in_true_sista77 (2021)
Performance and video
6 videos of varying duration: 16′04″ / 14′15″ / 7′04″ / 9′13″ / 22′08″ / 16′58″
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2021.478
in_true_sista77 is a performative and internet-based research work in which the artist creates and uses a troll user profile on popular online commerce platforms (such as Amazon, AliExpress, or SHEIN) to consciously intervene in these digital spaces using the same user tools provided by the platforms themselves.
Through these user tools, in_true_sista77 aims to carry out a conscious intrusion into online stores that have multiplied their wealth as a result of the pandemic. Indeed, because of lockdown, consumers have chosen to use these depersonalized environments to meet their needs, setting aside physical retail and pushing local commerce toward its foreseeable disappearance.
Using different accounts linked to this profile, the artist purchases seven products, carrying out several actions documented as follows: purchasing — understood as downloading a product from the internet (download); receiving the package — a video of the package opening (unboxing), explaining what the item is and how it appears; using and reviewing — an action returned to the internet itself (upload).
The review tools offered by these platforms allow users to upload photographs and comments about the product. Through this process, in_true_sista77 questions the standard behaviour of the average user in these environments, generating a type of “noise” or critical intervention within the web portals. This operation functions almost like an online graffiti tag, decontextualizing, and “hacking” the rules of use to reflect on digital consumption, the depersonalization of platforms, and the market economy that has grown especially since the pandemic.
Beatriz Sánchez is a visual artist born in Córdoba, Spain, trained in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and holding a Master’s in Digital Arts from the Pompeu Fabra University. With an extensive background as a draftswoman, she has begun to apply the experience of her pictorial work to new digital formats, adopting multiple media for her projects, such as video, digital imagery, sound, interactive art, net art, web, and mobile devices. Her work focuses on the representation of human actions filtered through the lens of the absurd, with a certain mischievous character, always from a clearly experimental approach. In some of her works, these representations give rise to situations dominated by apparent arbitrariness, where GIFs become a particularly suitable resource for realizing her creative and experimental variety.