The endless breath

Politics of being in the work of Anna Maria Maiolino

Paulo Miyada

AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

in

out

alive

AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

air

I inhale

life-body

I exhale

I pass through the window of the world

AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

I inhale

I exhale

rhythm

vital breath

AJJJJJJJJJJ

I inhale

darkness ensues

silence

Anna Maria Maiolino, Rio de Janeiro, 1971

1. Grunts

On 19 February 2018, Anna Maria Maiolino reflected on the recurrent intensities and processes in her life and works in front of an audience of more than 300 people, mostly under 30-year-olds.1 “My work makes spirals around some constant concerns: everyday life, subjectivity, the feminine, the political, the ethical,” she said while presenting signs of these spirals, manifested most explicitly through the alternance between different media and procedures employed over the course of her career. The finale of this lecture, which had alternated between reading and improvisation, involved the presentation of some videos made in recent years.

One of them, Um dia [One Day], drew the evening to a close like a twist in the Möbius loop of the temporalities of Maiolino’s work.2 This Super-8 video was filmed in 1976, digitalized in 2000 and only sounded and assembled in 2014. The images were primarily captured at the Quinta do Boa Vista, in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte. We see the statue of Pedro II installed in front of the National Museum, which decades later would blaze in the tragic fire of 2 September 2018. Then, the giant image of Christ the Redeemer, looming upside-down against the backdrop of an aerial view of the unmistakable Guanabara Bay, which according to Lévy-Strauss resembled a toothless mouth.3 The main part of the video then goes on to show an exercise routine of young soldiers, who represented the military wing of the dictatorial regime (1964-1985)4 and who, since a federal decree passed in February 2018, have once again been an everyday presence on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Military parades feature, not without a certain degree of irony, intertwined with the graceful movement of the gorilla from the Quinta zoo. The sounds added to the montage consist of whistles, tweets, grunts and chirps, which begin by inferring some unrestrained energy subverting the harsh air of the monuments portrayed in the initial frames of the film and end by reiterating the parallelism of the soldiers’ pathetic mechanism vis-à-vis the charismatic exhibitionism of the caged ape.

Although the audio-visual assemblage of the work may be defined as a simple essay on ordinary and political matters, there is something in the temporality of its creation that hinders its definitive comprehension. Firstly, what stopped Maiolino from publishing it as soon as she had completed the filming, in the heat of the moment? Moreover, why now, in 2014, has the work emerged and found its definitive form?

The second question stems from the intuition that structures Maiolino’s relationship with her time. In 2014 she was witnessing signs of the fragile social order in Brazil and its immature democratic institutions crumbling. Anyone who was following the news at the time saw how street protests took hold of the country in June 2013, how several agents gambled on the local and global economic crisis and the deep contradictions to which progressive sectors of Brazil delved to stir a state of exception atmosphere, the unforeseeable consequences of which have been proliferating ever since, to an increasingly abrupt and traumatic extent. The fire at the National Museum of the Quinta da Boa Vista, the federal intervention with military presence in Rio de Janeiro, the arrest of the former president Lula, the public execution of Marielle Franco and the country’s shift to the extreme right are the most comprehensive allegories for this process, which was in some form foreseen by the art that launched Maiolino back to the dark images of Brazil’s military dictatorship years.

The answer to the first question is more complex. We will need to take a long detour.

2. Gargles

Apart from the years of academic study at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Cristóbal Rojas, in Caracas, Maiolino’s effective immersion into art came about in Rio de Janeiro, from 1961. Shortly after starting to attend courses and ateliers of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, she joined a discussion network with artists like Rubens Gerchman, Antonio Dias and Roberto Magalhães. As a member of this generation, she participated in Opinião 66 (1966) and Nova Objetividade Brasileira (1967)5, two of the iconic exhibitions of that which became known as New Figuration.

Due to circumstances in the late 1970s and onwards, when the history of Brazilian art began to gain a more consolidated narrative, this generation’s entire legacy remained under-represented and scarcely debated, despite its importance and complexity.6 In brief, one could say that this generation, which had already emerged from under the dictatorship’s heavy boot, was defined firstly by ethical rather than aesthetic principles. A key idea inherent to their attitude was “opinion”, which not by chance was adopted as the name of exhibitions, a music show, theatre group, theatre festival and newspaper. Opinion is a focal point for countless artists in the most varied fields of work, all committed to expressing themselves in an immediate, spontaneous and discursive manner. Through ethical commitment, vigorous urgency and collective potential, opinion translated through art offered an escape route when traditional forms of political exercise (public demonstration and party) had been banned by the dictatorship. Furthermore, it was aligned to the global trend of the youth subculture of seeking alternative modes by which to make a stand and meet up.

In Brazil, this movement of opinion (and of New Figuration) occurred between 1964 and 1968 – when Institutional Act number 5 (AI-5) suspended the constitutional right of freedom of expression and thus criminalized opinion itself. Maiolino was not only amidst these events but actually collaborated with them through her art.

Among her works most in keeping with the new figuration approach, one can highlight Psiuuu!... (1967), presented at the Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition and later destroyed. There are no recordings or photographs of this sculpture, but the artist’s description talks of a 68 cm-high papier mâché ear stuffed with a pink-dyed fabric. Against the backdrop of the dictatorship, this giant ear, presented in an experimental exhibition which advocated a critical, socially and politically engaged art, signalled the latent surveillance and censorship that would soon afflict the entire cultural scene. A year earlier, Maiolino had produced the relief painting O Herói [The Hero] (1966)7, a parody of the military haughtiness expressed by an over-decorated, suited and booted skeleton boasting a sash, medals and shiny buttons. In 1968 at the Flags in General Osório Square happening (Rio de Janeiro, 1968), Maiolino joined the group of artists who printed flags and banners to fill the public space with poetic messages of resistance and irony. In that context, her screen print flag Alta Tensão I [High Tension I] (1968) pervaded the premises of two works cited here: a skull was positioned at the centre of a kind of target, where the words “alta tensão” (“high tension”) indicated the high risk situation that artists and the general public were in.

These, however, are works of exception. The main group of works produced by Maiolino in the 1960s showcases her experimentation in wood engraving, with a visual repertoire that touches on the popular imaginary realm of cordel literature, anecdotal prose typical of the Northeast of Brazil, and the visual legacy of Oswaldo Goeldi, in which contrasts between black and white (with red and yellow spots) take on a lugubrious meaning.8 In this aspect, her prints present apparently prosaic scenes, yet imbued with conflict as a result of the intensely cut lines in the wooden block and the raw compositions. Rarely have a butcher, a blessing and a romantic date9 been so impregnated with “high tension” as in Maiolino’s images.

Despite this, it is hard to understand such images as clear examples of the opinion as practiced by the New Figuration. Both the domesticity of her scenes and the choice to use extemporaneous references to mass culture diverge from the work by most artists of that generation.10

Witness, for example, the wood engraving Glu… glu… glu… (1967). A human-shaped body cuts a white silhouette against a black background. The face is dominated by gaping open mouth. Directly below or in front of the figure is a red area which would seem to resemble a table upon which a lavish meal is spread.  At the bottom of the image, white grooves define the spatiality of a tiled space at the centre of which is a toilet: a scatological double for the digestive system. Which dilemmas can be found in this peculiar figure? The table is set, but the person is nothing more than a mouth connected to an evacuation apparatus. Glu... glu... glu..., eats and defecates, once, twice, three times…

His appetite will never be sated. His presence supplants the domestic setting of the meal and indicates the impregnable lack of being. His dilemma, after all, neither begins nor ends with the specific problem of hunger caused by the accumulation of income accentuated by the military regime’s economic policy. This refers to a human condition: to human misery and hope.

Anna Maria Maiolino shares with her generation the prevalent ethics of aesthetics, but differs from them in the extent to which her addressing of time spills over the immediate role of opinion.

3. Screams

A mouth that devours, a body that excretes. In, out. This summary of the human being outlined for the first time in Glu…glu… glu… reappears several times throughout Maiolino’s career.

One of those times is in 1978. When the potentially interesting proposal of the 1st Latin American Biennial is publicly announced with the folkloric and paternalist angle of the theme “Myths and Magic”,11 a group of artists gathered by Hélio Oiticica and Ivald Granato invented and promoted a parody protest event entitled Mitos Vadios [Vagrant Myths]. Anna Maria Maiolino took part in the collective happening with Monumento à fome [Monument to Hunger] and Estado escatológico [Scatological State], two installations composed of cheap materials.

The former consists of a square table covered by a black cloth, on which a bag of rice and a bag of beans are placed, tied together by a black ribbon. The latter is a line of objects hanging on the wall: five rolls of toilet paper, arranged from the most expensive to the cheapest, following by a cloth, a newspaper and a fig leaf.12

Eating and defecation appear once more. They are referred to not entirely by representation or metaphor. The essential operation here is that of the metonym, the figure of speech that produces meaning through association of elements, by perceptibly substituting parts of specific semantic fields.13 For hunger, food. For Brazil, rice and beans. For monument, the table. For faeces, the toilet paper. For poverty, the cloth, the newspaper and the leaf.

Unlike the metaphor, the metonym dispenses of the narrative. It engages through the contact with pieces of materials, indicative of actions and fragments of ideas. It is, therefore, the fundamental tool of Maiolino’s poetry, montage, repente,14 editing, edification, cuisine… it is the resource at the heart of her artistic trajectory, whether in her videos, sculptures, drawings, performances or installations.

In 1970s Brazil, traumatised by the most brutal years of the military dictatorship, Maiolino used metonyms to weave another mode of conceiving the shattered public sphere that longed for ideas of redemocratization. During the enforcement of AI-5 (1968-1975) the regime not only criminalized opinion but also assassinated hundreds of citizens, placed hundreds of thousands of others under surveillance and systematically censored art, culture, education and the press.

This is made very clear in Maiolino’s Super-8 films, especially In-Out, Antropofagia (1973-4), X (1974), Y (1974) and Ad Hoc (1982), all of which result from the next framing of concrete gestures with no affectation. Bodies torn apart. The rhythm of their movements is linked to the rhythm of the montage.15 The sounds, in turn, have their own tempo. There are no characters or storyline, just as there is no performance or enactment per se – at least not in the sense of a complete gesture that dispenses of the montage to produce meaning.

The camera cuts, the montage associates. A metonym, but a metonym for what? For the political being that lives in a state of exception, but still has a body that pulsates, wants, doubts, trembles, swallows, breathes, orgasms, screams and looks – even with eyes closed, like in X, or blindfolded, like in Y.

Y consists of fragments and instants of a female face, blindfolded and mouth gaping. The sound is sharp, but does not coincide with the movement of the image. The image of the woman breathes an ambivalence in which screams transmute alternately into orgasm, crying, laughter and other spasms. Thus, a single work depicts an image of despair of the repressed and of the body’s untameable power.

4. Whispers

Aos poucos… [Little by Little] was the title of a solo exhibition of Anna Maria Maiolino’s work at the Petite Galerie, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1976. Although little comment was made by the critics at the time, this was one of the most important Brazilian exhibitions of a political nature of the latter half of the decade. The show was a poetic mourning and a language invention. At the centre of the space Maiolino assembled the installation Solitário ou Paciência (1976). On a raised floor, a black table and chairs brought cards arranged in a game of patients, that someone might try to complete, but would never succeed, because there were some cards missing, removed by the artist to transform this individual pastime into a tragic allegory for the task of rearranging a society that had lost lives to State violence.

It was also the first setting at which some of the Super-8 films mentioned here were screened and the debut image of the series Fotopoemação [Photopoemaction].16 In that series, the photographs condense the description of a performance carried out to be recorded through one or more images – a common exploit among the conceptual artists of the time. The difference – which explains the skilfully composed title, infiltrating the notion of poem residing between the poles of photography and action – is that the images and actions did not bear a simple relation fitting the narrative of the successive frames, but rather a mutual necessity ruled by synthetic metonymic precision. Por um fio [By a Thread] (1976) and Piccolo Mondo (1982) are perfect examples of this operation; a kind of transmutation from concrete poetry into beyond the written word.

Great malice is not required to understand the critical meaning of a photopoemaction such as É o que sobra [What is left over] (1974), not only in the context of the dictatorship, but also of domestic treatment of the female sex.17 Meanwhile, the photopoemaction Aos poucos… [Little by Little] (1974), which lent its name to the exhibition the Petite Galerie, inhabits a dual threshold. Produced parallel to the filming of Y, this sequence of four photographs describes successive stages of a black blindfold sliding over the artist’s face, resembling the stages of an eclipse. The cloth covering slides like a sign of the impediment imposed by the circumstances of that time, or like a timeless allegory for the self-imposed anaesthesia of feelings in the conformation of subjectivities. Likewise, one can interpret the sequence like a gradual release or a closing cycle, depending on whether you read the stack of images from top down or from bottom up, respectively.

This overlapping of ambivalences, social-existential and repression-return, produces the effect of a secret. Instead of opinion cast into the wind and hoisted like a flag, the sense is whispered here: an acute suggestion that something which is not well may be transformed, little by little.

The contrary and the equal. Duplicity in a single body. This has been the primary aesthetic and ethical issue in Maiolino’s artwork since her stay in New York (1968-1971).18 It was with this group of works on paper that Maiolino delved deep into forms of encoding the poetic message. Secret poem (1971) brought to light a gesture of erasing the lack of differentiation of the letter, which transforms a word game about intersubjectivity into a censured message.19 The drawings with cuts, tears and stitches, like Entre os dois [Between the Two] (1972) and the series Projetos construídos [Constructed Projects] (1973-1975) and Buracos/Desenhos objetos [Holes/Drawing Objects] (1972-1976), materialize the line as trauma, fissure on the surface of the ego that glimpses an unnamed significant. Mapas mentais [Mental Maps] (1971-1976), in turn, outline on the abstract plane of territorial control, with its boundaries and vectors, the problems of spelling out oneself, with one’s hiatuses and desires, or vice versa.

Of the latter, we must highlight Capítulo I and Capítulo II [Chapter I and Chapter II] (1971/1999 and 1974/1999, respectively). Their web of perpendicular lines establish a field that can be grasped not only as a system of cartographic coordinates, but also as a board of a game of life.20 Fundamental passages in Maiolino’s role as a woman are distinguished by her children’s names, just as her permanent condition of foreigner are stamped by moves between continents, countries and cities; various cross-hatched lines act as graphic signs of interludes or zones of conflict, accompanied by words like war, hunger, hate, melancholy, happiness, anguish, separation, pain, refuge, disease and panic. The three final words in the second work are: certainty, fate and POETRY.

