Abel Azcona

Abel Azcona (born 1 April 1988) is a Spanish artist, specializing in performance art.

His work includes installations, sculptures, and video art.

He is known as the "enfant terrible" of Spanish contemporary art.

His first works dealt with personal identity, violence and the limits of pain; his later works are of a more critical, political and social nature.

Azcona's works have been exhibited at the Venetian Arsenal, the Contemporary Art Center in Málaga, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Art League, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.

His work has also been exhibited at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka and Taipei, the Lyon Biennale, the Miami International Performance Festival and the Bangladesh Live Art Biennale.

Abel Azcona was born on 1 April 1988, as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, in the Montesa Clinic in Madrid, an institution that was run by a religious community.

It was geared towards people at risk of social exclusion and homelessness.

His father's identity is unknown, and his mother, a drug user and prostitute called Victoria Luján Gutiérrez, abandoned him at the clinic a few days after his birth.

The nuns gave the newborn baby to a man who knew his mother and who insisted he was the father, even though he met her when she was already pregnant and was her partner only sporadically.

Azcona was then raised in the city of Pamplona with this man, who continuously went in and out of prison, and his family, which was unstructured and linked to drug trafficking and delinquency.

The first four years of Azcona's life were characterised by mistreatment, abuse and abandonment, caused by different members within his family environment, and the fact he passed through various residences, which caused several concerns about custody from public institutions of social protection.

Due to this precarious situation, his birth was not registered until the age of four, in 1992, when Social Welfare intervened.

"The child is in a situation of complete abandonment, with visible signs of abuse, neglect and malnutrition, and testimonies by neighbours [...] confirm that the child occasionally finds himself alone for weeks in the house, which does not fulfill minimum habitability conditions."

A young Catholic woman from Navarre was introduced to a newborn Azcona when she met the man who brought newborn Azcona from the Montesa clinic in Madrid to Pamplona in prison, where she volunteered; he still falsely presented himself as Azcona's biological father.

She coordinated a Catholic group in the Saint Vincent of Paúl parish and was a volunteer with Caritas Internationalis.

This meeting in the penitentiary center led to the baptism of Azcona when he was uncommonly old, in a parish located in front of the prison, requested by the woman, who became his godmother.

She was the eldest daughter of a conservative Navarrese family (with three daughters); the family started taking Azcona in when he was four years old – typically over short periods of time and weekends – after the man came out of prison and they realised how poor Azcona's situation was.

They informally cared for him until the age of six, when they requested to foster him on a more permanent basis.

When he was six, the situation with the man's family got worse and custody was withdrawn.

An adoption request began to be processed, and he was officially adopted by the eldest daughter at the age of seven.

The family also intervened to allow him to be accepted into the Catholic schools the daughters had attended.

However, he had problems adapting to the family and to the school, which manifested in instances of theft and violence at the school until he was expelled at the age of thirteen.

Throughout his life, Abel Azcona has been officially known by various names: Abel Luján Gutiérrez, Abel David Lebrijo González, Abel David Azcona Marcos, David Azcona Marcos, and Abel David Azcona Ema.

Azcona's biological mother chose the name Abel and, when registering him at the Montesa Clinic as her own, he was first named Abel Luján Gutiérrez, using both her surnames.

The child was not registered in the Civil Registry until he was four years of age and, as he had been abandoned by his mother, her partner took care of the child and registered him as Abel David Lebrijo González, using his surnames; these are the first surnames that appear legally.

From then on, in different records and documents, such as at school, the second surname is shown as Raposo, that of the man's new partner.

At the age of seven he was adopted and became known as Abel David Azcona Ema, taking on the surnames of his adoptive mother.

The adoptive family refused to use the name Abel, since it implied a connection to the biological mother, so they called him David.

At fifteen years of age, Azcona was adopted by the husband of his adoptive mother, becoming Abel David Marcos Azcona (taking his surname); after a family process to invert the surnames was approved, 'Azcona' returned as the first surname, and he legally became Abel David Azcona Marcos.

At the age of twenty he decided to remove the name David, as he no longer had a relationship with his adoptive family, and started using Abel again, as a tribute to his biological mother and as a response to the restrictions he felt with the other name.

Azcona's first performances were created in the streets of Pamplona in 2005 when he was a student in the Pamplona School of Art.

They all had a critical spirit and were an objective of denunciation.

During these early years, Azcona turned his traumatic experiences into artistic works.

In 2011 and 2012 his artworks started gaining greater relevance, but in 2012 he was admitted to two psychiatric clinics, one in Barcelona and the other in Pamplona, where he stayed for some time as he had deep mental issues and had made a serious suicide attempt.

When he came out of the centres, he made a performance demonstration, totally naked and sitting on a chair, to interrupt traffic on one of the main streets of Pamplona.

Since this, he has carried out some works in the streets periodically, all of them with the same critical spirit and intent to denounce, with themes such as abandonment, violence, identity and sexuality.

He has been detained on various occasions for these.

Azcona's adoption was characterised by complicated situations and a lack of attachment to the family, until he abandoned it definitively when he was eighteen.

The Bogotá Museum of Contemporary Art dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him in 2014.