Loreto Martínez Troncoso uses words as vehicles of transmission; words which she transposes to invest them with new meanings and create new situations. Her works are palimpsests in which intertextuality is an instrument for communication, and her actions manifest themselves in the artist’s physical presence or through devices intended to act as a medium for the text, monologue, discourse or conference.

Loreto Martínez Troncoso’s work is essentially immaterial. Her first performances arose from very specific moments and assumed the protocols established for each particular context: events, exhibition openings, press conferences… The act of ‘taking the floor’ gave rise to concepts such as here and now and came to constitute the core content of the pieces. Questions such as ‘What is action?’ and ‘How and when does it begin?’ derive from the artist’s practice or experience as subject-object, a condition which implies the presence of the spectator in a given time and place.

The idea of the audience as the absolute and inalienable addressee without which there is no work (to borrow Rancière’s idea in The Emancipated Spectator) is fleshed out in recent works, where the artist abandons spontaneous intervention and the word is transmitted via physical devices such as headphones, projectors and loudspeakers that the spectator activates – maintaining his condition of performer – in his encounter with the work and place at a given time. Absence functions as a transposition of presence, for, as the artist argues, ‘inaction, too, is a form of action’.

Loreto also uses the space in a purely performative way, by creating an atmosphere in which we feel her proximity, consequently the space becomes like a living being impregnated by her interventions. In a sort of transposition the physical place becomes like a three-dimensional recreation of her mind, with works spread through the room as if they were thoughts which just came out of her head.