One can observe from the 1976 photographs that works like these, which someone in passing may interpret as strictly autobiographical, were shown almost right in front of Alma negra da América Latina – Uma situação geográfica [Black soul of Latin America – A geographic situation] (1976), a mental map in which the silhouette of the continent cut into the wood reiterates the procedure performed on paper in Holes/Drawing Objects.  Completely black, the work cemented the sense of mourning that pervaded the exhibition, in reference to how people’s democratic rights had been suspended in a large part of the continent and the slavery-based colonial past that tainted Latin American countries with black blood.

Meanwhile, to the left and to the right of Black soul…were two supposedly abstract object drawings, in which the support was torn lengthways and recomposed in the assembly of box-frames, thus establishing a tortured landscape, which might be both intimate and social. 21

In this tangle of works that result from a unique explosion of invention, Maiolino moulded her poetics of space, where the internal and external bleed into one another like the coming and going of the ocean tide. The understanding was therefore consolidated that if there is politics it is because existence itself perpetually establishes it. The political being. Being, political. Being.

4.1. Whispers, still

Before moving on, it is necessary to listen more carefully to the final seconds of Y. A female voice whispers hurried, slightly overlapping, fragments. They are lost appeals, echoes of calls that Maiolino has introduced almost at a subliminal level. Her invented wording is freely inspired by the vigorously minimalist writing of Samuel Beckett, with a sociological nod to Machado de Assis. Her insertion in the montage anticipates the publication of Ad Hoc, which also superimposes breathless speech over the image of a part of the body in motion.23

— Courage! Courage!

— Where the simplest honesty was called courage;

 —Ana Vieira Ruiz, a nanny goat, who lives by doing laundry;

 —Manuel da Costa Ataíde, a Creole;

 —Manuel da Gama, who lives by the art of painting;

 —Ana Teodora de Castro, a brown woman, who lives by weaving;

 —Francisco da Silva Maciel, who still lives by his art, music;

 —Courage… courage…

 —Never say never.

In view of this, what is there left to say? Perhaps just to ask oneself how courage is born.

5. Exhalations

Making art like one who serves the table. The idea is not as unusual as it may seem. In its anthropological roots, art stems from the field of the gift and sacrifice, where there are no rigid boundaries between magic, politics, education, philosophy, art and food. In every case, there is an ethical and antieconomic soul-bound bond, willing to offer the best of what lies within.

Maiolino, of Italian Catholic origin, and born in wartime, has since a young age understood the nexus between the division of food, the distribution of hunger and the communion of an idea. This, incidentally, is the main lesson that she shows she learned from her family cultural base.

Distributing hunger means dividing what is lacking as the greatest gesture of recognising oneself in the other. This was her main theme in the first edition of the installation-happening Arroz & Feijão [Rice & Beans]. In 1979, Maiolino joined a group of artists which formed to occupy a room in the Aliança Francesa building in the Botafogo district of Rio de Janeiro. According to the artist, working as a group in this setting proved a challenge, because the channels of dialogue were obstructed by all the years during which the artists, as citizens, had lived behind masks to defend themselves against repression. Faced with a context in which even words were lacking, Maiolino, in her first individual exhibition in the space, presented the installation Rice & Beans. There was a long central table with a black tablecloth and six places serving plates of earth containing germinated rice and bean seeds. In the four corners of the space, smaller square tables, each with four sets of cutlery and a plate, serving rice and beans prepared by the artist. The surrounding walls were entirely covered with insistent notes referencing the estimate that “one third of the human race overeats while two thirds starve to death.” 26

Art’s place, therefore, was treated as a place of distribution, while the artists themselves (the majority of the visiting public and the collective body that occupied the space) were posited as a metonym for misery. With such prosaicness and transplanted into the exhibition environment, the action gained ritualistic traits. Life affirmation through the perseverance of the shoots – and of the artists, who fed on them.

Maiolino’s kitchen temporarily became an extension of her workshop while executing this proposal, and the happening generated other fruits. From the early 1980s onwards, her graphic production flowed into the cycles of repetition and persistence common to preparing food. In the series Aleph (1982) and Signos [Signs] (1983), Maiolino started to multiply lines and distribute points like someone separating raw beans.27

In the halftone hand-drawn mesh, commas, like moons, and points, like holes, are meticulously accumulated. This is the embryo of the artist’s mature drawing and painting, which has flourished to this day. In a paradox often found in creative processes, control offers chance a privileged space. In Sem título [No title] (1982) from the Aleph series, for instance, a comma marks each of the 1,092 modules defined by the rectangular grid. All, except one. The square that is left blank is the punctum of the work, that which pierces us and confirms, by means of the contradiction, the monumentality of the repeated gesture. In Dois movimentos [Two movements], from the same series and year, there is also only one of the 1,042 squares which, instead of containing two commas, contains only one. This could be due to an accident caused by the human hand of an artist who lives and breathes, despite her serial attitude. Nonetheless, the force of this error was soon perceived by Maiolino, who has devoted great effort to choreographing errors, uncontrolled and random acts of paint and hand.

The hand knows. It knows more than our head is capable of conceiving. It betrays sensations and desires in its involuntary movements, resists rationalized programming and bears the atavistic wisdom of thousands of years of human craft. It is to the hand that we attribute the inexplicable touch of the cook’s beloved recipe. It is also what can be blamed for the recurring forms that humans learned to build from material found in nature. Taking a handful of moist earth and squeezing it through one’s fingers, leaving one’s hand cupped empty. If we roll our fingers over the matter into the shape of this cupped palm we soon form an almost-sphere, or a worm shape. And thus, with the help of the coordinated movement of the whole body, we make doughs, breads, bricks and all sorts of containers for food, blood and the air.

Attention to this lesser knowhow (monumental knowhow, yet deprived of rhetoric) begins for Maiolino inside a kitchen that dwells in her memories, blossoms in her drawings from the early 1980s and is multiplied in her work with clay. Decades of experimentation spanning from 1990 onwards, which converged in the installation Aqui & Lá [Here & There] (documenta 13, 2012) when the clay mixtures returned to the domestic environment, inundating it in a lavish outlay of energy and affection.

An expert in applied mathematics would be required if one wanted an estimate of how many points, lines, commas, worm shapes, mixtures, volumes and things have been imprinted on the world by the hands of Maiolino and her helpers in the past four decades. Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions? Handmade, these things might be created by the artist alone or, as is especially common in the large scale installation, by a range of people who gather to work as a single collective body, in scenes reminiscent of big get togethers to cook for whole towns or to work intensively and happily through the harvest.

Huge quantities, infinite differences in a mass of equals. Vital energy spent. Waste or food. In or out. Inhalation or exhalation. Once more: the opposite and the equal.

6. Breaths

Whether or not they are ephemeral, Maiolino’s installations, reliefs and sculptures transform the abject into a signal of vital energy expended.  “From hand to mouth,” the Americans say in reference to an infant’s behaviour of swallowing up the world without caring about dirt, the refinement or the scatology of their impulses. For Maiolino, going from hand to mouth is making the exhalation a shareable foodstuff.

Quoting the book of Genesis: “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) Going farther back, we have the Greek concept of pneuma: root of the idea of respiration, breath, soul and spirit.

Anna Maria Maiolino gives form to (moulds) matter like a stable container for her breath. The series of sculptures Emanados [Emanations] (2007) crystallizes this gesture. She allows the glass to be blown, enclosing the shape of a bubble. And then leaves the still hot bubble hanging on a kind of coat hanger, moulding itself to the weight of its void.  The delicate formation of these volumes is tested like a telluric incorporation of the organ-less body furiously desired by Antonin Artaud and laboriously multiplied by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

7. Apnoea

The title of this essay paraphrases The Endless Eye, Jacques Aumont’s acclaimed book about the essence of the cinematographic eye.28 The aim here was to outline Maiolino’s artistic development as a poetics of insatiable subsistence.29

The medical term for voluntary or involuntary interruption of breathing is apnoea. The whispers, screams, gargles and grunts in Maiolino’s work are persistent responses to her apnoea, to the moments when internal or external traumas take her breath (her soul) away. Shortage of air, or cessation of breathing, portrayed most comprehensively in the performance-installation Entrevidas [Between Lives] (1981): the walk along the joints in the egg-curdled pavement, the primordial point-commas of nature.

This work, just like the series of photopoemactions Vida Afora [A Life Line] (1981), synthesises Maiolino’s passage in the wake of Little by Little…, the great synthesis-show of her apnoea, towards creative gestures with paint and clay which provided an almost infinite outlet for her breath. It is significant that this passage dates from the start of the decade which saw the end of military rule in Brazil, since authoritarianism, war and hunger have been mostly responsible for directly forcing people to stop breathing over the course of Maiolino’s political existence.

With that in mind, we can return to the question that remained unanswered at the start of the text. Why was it necessary to wait until 2014 to edit something filmed in 1976?

When she filmed the pathetic military routines at the Quinta da Boa Vista, Maiolino was on the verge of embarking on her gradual farewell to the apnoea that had marked her 1970s. Furthermore, producing parody pamphlets, denouncement and opinion had never been her interest. Those images, therefore, naturally had no immediate purpose. It was the crudeness of developments in the last 10 years in Brazil and abroad, that brought a shudder back to Anna Maria Maiolino’s everyday life, something readily channelled in the final edition of One Day and in works such as the installation Estado de Exceção [State of Exception] (2009/2012), an impenetrable cell/box from which anguished calls resonate.30

For analogous reasons, a few months ago she also revised the poem Creia! [Believe!], which had been composed in Rio de Janeiro in 1976.31 This essay concludes with an extract from that poem, in the expectation that the future holds smooth breathing for Anna, her near and dear ones, her others and all of us:

but I say:

my son, indifference is worse than violence

it will make a stuffed bird of you

flightless

it will do you no good lying in a splendid berth

to the sound of the sea and in the light of the deep sky

illuminated by the sun of the New World

in this land giant by nature

Paulo Miyada, December 2018

Published Anna Maria Maiolino. O Amor se Faz Revolucionário, Milano, PAC e Silvana Editoriale, 2019

Published in Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019)

_____________________________________________________

1 Maiolino’s lecture, “Aula Magma”, marked the launch of her semester-long contemporary art course Escola Entrópica at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The event was organised by the coordinators of the School: Galciani Neves, Felipe Arruda and me.

2 The Möbius Strip, a physical manifestation of a topological conception of infinitude and indistinction between the inside and outside, is recalled by Maiolino as one of the main learnings from the work and ideas of Lygia Clark, whose pivotal work-happening Caminhando [Walking] (1964) involved the virtually infinite cutting along the length of a Möbius strip.

3 As recorded in the book Tristes Trópicos (1955) and popularised by the song O estrangeiro (1989), by Caetano Veloso.

4 The period of the Military Regime as established by consensus among historians.

5 Both at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ).

6 The most consolidated narratives about Brazilian art, drafted in the years of the so-called “democratic opening”, guided both academic research and market initiatives and institutional policies. Based on the rigid categorisation of “modernism – concretism – neo-concretism –  self-referential conceptual art – retrieval of painting” they underestimate a large part of 1960s and 1970s art, precisely that which rejects eminently formal interpretations.

7 A version from 2000 can be found today in the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP).

8 In relation to the settings in which experimental groups have formed in the history of art history, curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff highlights that artist Adir Botelho was a key figure at the free atelier of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes which Maiolino began to attend in the 1960s. Botelho’s mentor, Oswaldo Goeldi, in turn, had established the bases for teaching modern engraving at the school.

9 Açougue [Butcher] (1966), O Bebê [The Baby] (1967) and Ecce Homo (1967), respectively.

10 The most obvious exception is Antonio Henrique Amaral as regards contact with cordel literature, but the themes of the São Paulo artist in those times expounded explicit satirical comment on the politics of the military regime.

11 Also fuelling the dissatisfaction of the artists was the maintenance of a state of self-censorship by the Biennial Foundation, which led to its international boycott in 1969 and ensured its reduced local and international relevance throughout the entire 1970s. The boundaries of the 1st Latin American Biennial were queried at the Meeting of Art Critics of Latin America, held by the Biennial Foundation and conducted by Aracy Amaral in São Paulo, in October 1980 – on this occasion, however, the propositions that sought to give a collaborative, progressive and political sense to the event were suffocated by the opinion of the majority of the participants, who voted to suppress the Latin American focus of the Biennial.

12 The parallel between Glu… glu… glu… and the works presented in Mitos Vadios had already been noted by Catherine de Zegher, in her seminal essay “Ciao bella:  Uma migrante por dentro e por fora”, published in DE ZEGHER, Catherine. Anna Maria Maiolino – Vida afora. New York: The Drawing Center, 2002.

13 See JAKOBSON, Roman. “Dois aspectos da linguagem e dois tipos de afasia”, in Linguística e comunicação. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1975.

14 Kind of sung poetry typical of the northeast region of Brazil, in which the artist improvises verses and rhymes with emphasis on the clash between similar sounding words with opposite meanings, with sarcastic, humourous or romantic effects.

15 As regards montage, experimentation in films by Brazilian artists in the 1970s was primarily expounded by Anna Maria Maiolino and Antonio Dias.

16 The work Aos Poucos... was reproduced on the exhibition invitation.

17 It is worth recalling that even in the 1990s one of the most popular Brazilian television comedy shows carried the catchphrase: “Shut up, Magda!” Repeated ad nauseum to a wife who was considered stupid, this command perpetuated the lesson of silencing women at home. A recent UN study shows that 40% of all femicides in Latin America and the Caribbean occur in Brazil: 2,800 cases were recorded in the country in 2017.

18 Specifically, the beginning of this production is associated to her scholarship and attendance at the Pratt University Graphics Center and the New York Graphic Workshop in 1971, a cycle interrupted by her return to Brazil in the same year.

19 The censored poem contains the words, originally written in Italian: “I + you / body  + body / body to body / body in body / lost individuality / dual structure body / encounter / I + you / new body”.

20 There is a special relationship between these works and the installation Em lugar de… [In place of… ] (1980), which spatializes a map-board, placing the visitor as an actor in this hybrid territory between the subjective and the political.

21 The expression “tortured landscape” is borrowed here from This Tortured Earth (1942-1943), Isamu Noguchi’s bronze piece that embodies the caustic idea of building the topography of a park through the aerial bombing of a previously flat landscape.

