“Ariadna nunca fue nuestra diosa” (Ariadne was never our goddess) by Maria Alcaide

Ariadne Was Never Our Goddess proposes unravelling the dominant social and political structures of our societies to reweave new threads of connection that enable us to dismantle othering and establish a space of horizontal relationships. With a clear questioning spirit, the project challenges the Western historical projections of femininity, not only in visual art and literature but also in social and political constructs, as well as in matters of race and class.

Through a reinterpretation of the work of artist Maria Alcaide, The Managed Hand, Ariadne fades and blends into American nail salons, spaces where those who care for others seek to be cared for themselves. The result is a repetition of power relations in which subordinated bodies simulate the display of dominant privilege. In these spaces, conversations, longings, and dreams blur amid the sounds of nail files and the soft purple light of lamps, where power categories invert, yet violence resurfaces.

Maria Alcaide’s work borrows its title from sociologist Miliann Kang’s 2008 book The Managed Hand, an anthropological study on the social and economic conditions of America’s highly precarious youth. Drawing from her own experience, in which Alcaide worked in public-facing roles, offering her physical labour in service to others and thus placed on a lower scale of rights, she began an in-depth investigation into the performativity of work associated with bodily services. Her work exposes the systemic violence exerted on female, racialized, and lower-to-middle-class subjects. Alcaide delves into this ecosystem of service performativity through the specific context of nail salons, where these power dynamics play out among the same oppressed bodies, simulating the privilege of class. In an allegory that inverts the myth of Ariadne, it is not Theseus who must find his way out of the labyrinth but rather those who place their bodies at the service of those who can afford it.