political agency. The performance becomes an act of simultaneous preservation and disappearance, where the artist plays with the notions of presence and absence, permanence and oblivion.
Through these works, Hina Vagina reflects on the body and its relationship with the world around it. Her practice, rooted in an exploration of memory, resistance, and vulnerability, challenges traditional mechanisms of representation and questions the violence exerted on bodies by capitalism, patriarchy, and social norms. In a contemporary art context that has reclaimed the urgency of the performative and the political, her work aligns with a line of thought that advocates for the reappropriation of corporeality as a space of struggle and reclamation.
Her practice has been recognized for its ability to create experiences that challenge the viewer and immerse them in a direct dialogue with materiality, self and collective identity, sound, and memory. The interaction between body, object, and space generates a distinct language, positioning her within a new generation of artists working across performance and installation, blurring the boundaries between disciplines and proposing new ways of connecting art, identity, and sensory experience.
Her work can be followed on Instagram (@hina.vagina) and through her audiovisual experimentation space on Vimeo (@hinavagina), where she documents her practice and her ongoing exploration of corporeality and memory.
Este es un espacio de trabajo personal de un/a estudiante de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Cualquier contenido publicado en este espacio es responsabilidad de su autor/a.
Para este tipo de ejercicios es recomendable emplear algún recurso para enganchar al lector en el inicio, puede ser una anécdota sobre tu biografía, un fragmento de algún hilo musical que sea pertinente, etc. Transmites bien los contenidos, con claridad, un tono pausado y agradable pero tus referencias son demasiado focalizadas, transmites un exceso de influencia de una única corriente de pensamiento o una parte de ella. Pienso que sería recomendable ampliar este background con un acercamiento a la tradición de la teoría y práctica artística. Al hilo de tu relato, te puedes interesar Erving Goffman, sobre la presentación de la persona en la vida cotidiano, considerado el padre de la micro sociología.