22 The recorded voice is that of Márcia Taborda.

23 In this case, inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, an intense record of the catastrophe of subjectivity in an era of instrumentalized life.

24 For one year, Maiolino and fellow artists Amélia Toledo, Luiz Ferreira, Maria do Carmo Secco, Maria Luiza Saddi, Mauro Kleiman, Osmar Fonseca and Rogério Luz used the room as a studio and exhibition space.

25 The difficulty in achieving dialogue which would mark the whole process of resuming democracy and the following decades was brought into focus in Maiolino’s performance and photomontage O mascarado [The Masquerade] (1979), presented at the curtain raiser exhibition of the collective occupation of the Aliança Francesa room.

26 Poetic memorial of the installation Arroz & Feijão [Rice & Beans] (1979).

27 An explanation of this reference may be required for younger readers, who have  grown up in a world of super-processed foods. For thousands of years, eating beans, rice and other grains depended on a preliminary preparation whereby the patient hands and eyes separated the good beans from the bad, before leaving the beans to soak in order to facilitate their cooking and subsequent digestion.

28 Original version: AUMONT, Jaques. L’Œil interminable. Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989.

29 A maxim employed by Maiolino in several conversations is applicable here: “I don’t want anything and I want everything.” On another occasion it could be pertinent to appraise Maiolino’s voracious and dispossessed proposition as a maternal transubstantiation of Glauber Rocha’s aesthetics of hunger.

30 Not by chance, both of these works underpinned Maiolino’s presence in the collective exhibition imannam, presented alongside Laura Lima and Ana Linnemann at Pivô (São Paulo) from April to June 2018.

31 This revision was for the publication of the catalogue of the AI-5 50 Anos – Ainda não terminou de acabar exhibition, held from September to November 2018 at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo. A publicação, que apresenta o poema como introdução, mapeia a produção cultural durante a ditadura militar brasileira e será impressa em março de 2019.

Anna Maria Maiolino: Articulações e traduções of e in antropofagia1

Michael Asbury

Em seu conto A Biblioteca de Babel (1941), Jorge Luis Borges imagina uma biblioteca tão vasta que chega a ser universal. Sua arquitetura é composta de galerias hexagonais sobrepostas, conectadas por uma escada em espiral transversal ao centro de toda a estrutura. A biblioteca sem fim guarda todas as combinações possíveis das letras de todos os alfabetos, quer esteja a língua extinta, viva ou ainda por emergir. Esta coleção aleatória de letras está compilada em volumes de dimensões padronizadas, exibidos sem ordem específica ou conhecida. Todos os livros conhecidos, sejam eles baseados em fatos ou em ficção, ou ainda por serem escritos, estão intercalados entre uma quantidade extraordinária de compilações absurdas.2 A biblioteca é absolutamente disfuncional, uma vez que sua totalidade nega a possibilidade de especificidade e ordem, o que sempre deve ser preterido e lançado ao domínio da especulação.

O mesmo sentido de totalidade é evocado em alguns trabalhos de Anna Maria Maiolino. Refiro-me aos seus desenhos por derramamento de tinta e instalações em argila, em que o gesto simples e singular que imprime a forma ganha sentido pela repetição. Como no caso da biblioteca de Borges, este sentido não pertence ao específico, seja de um objeto ou desenho particular, mas à completude absoluta do trabalho, que sempre deverá ser preterida. Embora o acúmulo de marcas ou de objetos convirja para a totalidade, cada simples gesto evoca, mas jamais alcança, o fazer primordial que busca reproduzir. Semelhante aos dois extremos infinitos da biblioteca de Borges, esses gestos em série expandem-se, assim, em duas direções: inclinam-se para uma origem e para um fim.

Ao se debruçar sobre a questão, a historiadora de arte Maria de Fátima Lambert sugere que os desenhos e instalações de Anna Maria Maiolino podem ser “lidos”3 quase como um tipo de protoescrita; vale aqui uma menção ao ensaio de Walter Benjamim, A tarefa do tradutor (1923).4  É possível associar a marca sequencial ou a elaboração da forma em seu trabalho à busca pela tradução perfeita da marca primordial. O fracasso em atingir tal perfeição (pois todas as traduções seriam em última análise inadequadas) indica a potencial reprodutibilidade infinita dessas tentativas. Essa tradução potencialmente interminável de um código primordial invoca a noção de essência, ultrapassando sua comunicabilidade objetiva. Enquanto o narrador de Borges coloca a questão, “Você que me lê — tem certeza de que compreende minha linguagem?”,5 Benjamin indaga:

Pois que “diz” uma obra literária? Que comunica ela? Uma obra pouco “diz” para aqueles que a compreendem. Sua característica essencial não é a comunicação ou mera transmissão de informação. Contudo, toda tradução que pretende ser veículo de mensagens não é capaz de transmitir algo que vá além de sua comunicação — portanto, só transmite o inessencial. Essa é a marca das más traduções. Porém, geralmente não consideramos o que está além da comunicação em uma obra literária — e até mesmo um mau tradutor admitirá ser esta é sua substância essencial —  como o impenetrável, o misterioso, o “poético”?6

Uma associação similar entre o fazer singular e sua infindável expansão foi proposta por Catherine de Zegher. A curadora notou uma semelhança entre a criação dos rolinhos de argila de Maiolino e o ato de amassar pão. Sugerindo outra analogia em que o trabalho estabeleceria um jogo entre origem e finalidade, Catherine foi mais longe ao evocar a semelhança entre pão e fezes.7 A associação do que é ingerido ao que é excretado coloca-nos perante um ciclo que conecta a humanidade, seu passado, presente e futuro. Tal analogia pretendia superar a natureza repetitiva do fazer do trabalho. A curadora refere-se à relação que Anna, enquanto artista, tem com uma genealogia histórica da arte em especial: o mito de origem evocado pela arte e o que parece ser sua eterna recorrência. Mais uma vez as reflexões de Benjamin sobre tradução são particularmente esclarecedoras:

A história das grandes obras de arte nos conta sobre sua descendência a partir de modelos antigos, sua materialização na época do artista, e o que em princípio deveria ser sua vida eterna pelas gerações vindouras. Quando há tal sobrevida, tem-se a fama. As traduções que são mais do que meras transmissões de um assunto surgem quando uma obra, ao longo de sua persistente existência, atinge o período da fama. Ao contrário, portanto, às alegações dos maus tradutores, tais traduções não entregam tanto às obras quanto devem a existência a elas. Nas traduções, a vida dos originais alcança seu desdobramento último, mais abrangente e continuamente renovado.8

Maiolino nos convida para uma leitura de seu trabalho face ao “desdobramento total” (a fama) do conceito de antropofagia na arte brasileira. No catálogo da retrospectiva de sua última exposição na Fundação Tàpies, a artista declara que se considera “o bolo fecal resultante do banquete antropofágico brasileiro”.9 Surgindo como um meio irreverente de afirmação nacional em meio à perspectiva aparentemente inevitável de derivação cultural, o Manifesto antropófago de 1928 de Oswald de Andrade propunha que o povo brasileiro, independentemente de sua origem étnica, mantivesse características culturais indígenas, arcaicas e pré-cabralinas.10 A antropofagia, então, tornou-se uma metáfora para a natureza da cultura brasileira de apropriação, definida como um canibalismo (culturalmente) intrínseco. Ao afirmar que “Só a antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente”, o manifesto buscava a totalidade pela invocação de uma origem mítica.11 Esse espectro primitivo indígena que permeia a identidade nacional foi percebido por Oswald de Andrade como inteiramente coerente com a dinâmica da própria modernidade.

A tradução brasileira do modernismo europeu estava condenada a trair sua origem, como um espelho que às vezes distorce a imagem que reproduz, embora sempre inverta e multiplique ela. O Modernismo brasileiro, do qual o conceito de antropofagia emergiu, rivalizava, assim, com o “chamado pela ordem” parisiense em que seu purismo — com suas paisagens arcádicas, referências clássicas e primitivistas — procurava reafirmar a cultura francesa como sendo a legítima herdeira da tradição ocidental. Do mesmo modo, a antropofagia associava o o específico, isto é, o mito da origem, a um ideal universal de cultural. Em outras palavras, propunha a presença de um espectro mítico indígena na heterogeneidade étnica brasileira justapondo-o a outro mito, o do caráter universal da cultura europeia. A imagem refletida comprometia, portanto, a suposta pureza de sua fonte.

O fato da antropofagia, desde o final da década de 1920, ter sido recontextualizada pelo trabalho de várias gerações de artistas atesta a versatilidade incessante do conceito. No que se refere à interpretação e difusão internacional da arte contemporânea brasileira, o conceito é muitas vezes visto como sinônimo das noções de hibridismo cultural ou transculturação.12 É preciso ter cuidado com essas associações, sendo talvez esta última uma “tradução” melhor do que a primeira por sua implícita efemeridade. É importante referir-se a Benjamin aqui, uma vez que a antropofagia não só pode ser entendida como uma forma de tradução, mas também (o que talvez seja ainda mais significativo) como um desdobramento intergeracional e, portanto, histórico e genealógico da arte.13 Esse desdobramento fica evidente ao analisarmos as distinções entre as pinturas de Tarsila do Amaral, pioneira na transposição pictórica do conceito no final da década de 1920, e o trabalho dos artistas da geração de Anna Maria Maiolino. Enquanto Tarsila reagia à noção de antropofagia retratando uma figura primitiva mítica em Abaporu (1928), colocando-a em um cenário “arcádico tropical”, Maiolino recriava o próprio banquete antropofágico.14 O tema evoluiu, assim, do Abaporu (“aquele que come” na língua tupi-guarani) ao ato ou som de comer (como em Glu Glu Glu de Anna Maria Maiolino de 1967 [p.19, p.74], por exemplo). Neste sentido, a trajetória criativa de Anna é um exemplo. A evolução de seu trabalho esboça como a noção oswaldiana de antropofagia passou de uma temática representativa aberta para um processo que passaria a ser indispensável para a materialização do trabalho em si: uma mudança, em síntese, da iconografia para a imanência.

É claro que tal transição dentro dos processos formais intrínsecos de produção de arte respondia a fatores externos. As pinturas de Tarsila, e suas tentativas de inserção no meio artístico parisiense, parecem ter incentivado um modernismo brasileiro para exportação.15 Enquanto ela traduzia a negrofilia parisiense da década de 1920 em temáticas primitivistas brasileiras, o ressurgimento da antropofagia durante a década de 1960 era uma resposta a impasses nacionais internos. Em mais um caso de extrema semelhança, uma alusão à antropofagia surgiu em meados da década de 1960 como uma forma de contornar uma aversão generalizada à cultura estrangeira, sendo expressa acerca do espectro político: enquanto a esquerda criticava o imperialismo americano, o governo militar de direita exaltava a cultura brasileira em nome do patriotismo. A antropofagia, em sua reencarnação tropicalista na década de 1960, articulava, portanto, a cultura popular brasileira, o brega e a ascensão da comunicação de massa, face à censura e repressão política após o golpe de estado de 1964. Durante as décadas de 1960 e 1970, o trabalho de Maiolino reagiria à ambivalência entre o íntimo e o público, entre o singular, o subjetivo, e o potencial crítico-político da obra.

A artista se identificava com a ideia em um nível mais profundo do que o de mera apropriação da cultura hegemônica da outra. Talvez seja sua relação com a antropofagia que esteja por trás de sua insistência em ser considerada uma artista brasileira, apesar de sua criação italiana e das referências biográficas recorrentes em seu trabalho, como as que dizem respeito à paisagem de Calábria de sua infância, a sua experiência de migração e a sua história familiar complexa e transnacional. É realmente surpreendente que durante a década de 1960, uma artista recém-chegada no Brasil e tão jovem, se envolveria tão rápida e intensamente com o pulso cultural de seu país de adoção. Sua ligação com o grupo Nova Figuração e posterior participação em exposições relevantes, como a Nova Objetividade Brasileira realizada no Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro em 1967, são exemplos disso. Nessa exposição, o ensaio do catálogo de Hélio Oiticica referia-se ao legado antropofágico como um meio de compreender a diversidade de referências e estilos que emergiram no Brasil depois das vanguardas construtivistas da década de 1950. Outra reviravolta curiosa ocorreu na época: em vez de seguir movimentos surgidos na Europa e na América do Norte, como Op-art, Arte pop, Arte conceitual e Minimalismo, Hélio Oiticica recorreu a Oswald de Andrade para reivindicar uma coerência interna lógica na arte contemporânea brasileira. O vocabulário da cultura popular e sua associação com o “mau gosto” foram temas importantes para o grupo da Nova Figuração. Dessa forma, tais interesses poderiam ser interpretados ainda como precedentes à efervescência cultural incitada pelo conceito e instalação de Tropicália, criação do artista apresentada pela primeira vez na exposição Nova Objetividade Brasileira.

Passando a viver no Rio de Janeiro em 1960, embora ainda adolescente, Anna frequentou a então conservadora Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, onde integrou um círculo de artistas que mais tarde formaria o núcleo da Nova Figuração: Antônio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Roberto Magalhães e Carlos Vergara. No início da década de 1960, o meio artístico entusiasmara-se pelas imagens populares e seu imaginário, e Anna se inscreve no curso de xilogravura da Escola Nacional — técnica que mantinha fortes ligações com a literatura de cordel16 apresentada à artista por Rubens Gerchman. O cordel evocava a cultura afetada pela seca do nordeste do país, uma região que desde o início da década de 1960 atraiu a atenção de movimentos esquerdistas envolvidos com projetos de alfabetização e reforma agrária.17

Embora não esteja claro quando exatamente a artista conheceu o conceito de antropofagia, os exemplares mais antigos e ainda existentes de suas obras absorveram a estética e os temas da vanguarda local, ainda que transmitindo uma experiência íntima, afetiva, em suma, subjetiva. Um conjunto tão diverso de influências aliado à invocação pessoal do campo afetivo pela artista, pode ser percebido, por exemplo, em obras como ANNA de 1967 (p.17), na qual duas figuras pronunciam o nome da artista em um balão de texto colocado entre elas. Uma série de relações contrárias é colocada sob tensão aqui, como o expressionismo inato dos contrastes da xilogravura e a simplicidade elegante do palíndromo. Uma estética que evoca a cultura popular é projetada na moldura da imagem, embora a ênfase esteja na palavra escrita e na relação entre as superfícies em preto e branco. Outras obras contemporâneas como A Viagem ou Minha Família, as duas de 1966, são mais elucidativas quanto à identidade de silhuetas semelhantes; por elas podemos deduzir que as figuras em ANNA representam a mãe e o pai da artista. As duas silhuetas que pronunciam o nome “Anna” se repetem em outra xilogravura, Glu Glu Glu de 1967 (p.19), que, junto de uma versão antiga em acrílica sobre tecido e madeira de 1966 (p.74), fazem referência a Oswald de Andrade por seu título onomatopeico e pelo sistema digestivo representado na metade inferior delas.

Com a transformação do conceito em tema pela figuração, essas obras configuram-se como exemplos representativos do período iconográfico da relação da artista com a antropofagia. O modo como essa referência evoluiu pode ser avaliado ao comparar ANNA a um trabalho posterior, em que o tema genealógico ressurge. Em sua obra Por um Fio de 1976, da série Fotopoemação (págs. 80 – 81), a artista reaparece no centro da imagem. Nesta fotografia ela está unida a sua mãe à esquerda e a sua filha à direita por um fio segurado por cada uma pela boca. O texto em ANNA é aqui substituído por um único fio, uma linha, a marca primordial que precede a linguagem escrita. A antropofagia continua presente em referências orais, mas o processo de criação é consideravelmente diferente. A transição de uma técnica de reprodução de gravuras manual e popular para um meio mecânico é acompanhado de uma mudança conceitual: a finalidade em ANNA é substituída por uma ideia de fio potencialmente sem fim, em que a origem e o infinito se contrapõem.

A irreverência oswaldiana era potencialmente ambivalente, o suficiente para abrigar um posicionamento crítico à luz de hierarquias geopolíticas, a chacota de um regime que proclamava o que desejava para o caráter essencial nacional, e a possibilidade de absorver um conjunto de referências culturais para expressar experiências subjetivas. O trabalho da artista entre as décadas de 1960 e 1970 se debruçaria sobre posições diversas, como pode ser observado em O Herói de 1966 (p.75), com seu deboche da veste militar, e O Que Sobra de 1974 (págs. 58 – 59), com seu comentário potente sobre violência (contra o corpo feminino) e/ou (auto) censura, já Arroz e Feijão de 1979 (p.50) consistia em uma instalação que convidava participantes a refletir sobre a distribuição de alimentos e a fome no mundo.

A ideia de que a carga individual seria inevitavelmente compartilhada com o coletivo é invocada ainda em seus primeiros trabalhos com Super-8 e fotografia. Os primeiros exemplos desses trabalhos, produzidos no âmbito do regime militar, mencionam as questões de censura, tortura e, de forma mais geral, a experiência psicológica/subjetiva de viver nessas condições. Nas palavras da artista:

Com as novas mídias, tentei elaborar o momento político para refletir durante o fazer, procurando no ato de liberdade poética a resistência ao que é estabelecido, imposto pela ditadura militar... com sua repressão, [que] impede os seres humanos de atingir sua plenitude... Usei meu próprio corpo naquele momento em particular, não como uma simples metáfora, mas como verdade, algo que pertencia ao domínio do real. Pois, em um período de repressão e tortura, todos os corpos se tornam um só corpo em sofrimento. 18

O corpo, cuja fragilidade e natureza finita representam para Borges os principais impedimentos para decifrar os segredos guardados pela Biblioteca de Babel, torna-se em seu trabalho o portador do peso da repressão e seu veículo poético subjetivo.19 Ele é tanto a entidade subjetiva singular quanto o caráter coletivo plural. Além das particularidades do momento histórico de sua produção, os filmes de Maiolino recordam ainda os contos de Borges ao invocarem a não linearidade das narrativas de modo semelhante à disposição dos livros na Biblioteca de Babel (ou das páginas em seu outro conto correlato, O livro de areia) que não segue qualquer lógica pré-estabelecida. Anna afirma que seus filmes admitem a possibilidade de troca da ordem sequencial das imagens, justamente porque eles não dependem de uma linguagem linear.20

No filme In-Out (Antropofagia) de 1973-1974 (págs. 66 – 67), duas bocas – de um homem e de uma mulher – desenvolvem uma conversa sem nenhuma palavra. O quadro restringe-se apenas às bocas, com as fotos alternando entre uma e outra. A boca da mulher no início está amordaçada com uma fita. As cenas evoluem por uma série de situações em que objetos ou substâncias são colocados nas bocas, engolidos ou expelidos. Em uma das cenas, a boca da mulher expele diversos fios coloridos o que leva à associação de In-Out com a performance-terapia em grupo de Lygia Clark, Baba Antropofágica, também de 1973. Na obra de Lygia, alguns participantes, segurando carretéis de linha em suas bocas, “vomitam” linhas de algodão em outro participante. Apesar da performance de Lygia ter acontecido em Paris, Anna reconhece abertamente a artista como uma importante mentora durante a década de 1960. A referência oswaldiana aqui é uma prova do percurso conceitual estreito que as duas percorreram, além de ser uma demonstração da cumplicidade geral entre os artistas brasileiros durante aquele período.

Talvez não seja uma coincidência que associação de Maiolino do corpo individual com o corpo coletivo assemelhe-se à base fundamental da antropofagia oswaldiana, em que o espectro do nativo está presente no ser coletivo sociocultural. Para seus adeptos na década de 1960, o ressurgimento da antropofagia invocava ideias de visceralidade que cada vez mais priorizavam o corpo, a interação e a performance. Mas para a artista, a antropofagia teria, além disso, um significado pessoal como instrumento poético pelo qual poderia articular sua busca por pertencimento. Embora imediatamente reconhecível como comentário sobre a censura, In/Out (Antropofagia), pode ser entendida também como uma reposta à condição de ser culturalmente deslocado, com as restrições de comunicação que isso implica. O trabalho da artista ao longo da década de 1980 sofreria mudanças significativas, principalmente com a dissolução gradual do regime militar e a fragmentação das práticas artísticas características daquele momento. No entanto, embora não seja totalmente surpreendente vê-la confessar sua decepção com a fragmentação de conceitos, temas e questões que caracterizaram muito da produção artística da década de 1970, parece paradoxal ela expressar seu descontentamento com o abandono geral da crença na totalidade, no poder transcendental da arte. Essa declaração causa estranheza quando dita por alguém que manteve viva sua prática, apesar das angústias pessoais, e cuja subjetividade enquanto emigrante e mulher tenha sido um aspecto tão importante em seu trabalho. A artista esclarece que esse paradoxo é resultado de uma ansiedade gerada por um sentimento de ausência provocado pelo deslocamento, o que alimenta seu desejo de totalidade, de um tipo de comunhão no coletivo. O estrangeiro está, afinal, sempre incompleto em seu novo ambiente. Tal momento de crise criativa marcaria, aliás, o começo da própria transformação pela artista da antropofagia enquanto conceito.

Meu trabalho... produzido pela “mão fazedora”, como o crítico Paulo Venâncio Filho o chamava, tenta transformar uma totalidade de fragmentos em uma obra única. Há uma ansiedade imanente à totalidade, o anseio pela unidade é parte do processo. 21

A percepção de que seu trabalho deveria responder ao abandono das certezas e à fragmentação do critério retoma a versão de Borges da dissipação gradativa da alegria seguindo a hipótese de completude da biblioteca. Curiosamente, é neste momento, da década de 1980 em diante, que a relação com a antropofagia é incorporada no próprio processo de fazer arte; em outras palavras, a artista engaja-se na articulação dos mitos que sustentam o conceito. Entrevidas de 1981/2010 (págs. 84 – 85) talvez seja o momento em que isso ocorre pela primeira vez, enquanto o corpo individual caminha com cuidado por ovos espalhados pela rua. Uma infinidade de protosseres, símbolos arquetípicos da origem, são invocados. A referência à antropofagia perde qualquer conexão a sua iconografia tradicional e agora é traduzida para a dimensão do simbólico. Os meios fotográficos enquadram a Fotopoemação enquanto o “indivíduo” atravessa múltiplos pontos de origem, produzindo um tempo estático e transitório. Em um depoimento dado em 2002, Maiolino revela o significado do ovo em seu trabalho:

OVO, em português escreve-se com um “O” na frente e um “O” atrás do “V”. Sendo o “V” a letra inicial de Vitoria e o símbolo desta.  Em uma leitura paralela, forma-se à nossa vista a possibilidade de vermos o significado: Ovo Vive, Vive Ovo. Portanto, a grafia da própria palavra reforça ao nosso olhar o arquétipo por excelência do ovo - a vida. Reforça ainda este pressuposto que OVO forma uma palavra palíndromo, podendo ser lida de frente para traz e de traz para diante. Comparta o ovo a simplicidade da forma oval do zero “O” — forma mínima por excelência — que para  os hindus significa:  “anterior à realização — a aura do nada”, enquanto “raiz de diversidade”. Portanto, diante do ovo estamos diante do nada e do todo; o vazio e o pleno; o início como passado, o fim, e o infinito...”.22

Para concluir esta conjunção experimental entre um conto sobre uma biblioteca infinita, um manifesto de 1920, um ensaio sobre teoria da tradução e o trabalho de uma artista contemporânea, é importante lembrar a última exposição individual da artista em Londres. Suas instalações em argila no Camden Arts Centre ocuparam o local de uma antiga sala de leitura de uma biblioteca no norte de Londres. A coincidência foi estranha, embora talvez não improvável, pois, inicialmente, foi justamente o que me levou a sugerir a analogia com o conto de Borges. A biblioteca, em outras palavras, já continha este texto ainda por ser escrito, bem como suas diferentes versões, traduções e enunciados. Quão apropriado, então, que este ensaio ressurgisse para acompanhar uma exposição que iniciaria seu itinerário no Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea na Itália, país natal da artista, e terminaria na Whitechapel Gallery, que incorporou a biblioteca vizinha como parte de sua recente expansão.

Publicado Anna Maria Maiolino. O Amor se Faz Revolucionário, Milano, PAC e Silvana Editoriale, 2019

Publicado em Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019)

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1 Esteensaio foi adaptado de um artigo de apresentação, Anna Maria Maiolino:Utopias e Subjetividades, apresentado no 20° encontro anual da ANPAP(Associação Nacional de Pesquisadores em Artes Plásticas), realizado na UERJ(Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro) em setembro de 2011. Uma versãoreduzida do artigo, Anna MariaMaiolino’s Articulations of the Notion of Anthropophagy’(Articulaçõesde Anna Maria Maiolino com a noção de antropofagia) foi apresentada emfevereiro de 2010  na conferênciaSub-Objects and Studio Work: From EvaHesse to Anna Maria Maiolino (Subobjetos e trabalho em ateliê: de Eva Hesse aAnna Maria Maiolino), realizada no Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art,University College London, University of London.

2 Anarrativa feita por Borges aborda as especulações teóricas sobre uma“biblioteca de gênio” pelas quais ele evoca alguns exemplos interessantes:“Tudo – a história pormenorizada do futuro, as autobiografias dos arcanjos, ocatálogo fiel da biblioteca, milhares e milhares de falsos catálogos, a provada falsidade desses catálogos, uma prova da da falsidade do catálogo verdadeiro,o evangelho gnóstico de Basilides, os comentários sobre esse evangelho,comentários sobre os comentários desse evangelho, a história verídica de suamorte, a tradução de todos os livros em todas as línguas, as interpolações decada livro em todos os livros, o tratado que Beda poderia ter escrito (mas nãoescreveu) sobre a mitologia dos saxões, os livros perdidos de Tácito”. JorgeLuis Borges, La Biblioteca de Babel, in El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, Buenos Aires,1941, trans. Andrew Hurley, The Library of Babel, David R. Godine,Boston, MA, 2000, p. 23.

3 Mariade Fátima Lambert, Anna Maria Maiolino, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity (Anna Maria Maiolino: ordem e subjetividade), ed. Michael Asburye Garo Keheyan, catálogo de exposição, Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art,Nicosia, Outubro, 2007, págs.79 – 89.

4 Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator (A tarefa do tradutor), in Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913 –1926, ed. Marcus Bullock e Michael W. Jennings, The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1969, págs. 253 – 263.

5 Borges, 2000, p. 35.

6 Benjamin, 1969, p. 253.

7 Catherine de Zegher, Ciao Bella: The Insand Outs of a Migrant, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora. ed. Catherine de Zegher, catálogo de exposição, The Drawing Center, Nova York, janeiro – fevereiro 2002, págs.81–105. Uma analogia similar foi sugerida por Hélio Oiticica  em seu  ensaio Brasil diarreia, no qual discute a diluição da noção de antropofagia e sua relação com a apropriação da Tropicália pela indústria cultural. Ver Hélio Oiticica, Brasil Diarreia in Arte Brasileira Hoje, Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro, 1973, trans. in Hélio Oiticica, catálogo de exposição, Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, February – abril 1992, págs.17–20.

8 Benjamin, 1969, p. 255

9 Anna Maria Maiolino, in Anna Maria Maiolino, ed. Helena Tatay, catálogo de exposição, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, outubro 2010 – janeiro 2011, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, fevereiro – maio 2011, Malmö Konsthall, maio – agosto 2011, p. 97.

10 A expressão “pré-cabralina” indica o período anterior à  “descoberta” do Brasil. Pedro Álvares Cabral, o primeiro navegador português (de acordo com a história consensual) a chegar em terras brasileiras em 22 de abril de 1500.

11 Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto  Antropófago, in Revista de Antropofagia, maio 1928, trans. in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era (A era moderna), 1820 –1980, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT e Londres, 1989, p.312.

12 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico, 1989, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari e Silvia L. López, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Culturas híbridas: estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade) , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1990; Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azucar, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1940, trans. Harriet de Onís, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Contraponto cubano: tabaco e açúcar), Alfred A. Knopf, Nova York, 1947, repr. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1995.

13 Benjamin expressa sua natureza transitória do seguinte modo: “Assim como o teor e o significado das grandes obras de literatura passam por uma completa transformação ao longo dos séculos, a língua materna do tradutor também se transforma. Embora as palavras de um poeta resistam a sua própria linguagem, até a melhor tradução está destinada a tornar-se parte do desenvolvimento de sua língua e, por fim, a perecer com sua renovação. A tradução está tão longe de ser a equação estéril de duas línguas mortas que, de todas as formas literárias, é a única encarregada da missão especial de acompanhar o processo de amadurecimento e as dores do nascimento da língua original”. Benjamin, 1969, p. 256.

14 Michael Asbury, Parisienses no Brasil, brasileiros em Paris: relatos de viagem e modernismos nacionais, in Concinnitas: Revista do Instituto de Artes da UERJ, ano 9, no.12, julho 2008, p. 47. Outras publicações em que explorei a questão da antropofagia como um mito arcádico tropical, sua  associação com o purismo francês e o “retorno à ordem” incluem: Asbury, Tracing Hybrid Strategies in Brazilian Modern Art (Vestígios de estratégias híbridas na arte moderna brasileira), in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism, Critical Forum Series, ed. Jonathan Harris, Liverpool University Press e Tate Liverpool, 2003, págs.139 – 70. Asbury, Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of  Brazilian Art (Algumas observações em Contaminação e Quarentena da arte brasileira) , in Art/ Histories in Transcultural Dynamics: Narratives, Concepts and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries, ed. Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine e Georg Vasold, Wilhelm Fink, Leiden e Boston, MA, 2017, págs.141–152.

15 Ver Paulo Herkenhoff, Tarsila: deux et unique, in Tarsila do Amaral: Peintre Brésilienne à Paris 1923 –1929, catálogo de exposição, Maison de L’Amérique Latine, Paris, dezembro 2005 – fevereiro 2006, págs.12 – 52.

16 A literatura de cordel é um gênero popular de  livretos ou folhetos impressos não encadernados contendo poesias e histórias da cultura popular predominante no nordeste brasileiro. Com ilustrações em xilogravura e representações do imaginário popular, os cordéis são vendidos regularmente em mercados e feiras, exibidos em varais com barbantes (cordões), que inspiraram o nome do gênero.

17 Com o golpe de estado que instaurou o regime militar em abril de 1984, a proximidade entre os militantes de esquerda e os setores marginalizados da população foi ameaçada. Intelectuais e artistas conseguiram manter algum contato até 1968, quando foi imposta uma repressão linha-dura.

18 Anna Maria Maiolino, Notes on works (Observações sobre as obras), 2009, págs. 96 –100.

19 Borges descreve a biblioteca de Babel buscando compreender a totalidade da biblioteca, ou pelo menos levantar hipóteses sobre ela, ainda que restrito pelas limitações de sua própria mortalidade .

20 Maiolino, 2009, p.103.

21 Anna Maria Maiolino, in A Conversation between Holly Block and Anna Maria Maiolino, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora. ed. Catherine de Zegher, catálogo de exposição, The Drawing Center, Nova York, janeiro – fevereiro 2002, p.356.

22 Maiolino, 2009, p.90. Observe que “Vitoria” lembra o nome da mãe de Anna,, Vitalia, e pode ser associado ainda com a obras ANNA e Por um Fio.

Anna Maria Maiolino: Articulations and Translations of and in Anthropophagy1

Michael Asbury

In the short story, ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), Jorge Luis Borges imagines a library so vast that it is all-encompassing. Its architecture consists of superimposed hexagonal galleries. These are connected by a spiral staircase that cuts across the centre of the entire structure. The endless library holds all possible combinations of the letters of all alphabets, whether the languages are extinct, currently in use or yet to emerge. This random collection of letters is compiled in standard-size volumes, displayed in no particular or known order. All known books, whether based on fact or fiction, or yet to be written, are interspersed among an inordinate number of nonsensical compilations.2 The library is absolutely dysfunctional, since its totality denies the possibility of both specificity and order, which must always be deferred, cast to the field of speculation.

A similar sense of totality is evoked in certain works by Anna Maria Maiolino. I refer to her poured ink drawings and installations with clay, where the single and simple action that gives form gains significance through repetition. As in the case of Borges’s library, this significance pertains not to the specific, whether the individual drawing or object, but to the absolute completeness of the work, which must also always be deferred. While the accumulation of marks or objects tends towards totality, each single gesture evokes, but never achieves, the primordial act it seeks to reproduce. Similar to the two infinite extremes of Borges’s library, these serial gestures are thus expansive in two directions: they tend towards both an origin and an end.

Elaborating on art historian Maria de Fátima Lambert’s suggestion that Maiolino’s drawings and installations can be ‘read’3 as a form of proto-writing, it may be useful to refer to Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923).4  One can associate the sequential mark   or form-making in Maiolino’s work as a search for the perfect translation of that primal mark. The failure to achieve this (as all translations are ultimately inadequate) leads to the potential infinite reproducibility of those attempts. This potentially infinite translation of a primal code invokes a notion of essence, that which lies beyond strict communicability. While Borges’s narrator poses the question, ‘You who read me – are you certain you understand my language?’5, Benjamin asks:

For what does a literary work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not communication or the imparting of information. Yet any translation that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but communication – hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard that which lies beyond communication in a literary work – and even a poor translator will admit that this is its essential substance – as the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic’6?

A similar conjunction of the singular act and its endless expansion has been proposed by Catherine de Zegher. The curator observed a resemblance between the making of Maiolino’s clay ‘rolls’ and the act of kneading bread. Suggesting another analogy that the work sets into play between origin and finality, de Zegher went further by recalling the resemblance between bread and faeces.7 The association of that which is ingested with that which is excreted presents us with a cycle that connects humanity, its past, present and future. This analogy was intended to go beyond the repetitive nature of the act of making the work itself. De Zegher refers to the relationship that Maiolino, as an artist, possesses with a particular art historical genealogy: the myth of origin that it evokes and what seems like its eternal recurrence. Once again, Benjamin’s reflections on translation are particularly enlightening:

The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from prior models, their realisation in the age of the artist, and what in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifest itself, it is called fame. Translations that are more than transmissions of a subject matter come into being when

a work, in the course of its survival, has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the works as owe their existence to it. In them the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.8

Maiolino invites a reading of her work in relation to the ‘complete unfolding’ (the fame) of the concept of anthropophagy within Brazilian art. In the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Tàpies Foundation,  the artist declared that she considered herself ‘the faecal pellet resulting from the anthropophagous Brazilian banquet’.9 Arising as an irreverent means of national assertion amid the apparently inescapable prospect of cultural derivation, Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ of 1928 proposed that the Brazilian people, irrespective of their ethnic origin, hold an archaic, pre-Cabralian Amerindian character.10 Anthropophagy thus became a metaphor for the appropriative nature of Brazilian culture, one defined as inherently (culturally) cannibalistic. By claiming that, ‘Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically’, the manifesto sought a totality by invoking a mythical origin.11 This original Amerindian spectre pervading the national character was perceived by Oswald de Andrade to be entirely coherent with the dynamics of modernity itself. The Brazilian translation of European modernism was doomed to betray its source, like a mirror that sometimes distorts, but always inverts and multiplies the image it reproduces. Brazilian Modernismo, from which the concept of anthropophagy emerged, thus emulated the Parisian ‘call to order’ wherein purism, with its Arcadian landscapes, classical and primitivist references, sought to re-affirm French culture as the rightful inheritor of the Western tradition. Similarly, anthropophagy associated the specific, that is, the myth of origin, with a universal ideal of culture. In other words, it proposed the presence of a mythical indigenous spectre within Brazilian ethnic heterogeneity, and juxtaposed it with another myth, that of the universal character of European culture. The reflected image thus undermined the purported purity of its source.

The fact that anthropophagy, since the late 1920s, has been re-contextualised through the work of several generations of artists proves the ongoing versatility of the concept. With regard to the international dissemination and interpretation of Brazilian contemporary art, the concept is often seen as synonymous with notions of cultural hybridity or transculturation.12 Some caution is necessary in such associations, the latter being perhaps a better ‘translation’ than the former, for its implied transience. Benjamin is useful here since not only can anthropophagy be understood as a form of translation, but also, and perhaps more significantly, as an inter-generational and thus genealogical art historical unfolding.13 This unfolding becomes evident when considering the distinctions between the paintings of Tarsila do Amaral, who first transposed the concept pictorially in the late 1920s, and work by artists from Maiolino’s generation. While Tarsila responded to the notion of anthropophagy through the portrayal of a mythical primal figure in Abaporu (1928), placing it in ‘tropical Arcadian’ scenery, Maiolino re-enacted the anthropophagite feast itself.14 The subject matter thus evolved from the Abaporu (‘the one who eats’ in the Tupi-Guarani language) to the act or sound of eating (as in Maiolino’s Glu Glu Glu from 1967 [p.19, p.74], for example). Maiolino’s creative trajectory is exemplary in this respect. The evolution of her work delineates how the Oswaldian notion of Anthropophagy was transformed from an overt representational theme into a procedure that would become integral to the materialisation of the work itself: a shift, in other words, from iconography to immanence.

Of course, such a transition within the internal formal procedures of art production responded to external factors. Tarsila’s paintings, and her attempted insertions into the Parisian artistic milieu, seem to have sought a Brazilian modernism for export.15 While she translated the Parisian 1920s negrofilia into Brazilian primitivist themes, the re-emergence of anthropophagy during the 1960s responded to internal, national impasses. In yet another case of extremes resembling each other, reference to anthropophagy emerged in the mid-1960s as a form of negotiating a generalised aversion towards foreign culture. This was expressed across the political spectrum: if the left criticised American imperialism, the right-wing military government glorified Brazilian culture in the name of patriotism. Anthropophagy, in its 1960s tropicalist reincarnation, thus articulated Brazilian popular culture, kitsch and the rise of mass communication, in the face of censorship and political repression following the 1964 coup d’état. During the 1960s and 1970s, Maiolino’s work would respond to the ambivalence between the intimate and the public, between the singular, the subjective, and the critical-political potential of the work.

Maiolino identified with the notion at a level that was more profound than a mere appropriation of hegemonic culture of the other. It is perhaps her relation to anthropophagy that lies behind her insistence on being described as a Brazilian artist despite her Italian upbringing and the biographical references that continuously reappear in her work, such as those to the Calabrian landscape of her childhood, her experience  of migration, and her complex, transnational family history. It is indeed striking that during the 1960s, an artist recently arrived in Brazil and at such a young age would become so rapidly and so intensely connected to the cultural pulse of her adopted nation. Her integration within the Nova Figuração group and subsequent participation in key exhibitions such as Nova Objetividade Brasileira, held at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967, are cases in point. In the latter, Hélio Oiticica’s catalogue essay invoked the anthropophagite legacy as a means of understanding the diversity of references and styles that had emerged in Brazil in the aftermath of the 1950s constructivist avant-gardes. Another interesting reversal took place here: rather than emulating the artistic movements arising in Europe and North America, such as pop, conceptual art and minimalism, Oiticica invoked Oswald de Andrade in order to claim an internal coherence and logic within Brazilian contemporary art. The vocabulary of popular culture and its associations with ‘bad taste’ had been important themes for the Nova Figuração group. As such these interests could also be understood as precedents to the cultural effervescence spurred by Oiticica’s concept and installation Tropicália, which was first presented at the Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition.

Settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, while still a teenager, Maiolino attended the – then conservative – Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, where she joined a circle of artists that would later form the core of Nova Figuração: Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Roberto Magalhães and Carlos Vergara. In the early 1960s, the art milieu became enthusiastic about popular imagery and its imaginary. Maiolino had enrolled in the woodcut printing course at the Escola Nacional, a technique that had strong traditional associations with popular Cordel16  literature, to which the artist was introduced by Rubens Gerchman. Cordel evoked the drought-ridden culture of the country’s northeast, a region that from the early 1960s had attracted the attention of leftist movements involved with projects of alphabetisation and agrarian reform.17

Although it is unclear precisely when Maiolino became aware of the concept of anthropophagy, even the earliest surviving examples of her work absorbed the aesthetics and themes of the local avant-garde while conveying expressions of an intimate, affective – in short, subjective – experience. Such a diverse set of influences, combined with the artist’s invocation of the affective domain, can be found, for instance, in works such as ANNA of 1967 (p.17), where two figures utter the artist’s name in a speech bubble shared between them. A number of opposing relationships are placed in tension here. The innate expressionism of the woodcut contrasts with the elegant simplicity of the palindrome. An aesthetic that evokes popular culture is configured within the picture frame, while the emphasis is on the written word and the relation between the black-and- white surfaces. Other contemporaneous works such as A Viagem (The Journey) or Minha Família (My Family), both of 1966, are more forthcoming about the identity of similar silhouettes.  From these we can deduce that the figures in ANNA represent the artist’s mother and father. The two silhouettes that pronounce the name ‘ANNA’ recur in another woodcut print, Glu Glu Glu of 1967 (p.19), which, together with an earlier version in acrylic on fabric and wood from 1966 (p.74), reference Oswald de Andrade through the onomatopoeic title and the digestive system represented in the lower half of the works. Turning concept into subject matter through figuration, these are representative examples from the iconographic period of Maiolino’s relation to anthropophagy. The ways in which this reference evolved can be ascertained by comparing ANNA with a later work, where the genealogical theme re-emerges. In her Photopoemaction work Por um Fio (By a Thread) of 1976 (pp. 80 – 81), the artist reappears at the centre of the image. In this photograph she is connected to her mother on the left and her daughter on her right by a thread held in each of their mouths. The text in ANNA is replaced here by the simple thread, a line, the primal mark that precedes written language itself. Anthropophagy is still present through the oral reference but the process of making is significantly different. The transition from a manual and popular printmaking reproduction technique to a mechanical means is accompanied by a conceptual shift: the finality in ANNA is replaced by the notion of a potentially endless thread, where origin and infinity are set against each other.

Oswaldian irreverence was powerfully ambivalent, enough so to contain a critical positioning in light of geopolitical hierarchies, a mockery of a regime that proclaimed what it desired as the essential national character, and the possibility of absorbing a set of cultural references in order to express subjective experiences. Maiolino’s work from the 1960s to the 1970s would touch upon a similar range of positions, as can be observed in O Herói (The Hero) of 1966 (p.75), with its mockery of military regalia, and É o que Sobra (What is Left Over) of 1974 (pp. 58 – 59), with its powerful commentary on violence (against the female body) and/or (self) censorship, while Arroz & Feijão (Rice & Beans) of 1979 (p.50) consisted of an installation that invited participants to ponder on hunger and the worldwide distribution of food.

The idea that the burden of the individual is inescapably shared with the collective is also invoked in her early work using Super 8 film and photography. The first examples of this work, produced under the military regime, refer to censorship, torture and more generally to the psychological, subjective experience of living under such conditions. As the artist herself put it:

With the new media I attempted to elaborate on the political moment, to reflect while doing, searching in the act of poetic freedom the resistance to that which is established, imposed by the military dictatorship … with its repression, [that] prevents human beings from reaching their plenitude … I made use of my own body    at that particular moment, not as a mere metaphor but as a truth, something that belonged to the domain of the real. Since, in a   moment of repression and torture, all bodies become one in pain. 18

The body, whose frailty and finite nature is for Borges the principle impediment to deciphering the secrets held by the Library of Babel, becomes in Maiolino’s work the carrier of the burden of repression and its poetic/ subjective vehicle.19 It is both the single, subjective entity and the total collective self. Beyond the specifics of the historical moment of their production, Maiolino’s films also recall Borges’s tales by referring  to the non-linearity of narratives in a similar manner to the way in which the ordering of the books in the Library of Babel (or the pages in his    other related short story, ‘The Book of Sand’) does not follow any pre- established logic. Maiolino has stated that her films allow the possibility of interchanges within the sequential order of the images, precisely because they do not depend on a linear language.20

In the film In-Out (Antropofagia) (In-Out [Anthropophagy]) of 1973–74 (pp. 66 – 67), two mouths – a male and a female – undertake a wordless conversation. The frame is limited to these mouths only, shots alternating from one to the other. The female mouth is initially gagged with tape. The film progresses through a number of situations in which objects or substances are placed upon it, taken in, or expelled. In one instance, the female mouth expels a number of coloured threads leading one to associate In-Out with Lygia Clark’s group performance-therapy, Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagite Drool), also of 1973. In Clark’s work a number of participants, holding cotton reels in their mouths, ‘vomit’ multi-coloured cotton lines over another participant. Despite the fact that Clark’s performance took place in Paris, Maiolino openly acknowledges that she had been an important mentor during the 1960s. The Oswaldian reference here becomes a testament to the narrow conceptual path both artists held, and is demonstrative of the general complicity between Brazilian artists during that period.

It is perhaps no coincidente that Maiolino’s association of the single with the collective body bears similarities with the fundamental basis of Oswaldian anthropophagy, where the spectre of the native is present in the collective socio-cultural being. For practitioners in the 1960s the re-emergence of anthropophagy invoked ideas around viscerality that increasing privileged the body, participation and performance. But for Maiolino, anthropophagy would additionally have personal significance as a poetic tool through which the artist could articulate her own search for belonging. Although immediately recognisable as a comment on censorship, In-Out (Antropofagia) can also be understood as a response to the condition of being culturally displaced, with the communicative limitations that this implies.

Maiolino’s work over the course of the 1980s would undergo significant changes, particularly with the gradual dissolution of the military regime and the fragmentation of artistic practices characteristic of that moment. Yet, while it is not entirely surprising to  find  Maiolino confessing her disappointment with the fragmentation of concepts,  themes  and issues that had informed much of the artistic production of the 1970s, it seems paradoxical that she would express her discontent with the general abandonment of the belief in totality, in the  transcendental power  of  art. This seems odd, coming from someone whose practice survived despite personal trials, and whose feminine and migrant subjectivity had been such an important aspect of her work. The artist explains this paradox as resulting from anxieties generated by the sense of lack produced by displacement, which in turn drives a desire for totality, for a kind of communion within the collective. The foreigner is, after all, always incomplete in her new environment. Such a moment of creative crisis, it could be argued, would mark the beginning of the artist’s own transformation of anthropophagy as a concept:

My work … produced by the ‘doing hand’ as the critic Paulo Venancio Filho called it, tries to bring a totality of fragments to the state of being a single work. There is an immanent anxiety about the totality, the longing for a whole is part of the process. 21

Maiolino’s realisation that her work must respond to the abandonment of certainties and the fragmentation of judgement recalls Borges’s account of the gradual dissipation of joy following the hypothesised wholeness of the library. Interestingly, it is at this moment, from the 1980s onwards, that the relation with anthropophagy becomes absorbed by the process of art-making itself; in other words, Maiolino becomes engaged with the articulation of the very myths that sustain that concept.

Entrevidas (Between Lives) of 1981/ 2010 (pp. 84 – 85) is perhaps the moment when this first occurs, as the individual body walks carefully through eggs scattered across the street. A multitude of proto-beings, archetypal symbols of origin, are invoked. Reference to Anthropophagy has lost all connection to its traditional iconography and is now translated into the realm of the symbolic. The photographic medium frames the photopoemaction as the ‘self’ traverses a multitude of points of origin, rendering time both still and transient. In a statement made in 2002, Maiolino expressed the significance of the egg in her work as:

OVO, Portuguese for ‘egg’, has an ‘O’ before and an ‘O’ after the ‘V’, ‘V’ being the first letter of Vitoria (Victory) and its symbol. A parallel reading gives us the meaning: ‘Ovo Vive, Vive Ovo’ (Egg Lives, Live Egg). Thus, looking at the way the word itself is written reinforces it as an archetype par excellence of the OVO – life. Furthermore, it reinforces the presupposition that the word OVO forms a palindrome in that it can be read forwards and backwards. The OVO shares the simplicity of the ovality of the zero ‘0’ – the smallest form par excellence – which to the Hindu means: ‘previous to realisation – the aura of nothing’, and considered the ‘root of diversity’. Hence, faced with the egg we are faced by nothing and everything; the empty and the full; the beginning as past, the end and the infinite.22

To conclude this tentative conjunction between a short story about   an infinite library, a 1920s manifesto, an essay on the theory of translation and the work of a contemporary artist, it is worth remembering Maiolino’s last solo exhibition in London. Her clay installations at the Camden Arts Centre occupied the site of a former north London library reading room. The coincidence was uncanny, although perhaps not improbable, since this was precisely what led me to suggest the association with Borges’s tale in the first place. The library, in other words, already contained this text before it had been written, as well as its different versions, its translations and enunciations. How appropriate, then, that this essay re-emerges to accompany an exhibition that begins its itinerary at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Italy, Maiolino’s country of birth, and ends at Whitechapel Gallery, which has incorporated the neighbouring library as part of its recent expansion.

Published Anna Maria Maiolino. O Amor se Faz Revolucionário, Milano, PAC e Silvana Editoriale, 2019

Published in Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019)

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1 This essay has been adapted from a keynote paper, ‘Anna Maria Maiolino: Utopias e Subjetividades’, presented at the 20th annual meeting of the ANPAP  (National  Association of Researchers in Fine Arts),  held  at  UERJ (Rio de Janeiro State University) in September 2011. A shorter version of that paper, ‘Anna Maria Maiolino’s Articulations of the Notion of Anthropophagy’, was delivered in February 2010  at the conference, Sub-Objects and Studio Work: From Eva Hesse to Anna Maria Maiolino, held at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art, University College London, University of London.

2 Borges’s narrative discusses the theoretical speculations of a ‘librarian of genius’ through which he evokes some interesting examples: ‘All – the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues,  the  proof  of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the  commentary  on  the  commentary of that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but  did not) on the mythology  of  the  Saxon  people, the lost books of Tacitus.’ Jorge Luis Borges, ‘La Biblioteca de Babel’, in El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, Buenos Aires, 1941, trans. Andrew Hurley, The Library of Babel, David R. Godine, Boston, MA, 2000, p. 23.

3 Maria de Fátima Lambert, ‘Anna Maria Maiolino’, in Anna Maria Maiolino:  Order and Subjectivity, ed. Michael Asbury and Garo Keheyan, exhibition catalogue, Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, October 2007, pp.79 – 89.

4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Volume I,  1913 –1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1969, pp. 253 – 263.

5 Borges, 2000, p. 35.

6 Benjamin, 1969, p. 253.

7 Catherine de Zegher, ‘”Ciao Bella”: The Insand Outs of a Migrant’, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora / A Life Line, ed. Catherine de Zegher, exhibition catalogue, The Drawing Center, New York, January – February 2002, pp.81–105. Hélio Oiticica suggested a similar analogy in his essay ‘Brasil Diarréia’, in which he discusses the dilution of the notion of anthropophagy and its relation to the appropriation of Tropicália by the culture industry. See Hélio Oiticica, ‘Brasil Diarréia’ in Arte Brasileira Hoje, Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro, 1973, trans. in Hélio Oiticica, exhibition catalogue, Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, February – April 1992, pp.17–20

8 Benjamin, 1969, p. 255.

9 Anna Maria Maiolino, in Anna Maria  Maiolino, ed. Helena Tatay, exhibition catalogue, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, October 2010 – January 2011, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, February – May 2011, Malmö Konsthall, May – August 2011, p. 97.

10 The expression ‘pre-Cabralian’  refers  to the period prior to the ‘discovery’ of Brazil. Pedro Álvarez Cabral, the Portuguese navigator (according to consensual history) first  landed on Brazilian soil on 22 April 1500.

11 Oswald de Andrade,  ‘Manifesto  Antropófago’, in Revista de Antropofagia,  May  1928,  trans. in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820 –1980, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1989, p.312.

12 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico, 1989, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1990; Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azucar, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1940, trans. Harriet de Onís, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1947, repr. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1995.

13 Benjamin expresses this transitory nature of translation as follows: ‘For just as the tenor and the significance of the great works of literature undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother  tongue  of  the  translator is transformed as well. While a poet’s words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to perish with its renewal. Translation is so far removed from being the  sterile  equation  of two dead languages that of all literary forms     it is the one charged with the special mission  of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.’ Benjamin, 1969, p. 256

14 Michael Asbury, ‘Parisienses no Brasil, brasileiros em Paris: relatos de viagem e modernismos nacionais’, in Concinnitas: Revista do  Instituto de Artes da UERJ, year 9, no.12, July 2008, p. 47. Other publications where I explore the subject of anthropophagy as a tropical Arcadian myth and its association  with  French  purism and the ‘return to order’, include: Asbury,  ‘Tracing Hybrid Strategies in Brazilian Modern Art’, in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism, Critical Forum Series, ed. Jonathan Harris, Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2003, pp.139 – 70. Asbury, ‘Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of  Brazilian Art’, in Art/ Histories in Transcultural Dynamics: Narratives, Concepts and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries, ed. Pauline Bachmann, Melanie Klein, Tomoko Mamine and Georg Vasold, Wilhelm Fink, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2017, pp.141–15

15 See Paulo Herkenhoff, ‘Tarsila: deux et unique’, in Tarsila do Amaral: Peintre Brésilienne à Paris 1923 –1929, exhibition catalogue, Maison de L’Amérique Latine, Paris, December 2005 – February 2006, pp.12 – 52.

16 Cordel literature is a popular genre of unbound printed booklets or pamphlets containing folk novels and verse, written and oral, most prevalent in northeastern Brazil. Illustrated with woodcuts of representations of the  popular  imaginary, they are sold regularly in markets and fairs  where they are displayed on rope clotheslines (cordão), from which they derive their name.

17 With the coup d’état that installed the military regime in April 1964, much of the proximity between left-wing militants and marginalised sectors of the population was curtailed. Intellectuals and artists were still able to continue certain connections until 1968 when hard-line repression was imposed.

18 Anna Maria Maiolino, ‘Notes on Works’, 2009, pp. 96 –100.

19 Borges describes the Babel librarian as seeking to understand or at least speculate on the wholeness of the library while being  restricted by the limitations of his own mortality.

20 Maiolino, 2009, p.103.

21 Anna Maria Maiolino, in ‘A Conversation between Holly Block and Anna Maria Maiolino’, in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora /A Life Line, ed. Catherine de Zegher, exhibition catalogue, The Drawing Center, New York, January – February 2002, p. 356.

22 Maiolino, 2009, p.90. Note that ‘Vitoria’ recalls the name of Maiolino’s mother, Vitalia, which further associates this work with ANNA and Por um Fio.2

A Conversation between Anna Maria Maiolino and Helena Tatay

Helena Tatay: You were born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942. At the age of twelve, your family emigrated to Venezuela, and a few years later to Brazil. Can you tell me about the time when you first arrived in Brazil?

Anna Maria Maiolino: I arrived in 1960. I was eighteen. It wasn’t my decision – my parents had decided to move to Rio de Janeiro, and I found myself being an immigrant again, without speaking Portuguese. I felt as though I was on shifting sands, permanently anxious; what kept me going was my obstinate search for a language, my obsession to become an artist. In Caracas, my teachers had told me that art in Brazil was different to the rest of Latin America, and so it was. I soon found out that certain aspects of Brazilian art were made with very little. You could construct a whole poetic discourse with a single comma. Brazil is not like the Hispano-American countries whose memory of the past is burdened by a heavy Spanish iconography. Here you find the body painting of the indigenous peoples, so ancestral. It is a ritualistic form of painting, non-representative – poetically elaborated signs, rather than a construction of images. Equally important is the African presence in the Brazilian cultural imaginary, and the peculiar Mining Baroque of Minas Gerais that anticipated modernity.

In the 1960s, when you arrived in Brazil, there was a significant change in the country’s perception of itself, it was a moment of national exaltation. In art, modernity seems to be exhausted and instead there is a renewed interest in popular forms.

I arrived at a time of great changes. Politicians and society in general aspired to a modern Brazil, and the move of the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, together with Oscar Niemeyer’s projected architecture for the construction of this city, was proof of that. On the other hand, it was obvious that the socialist project was gaining ground in Brazil, as in the rest of Latin America, although the right was also gaining ground and plotting their system of repression throughout the whole continent.

I was very young and was not aware that modernity was practically exhausted. Besides, all my energy was spent trying to become an individual. The existential and art formed one anguished body. My life was dominated by anguish and doubts, although I also wanted to participate in that moment of great political, social and artistic effervescence that was pushing artists to make alliances with the previous generations, as was the case with the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity), that took place at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, in 1967.1 We wanted to develop an autonomous national art, far removed from external patterns and models. For us, approaching the popular meant looking for our roots. Unlike American Pop art, in Brazil the incorporation of the popular was due to an interest in everything political and social. We dreamt of a free and autonomous Latin America, with its own economic resources, and art was no different in this respect.

At that time, the recuperation of the popular was done mainly by the New Figuration movement, in which you took part.

I joined the group through my colleagues in the wood engraving class: they were Antonio Dias, Roberto Magalhães and Rubens Gerchman, whom I married in 1963. There was a renewal in the questions of representation at that time, and my wood engravings were close to the tradition of the popular engravers in the north-east of Brazil: O Cordel.2

You said earlier that in the 1960s, in Brazil, the new movements were seeking alliances with the previous generations. There was also a look to the past, to the 1920s, which was another moment of national reaffirmation in Brazilian art. For instance, Andrade’s Anthropophagous Manifesto was very much in vogue at the time.3

Among other things, the manifesto Declaração de Princípios Básicos da Nova Vanguarda,4 written and signed by various artists with the theoretical contribution of Hélio Oiticica, rehabilitated certain aspects of  Andrade’s Anthropophagous Manifesto of the Week of 22,5 since it aimed at the same ‘Brazilianisation’: it wanted a strong and autonomous Brazilian art. But it is also based on a Neo-Concrete manifesto,6 written by Ferreira Gullar, that sees a work of art, not as a machine or an object, but as a quasi-body, an organic being. Therefore, it shares with the Neo-Concrete movement a phenomenological approach to the work of art. But undoubtedly our manifesto goes further, since it assumes, proposes and expands art as a revolutionary contribution to all the fields of man’s conscience and sensitivity, and gives sense to sensorial works and to those works that seek audience participation.

In the 1960s, in Brazil and other parts of the world, there was a resurgence in artistic practices of the body and subjectivity that had been absent or repressed in the more abstract practices. There was also a move towards audience participation.

Yes, there is a change of attitude towards art. The manifesto, which, as far as I can remember, was one of the last spontaneous collective declarations, was created for the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira. This exhibition has become a point of reference in Brazilian art because it marked that change of attitude. Artists from many different tendencies took part, and also artists who were originally Neo-Concrete but who had already begun to move away from Neo-Concrete practices, such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica.

What was your participation in Nova Objetividade Brasileira?

I exhibited a sculpture made of stuffed fabric – a big ear entitled Pssiu!, in reference to the country’s paranoia at the time with telephone tapping, as practiced by the government’s repressive institutions. I also exhibited some wood engravings.

In your wood engravings of the 1960s (ANNA, Glu Glu Glu, Pssiu!, etc.), the themes and attitudes that would define your work thereafter are already apparent.

Themes that were hidden from me at the time, totally unconscious. I was not yet aware of where my work was going.

What were you interested in at the time?

My work from the 1960s is motivated by intimate situations and experiences, such as women’s everyday life. Some critics at the time saw it as prosaic, banal, obvious. It was a socially excluded theme… it still is. On the other hand, military repression was also part of our everyday life, and some of my works, such as O Herói (The Hero) and Glu Glu Glu, both from 1966, reflect these political and social concerns.

So Glu Glu Glu is already in line with some of your later works, such as Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger) and Arroz e Feijão (Rice and Beans), where you talk about the way wealth is distributed. Does it refer to hunger?

Yes. It is a seminal work that gave rise to many others where I try to tackle poverty and to subvert the feelings of impotence and guilt that one feels before injustice. It’s the hunger of my childhood, of Brazil, of the whole world.

When I look at the relief Glu Glu Glu, or the wood engraving, and at the way you relate what comes in and out of the body, I am reminded of the medieval alchemists who portrayed themselves as stomachs.

Of course, it is a place for creation. There is an analogy there, because, where do we think? In the stomach? In the soul? In the spirit? Or in the mind?

For the alchemists, the stomach was a place for vital transformation. The world came in through the mouth, things were transformed in the stomach, and through defecation the vital cycle came full circle, since the corruption of an element could regenerate another. Your way of talking about the body is always related to that transformation between the inside and the outside. We could say that all your work is about transformation.

Our basic needs are central to us, and some are primary psychological needs that are inherent to all of us. Themes such as hunger, the body, what comes in and out of the body, have been approached by many people. Meanwhile, all works of art originate in the individual experience of the artist, it is the experience that defines them and makes them unique. I would go as far as saying that my works about digestion come from what my mouth remembers of my mother’s breast, the comfort of that first food, while as a counterpoint, I see defecation as the ‘first work’. For, if the body is the architect of work, it is not surprising that in some cultures they refer to defecation as ‘work’. We live and die from the mouth to the anus. I find it impossible not to talk, not to poetise about what comes in and out of the body, when these are experiences that are fundamental, corporal and vital to us.

This allusion to the abject, already outlined in your earlier works, keeps reappearing in your work, in a scatological state, or in the installations of unfired clay that can be seen as excrements or organic parts.

This is a paradox, because my work also has a clean aspect, almost elegant, I would say. But if we are talking about ‘inside and outside’, this implies movement, transit, and it leads us to vital aspects. If you think about life, you’ll see that nature renews itself in the movements of contaminated transits. Is there anything more contaminated than the birth of a child? In the south of Italy they refer to lucky people as being ‘born covered in shit’. Seeds rot before they germinate. Fortunately, nature doesn’t ‘do clean’. There is an intrinsic duality in it, without any kind of moralisation. It exists with all its opposites. Bataille says: ‘I love purity to the extent of loving impurity, without which purity would be counterfeit.’ Luckily, in art, all higher and lower aspects of existence are susceptible to appropriation and transformation.

It seems odd that the notion of the abject already appears in your early works. The abject is, psychologically speaking, related to the construction of subjectivity, since the formation of subjectivity is to do with language but also with the abject, which is what has been expelled by the body and turned into an alien element. So the abject establishes the limits of the body – which are maintained by social regulation and control – but also those of the subject.

Now, more than ever, art owes much to subjectivity, since contemporaneity emphasises the processes, and therefore the modes and behaviour that, in themselves, affirm subjectivity in a meta-art. In my work, the discourse of subjectivity has been reinforced by a desire to form myself as a person and to introduce a healing process in the artistic work. Look, you can establish all sorts of analogies with the digestive system, and one of them would be the place of desire. The intestine is a hole that we can never fill, just as we can never fulfil desire. I think man invented God in order to fill this immense, eternal void that never gets full and is never satisfied. Maybe that’s why we make art.

In your work there’s always been a search for language that you associate with the search for identity.

Well, my youthful need to find an identity has disappeared. In the end, I understood that identity is a dynamic process of formation. When you manage to articulate a language, you can also articulate the multiple aspects of life. What I did learn intuitively is that to form myself as a person, and to be able to be in the world with all its nastiness and beauty, also meant to form myself as an artist. I was carrying many childhood traumas, because I lived through the war and post-war years. I was the youngest of ten brothers and sisters, in a southern Italian family, and, as I’ve already said in my writings, I was often forgotten in the middle of an air raid. As a child, I’d stay motionless in a corner of the house for hours. Would I be able to escape such a harsh reality? Carmela, my nana, when she saw me in that absentminded state, would call me lovingly and I would have to abandon, half-heartedly, that secret place in my mind. Then I would find it difficult to go back; for me living was a conflict, even as a child. It was all very enriching and terrible at the same time.

Your condition as an immigrant must have affected you, too. You changed countries several times, and every time you had to adapt to different languages and situations. Catherine de Zegher, in Vida Afora/A Life Line, talks about the divided personality of the immigrant. Is this duality, this split, cultural or to do with personality?

Both, I think. In any case, they’re both reflections of my subconscious. One, to do with the duality of the memory of my childhood culture, which I still consider real, as it was described by Norman Douglas in his book Vecchia Calabria.7 The other is to do with a divided identity, the feeling of being a nomad, a pilgrim, of never being able to find a place where one can identify oneself and be complete, as Catherine de Zegher explains. That’s why the search for language was also a healing process for me. Art allowed me to place my feelings, which were invisible, in the world, and to transform this ‘lack’ into compensation through a constant process of elaboration of signs and metaphors. On the other hand, my subconscious visibly legitimised my duality as it really was: natural. This is very clear in the wood engraving ANNA.

Can you talk about the duality of ANNA?

ANNA is a self-portrait in the form of a palindrome. A self-portrait where my name is substituted for my image. It’s an engraving with sharp contrasts, with opposites: black and white, positive and negative. Two white figures, father and mother, pronounce in unison the name ANNA with their big mouths. The word ANNA is a palindrome, it can be read left to right and right to left. The two figures, in the manner of primitive idols, sit from the waist up on a rectangular block resembling a tombstone, a sepulchre, where the name ANNA is also written. The word ANNA can mean the announcement of a birth, or a cry of sorrow for the death of the loved one. Therefore, ANNA means birth and death. It means presence but also absence. Black and white. Positive and negative. Father and mother, masculine and feminine. It is a self-representation with a heavy subjective charge, where many tensions converge. This was the last figurative work I made before leaving for New York in 1968.

Curiously, in 1968, the year when you were granted Brazilian nationality, you moved to New York.

I went to New York because my husband had a grant. It was an important place for art at that time, there was Pop and Conceptual art was just beginning, a parallel situation to that in Brazil. There were many Latin American artists living there, and most of them were self-exiles, not because we were being persecuted by the dictatorships, but because it was very difficult to produce art in that state of repression in Latin America at that time. I felt very uncomfortable. It was like living on crumbs from the rich man’s table, in a country that was supporting the dictatorships in our continent.

You stayed three years?

It was two and a half difficult years. When I arrived, I didn’t speak any English and I had two children aged two and four. I spoke Spanish, the language of the immigrants and the unqualified, and Italian when I went shopping in Little Italy. The Latin American artists we frequented didn’t know I was an artist, maybe because I didn’t describe myself as such. I remember once, in our loft in the Bowery in 1970, a Brazilian newspaper, I can’t remember which, was doing an article on Brazilian artists living in New York at the time. There was Hélio Oiticica, Amílcar de Castro, Ivan Freitas, Roberta Delamonica and, of course, my own husband, Rubens Gerchman. Nobody invited me to take part and I spent the whole time serving coffee.

You can imagine how I felt. The fact that I had participated in exhibitions such as Opinião 66 (Opinion 66) and Nova Objetividade Brasileira in 1967 seemed to count for nothing. Was it my fault? It was obvious that my colleagues and my husband saw me as foreigner. And they were partly right. All I could do was to continue with my project of forming myself as a person and as an artist. To do that, I needed a minimum of economic independence. Because if you are economically dependent, you feel divided inside and that undermines all your ambitions. So I started looking for a job I could do while continuing with my art. I found a textile-printing workshop where I worked illegally, like all immigrants, during the hours when Veronica was at nursery school, and Micael at school. As you can imagine, I had very little time left.

But in 1971, while you were still in New York, you received an artist’s grant, didn’t you?

What happened was that one day Rubens showed some of my wood engravings from the sixties to Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan artist who had come to visit him; and he liked them. He immediately got me a grant from the International Pratt Graphic Center, where he was teaching. They had studios for foreign artists. That’s when I abandoned figuration and started doing metal engravings: Escape Point and Escape Angle. This return to work after such a long period of inactivity helped me to redefine my life. I decided to leave Rubens and to return to Brazil.

Why did you abandon figuration?

It was a natural process. Before doing those engravings, I was writing poems. After that reportage on Brazilian artists, Hélio Oiticica realised I was upset. He told me that if I couldn’t work due to my situation, I should take notes, do some writing. He said I should always carry a notebook in my pocket, that it would help me with my work without the need for a big space. Hélio was always very generous with other artists. ‘James Joyce renewed the English language because he was Irish,’ he said to make me feel better, since my Portuguese was still rather limited. So I started taking notes. They were words/feelings, sketches for short stories, short visual stories. Some would end up in Super-8, and others resulted in the series Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps), which I made from 1971 to 1976. The words, with their weight and meaning, turned into metaphors of feelings in my desire to find answers to the many questions in my personal life. They also helped me to find a way of coming to terms with the military dictatorship on my return to Brazil.

The 1970s, when you went back to Brazil, was a very productive period. You did a series of drawings, but also started using other media, Super-8, photography and installations.

I went back to Brazil and to work. And I had to start from scratch: I had to resume my career, and earn a living without a husband in a society where women were represented by men – I’m talking about the beginning of the seventies, although I’m not sure it has changed that much. I managed to earn a living doing all sorts of jobs, until I began printing textiles for factories in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as a freelance first, and then as a factory employee. I had to juggle this with my work on paper and my research on new media: films on Super-8, performances and installations. It’s amazing how much patience I can have in my work, when I’m so impatient in life.

There is a whole series of works on paper where you cut or tear the paper, then sew it or superimpose it in layers, exposing the reverse, which is normally unseen. The first works where you sew the paper and show the hidden side are a series of engravings.

With the technique of engraving you’re in contact, first with the ‘negative’ matrix, and then with the ‘positive’ paper, and therefore, with the front and back, with the inside and the outside. From the moment I did my first wood engravings, I became intrigued with the back of the paper, that other space that is absent but latent. Then, with the metal engravings, I began to discover all sorts of new possibilities. I started printing on both sides of the paper, front and back, and then, by cutting and folding the paper, I began to incorporate the reverse into the work. I entitled this series Gravuras/Objetos (Engravings/Objects). For me they were important as progenitors of other series of drawings, such as Projetos Construídos (Constructed Objects), and Desenhos/Objetos (Drawings/Objects).

All these series widen the concept of drawing since they don’t use traditional methods.

There is a development at the moment when the paper ceases to be a mere surface that receives the impression of the engraving or drawing, and becomes matter, a body. A material with which to construct and dramatise, as in Projetos Construídos, Desenhos/Objetos and Livros/Objetos 1971–76  (Books/Objects). These are hybrid works, where the traditional elements of drawing coexist with cuts, slashes and sewing thread.

In these series we begin to see something of what will become your trademark in your later series of drawings: the importance of the gesture, the action, the process. The gestures here are slashing or cutting, and then sewing.

The gesture is the manifestation of what is inside. Again, in the gesture we find a copulation between the inside and the outside, similar to the relation empty-full. I hear myself using the word ‘copulation’, but I’m not using it in a sexual sense, rather in the sense of its synonyms: to couple, to join… I’m using this word because it hints at something that is produced, at the transformed fruit, as in a work of art.

Every time someone mentions your Desenhos/Objetos, they quote the work of Lucio Fontana as a reference. Did you know Fontana’s work?

In the seventies, I hardly knew it. But even if you don’t physically know the work of an artist, you hear what other people say about it. What my work and Fontana’s have in common is their research into the surface of the support, and that’s why they quote him. But my work from the seventies, where the sheet of paper ceases to be a surface and becomes a body, is very much indebted to the practices of Brazilian Neo-Concretism. What I seek is to poetise the fullness of the void. This is evident in works where the sewing thread literally works in the gaps, as in Linha Solta (Loose Line), 1975, where the sheets of paper, as the layers of an onion, are slices of space that indicate the existence of other invisible planes, on the inside, towards the infinite.

The void in your work does not represent the ‘absence of being’. On the contrary, it is an active void. You talk about this in your Desenhos/Objetos from the seventies, but also in the sculptures from the nineties where you use the mould as the ‘shadow of the other’.

I think we all have a strange and undefined nostalgia for the void. A previous memory brings back something we think we know. Could it be the memory of our mother’s womb? I remember the nostalgia I felt as a child, an incomprehensible desire to return, the nostalgia for a place. Later on I recognised this nostalgia for a place of the mind as the drive that guided the construction of the Desenhos/Objetos during the seventies. The sewing thread, with its trajectory across the layers of torn paper, insinuates and represents fullness, strengthening the fascination with the infinite. Moreover, life is renewed in containers such as the holes in the earth, the uterus, and so we learn that these two realities, empty and full, are one and the same. This became clear to me when working in sculpture cast from moulds, where there is a constant copulation between the full and the empty, the empty and the full. The positive generates the negative, which in turn generates the positive, and a mould preserves the memory of the positive that originated it. Here, the void is the memory, the ‘shadow of the other’, the previous presence.

In both cases, in the Desenhos/Objetos of the seventies and the sculptures made from a mould in the nineties, there is an interest in the space that is not visible, the hidden space. One of the constants in your work, which is not linear or chronological, neither in its interests nor in the media it uses, is that a theme can appear in some of your works and then reappear years later in a different media. Therefore, when seen in its totality, what appears is a rhizomatic structure, where the works are like semiotic steps, loaded with gestures, perceptions, attitudes, interests. These steps, the works, establish transversal connections between themselves that create a web, so that the meanings, between one work and the other, reverberate and grow. We’ve talked about your interest in the hidden spaces, but equally we could talk about seriality, topologies, the same and the other, etc.

That’s right. During all these years, my work has grown in a spiral sense, turning round some central points, which at times move away only to come closer again. I mean, the work always returns to the points of interest that feed it, or to the basis that drives it forward. For example, the humble aspects of everyday life: food, manual work, drawing, sewing, modelling. Starting with these, and moved by desire and need, I create metaphors of the body: digestion, defecation, the inside and the outside. Also through the body, the political can be manifested: a clear example of this can be found in the photographs of the series Fotopoemaçãos from the seventies. Another reflection of the interrelations between myself and the others are the questions referring to maps, frontiers, the here and there, territoriality and extra-territoriality. And finally, there is the interest in the big and transcendental things: the search for totality and the infinite through repetition and seriality.

Your films from the seventies, such as Fotopoemaçãos and some actions, are a reaction to the political climate and the dictatorship in Brazil, but as in all your works, they also contain many other interrelated meanings. Which is the first film you made?

In-Out (Antropofagia) (In-Out (anthropophagy)), in 1973. The title refers to the Anthropophagous Manifesto of the Modern Art Week of 22. The word antropofagia has a mythological meaning in Brazilian culture. Our history of anthropology says that the Indians used to eat their enemies, they incorporated them with the aim of dominating them. This is the perfect meaning for this Super-8: to eat the repressive organs of the dictatorship, the enemies of freedom at that time. Meanwhile, as you rightly say, there are other meanings. There is an attempt by a female mouth to articulate words, the discovery of language. And also an attempt to establish a dialogue with a male mouth. It has no linear history.

Through editing the images acquire meaning, but not a specific one. We can change their position in the process of editing and the result will still be the same, precisely because it doesn’t follow the linear logic of language. A series of images and their meanings follow each other, they construct a structure of meanings that expresses emotions. The structure of the film is combinatory, like a game of chess. I have followed the same type of editing structure in all my films and videos. In a way, we find this same structure of mutant combinations in the series of drawings that I made from 1993 onwards, such as Marcas da Gota (Drip Marks), Vestígios (Vestiges) and also in my sculptures/installations.

I’d like you to talk about the collective happening Mitos Vadios (Empty Myths), from the end of the seventies, in which you participated with two works, Monumento à Fome and Estado Escatológico. They refer to the two extremes of digestion, food and defecation.

I went back to the subject of digestion, in reference to the social problems and the eternal hunger in the world. It was 1978. The title, Mitos Vadios, refers to Mitos e Magia (Myths and Magic), the theme of the I Latin American Biennial in São Paulo, which was the first important event after the dictatorship and the advent of democracy in the country. We artists were against this theme. How could they talk about Mitos e Magia after so many years of repression in Brazil and Latin America? To show our disapproval, the artists, led by Hélio Oiticica and Edwaldo Granado, occupied a disused plot of land in calle Augusta, which was the street with all the smart shops in São Paulo. I took part with Estado Escatológico, an irony on the consumerist pretensions of the rich. It consisted of various types of toilet paper hanging on the wall, from the most expensive to the cheapest, including pages of newspaper and leaves. The other piece was Monumento à Fome: two sacks of 30 kilos, one full of rice, the other full of beans, the two staple foods in Brazil. They were placed on a table tied with a black ribbon, the symbol of grieving. I remember that the artist Antonio Emmanuel said the work was static and museographic because it was on a table. He wanted to destroy it, and since I resisted him he attacked me physically [laughs]. I think he was drunk.

In the installation Arroz e Feijão, you refer to digestion again, although ultimately it is about transformation, of the food we eat, and the seeds that germinate on the plates.

In 1979, the military finally allowed the country to open up to democracy. It was a moment of readjustment, but the country was far from achieving equilibrium. I installed Arroz e Feijão for the first time in the Artist’s Space in Botafogo, a place lent by the Alliance Française of Rio de Janeiro. The space was an initiative of a group of artists from Rio – Ana Linnemann, Amélia Toledo, Luiz Ferreira, Maria do Carmo Secco, Maria Luisa Saddi, Mauro Kleiman, Osmar Fonseca and Rogério Luz. The aim was to promote debates and exhibitions at such a hopeful time for the nation. Arroz e Feijão was the first show there. It consisted of a large table covered in a black cloth that made it look like a catafalque, set for a meal. On the white plates, seeds of rice and beans germinated in the soil. In the four corners of the room, there were four tables covered in white cloths where rice and beans were actually being eaten. When we finished eating we started debating on the work proposal, art, the current events in the country, etc. To talk about the stomach, about hunger, is to start a cycle of renovation, because this is where life struggles against death. The seeds germinate and bring hope, despite the fact that a third of the world population eats more than the other two thirds, who at times literally starve to death.

In 1981 you did the performance Entrevidas (Between Lives), which evokes the tensions between life and death. Eros and Thanatos.

In contemporary art, performances and installations have an immanent subversion, in the sense that they strengthen our need to redo the repressions. In Entrevidas, this is literally so, since it was a response to the repression during the dictatorship. It’s not surprising that this type of work may feel strange and indigestible.

What do you mean ‘redo the repressions’? To re-enact them?

Yes. I mean that installations and performances in contemporary art articulate themselves in that mythical ancestral space of the ritual, while at the same time appearing like a children’s game: it’s what is called fazer de conta in Portuguese, to pretend. Here, the artist works with reality, with the real world; exposes it, turns it upside down, showing new dimensions, new truths. The artist exorcises and subverts the repressions.

In the performance I did outside my studio in calle Cardoso Junior in 1981, and later in the installation of the same title, the feet walking among hundreds of eggs lying in the street are a menace, a danger for the eggs. So the experience is one of tension and fear. This is what I mean by ‘redoing the repressions’. You can build an analogy between the repression and menace of the feet and the dictatorship. In this work, although we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to choose between life and death, life is reaffirmed through the symbol of the egg. The installation is a poetic act – it subverts meanings, and it allows for different readings.

In 1982 you spent the whole year travelling.

I needed a break so I could go forward. I managed to get some money and travelled to Italy, New York and Caracas, the places where I had lived before. I was looking for something that didn’t exist any more. The Anna from the past was dead; she only lived in my memory. After a whole year travelling, I went back to Rio de Janeiro. Finally, I realised how important Brazil was for me and managed to find my own territory. I am a Brazilian artist.

So once you accepted that Brazil, following the principles of Antropofagia, had devoured you, you moved to Argentina in 1984.

When I went back to Brazil, I met the Argentinean artist Victor Grippo and ended up in a relationship again after so many years. We lived between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. I started working at a slower pace and had very little to do with the art world. Something similar had happened after my first marriage. But slowing down and having a break can be very regenerating, when you start again you realise that you’d been in a state of gestation.

You say having a break can be very regenerating…

Yes, but you don’t realise until later. Somehow I was aware, since long before I went travelling in 1982, that I was going through a crisis in my artistic work. I kept wondering how I could do an art that would help me avoid the anxiety, the unease and the speed of contemporaneity. An art that could express a world in favour of life, a space for the future, a platform for optimism. To express life and nature in a creative and integrating act.

During those years in Argentina, you were painting. Was it for the first time?

Yes and no. I’d done some painting at school. A bit like in mythological tales, where the character is lost and goes back to the beginning. I did the same. I restarted with a traditional support. I spent days in front of the same canvas. I would paint the shape of zero, ‘0’, the ovule, or rather suggest it, because it could hardly be seen. I constructed and deconstructed the image on the canvas in dialectical movements – some brushstrokes paint the image and others make it disappear. Then I would start again, and so on. I was working with a duality that made me despair because I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I would have liked to come out with a definitive answer. Like Fontana when he called his series of oval-shaped paintings Fine di Dio (The End of God), a phrase that leaves no room for doubt. For me, the ‘0’ was like that Hindu saying: ‘The Aura of nothingness, before realisation and the root of diversity.’ Imagine how mixed up I was!

That ‘0’ suggests the egg. Do you still have those paintings?

I finished very few paintings, but that working ‘with nothingness’, which might have seemed alienating, expanded my consciousness. I left that pictorial activity with a sense of renewal. Only when I started working with clay, a year later in Rio de Janeiro, did I realise how important this pictorial work had been for me.

On your return to Rio de Janeiro in 1989, you started working with clay. Are your wall sculptures Nova Paisagem (New Landscapes) your first clay works?

I started a series of sculptures using the traditional method with a mould. First I model the clay, then I make the mould, then cast a positive in plaster or cement. I’m going back to territorial questions, but this time through the tactile.

Do you start making cartographies again, as in the Mapas Mentais?

Of course, every time I’m lost, I think about territory. Territory as a way of recognising where I am. A lump of clay on a table is already a topology. This is what guided me while I was making those objects that I would then paint in oil. Look how the oval shape of the paintings reappears in these desert reveries that evoke the primeval, the genesis. They seem on the edge of language, between nature and culture.

The installation De Vita Migrare Anno MCMXCI, which you presented at the São Paulo Biennial of that year, also evokes extra-territoriality, man and the cosmos.

The title in Latin literally means ‘to migrate from life, year 1991’. Migration and death are metaphors in themselves. I presented this installation just after I’d finished the series Nova Paisagem, and it is also a landscape that suggests spatial relativity, a game between the notions of small and large, inside and outside, territoriality – here – and extra-territoriality – there. In the same way as the wood engraving ANNA signalled the end of representation, this installation marked a dividing line with what was to follow, in the nineties. I emigrated from my own language, at a psychological and mental level, and started a new phase in my work.

Can you talk about this installation?

It was a one-hundred-square-metre space, enclosed within very high walls and with two entry doors. The floor was covered in water – it looked like a mirror – and in the middle of the space there was a dwelling, a house. A gangway built over the water connected the two doors. The high walls were reflected downwards, on the water, creating a very deep well, and when the spectators walked on the gangway, over the water, they felt suspended, outside time. On a symbolic level, the house represents our inner and mental dwelling. The four elements – earth, air, water and fire – take part in the installation. In the middle of the water there is a stone with a flame, fire. The spectator, through an opening in the front wall of the dwelling, can see the Earth inside, filmed by one of the Apollo 11-17  astronauts during his first journey into space. The image alternated with a news programme on the 1991 Iraq War.

You said that the series Nova Paisagem evokes the primeval. There is also nostalgia for the origins in De Vita Migrare, although more transcendental. This evocation of the primeval, this nostalgia for the origins, reappears in all your works in clay.

When we lay our hands on that wet mass of clay, a whole cosmic vision appears with all the archetypes of creation. Clay is the perfect prototype of matter, and it contains the possibility of form and invites us to look for it. Meanwhile, form organises amorphous matter, it sets limits on it. We are faced with a paradox. The form that organises matter is also the beginning of death… What do you think? All these thoughts on materials where going round and round in my head when I started casting sculpture with moulds.

You seem to be talking about limits again. All your work is a negotiation of dichotomies – inside-outside, pure-impure, empty-full – and they all reconnect in a process of transformation. Now you mention form-amorphous as a metaphor for life-death. It seems you’re evocating questions relating to the individual and his or her limits through the materials.

An artist is like an alchemist, who in seeking to transform metal into gold, ends up transmuting his own being. The process of artistic work is a constant state of construction and deconstruction, which to me represents an active state of transforming meditation. On the other hand, the territory of art is a mirror of life, and it is possible to establish analogies with all the physical and psychological aspects of life. That’s why life and death are present in De Vita Migrare and in the installations Terra Modelada (Modelled Earth).

You started making sculpture in a traditional way, with a mould, but working with basic forms, minimal.

The methodology of clay – to knead, cut and compact – is an important part of the sculpture vocabulary. I do the same thing with the archaic method of ceramics called cobritas y rollitos (little snakes and rolls). These are common procedures because it is what the material demands. But I incorporate it in my work and I make it visible.

Is Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil (One, No One, One Hundred Thousand) the first work where a simple form is repeated serially? Where there is repetition and difference?

Yes. Basic forms produced by hand, identical and different, are added to the body of the sculpture. The same as in nature, they don’t repeat themselves, there is difference in sameness. Like the Pirandello play the title of which I borrowed, Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, this is a work about multiplicity that questions the notion of identity. When forms are repeated, next to each other, they affirm and negate one another in their sameness and difference. In a public square you are one and no one, because your identity is dissolved and you become one hundred thousand.

After this, you begin what you call sculptures/installations, which are a series of sculptures, cast with a mould, but which remain open because you keep adding and subtracting parts, the segments. For example, you were talking about São (Saint).

The series of sculptures/installations that I began in 1993 are still in progress, unfinished. There are series made with modules or segments in positive, and others made with the negative, the mould. These last ones are made with the mould, which is normally discarded in the process of sculpture, but which here acquires the status of a work of art. São is a series in positive that so far has over seventy modules or segments. Each segment has its own mould, which is unique.

These sculptures/installations are similar to some primary biological forms where, when one part of the body is lost, it grows back again. The segments can be divided, subdivided, removed from the main body of the installation and used as an independent sculpture. Then, one day, all the segments could be put together again to form that main body. Moreover, we could also add the new segments we’ve been making since. The installation will thus have an ever-changing structure, acquiring new configurations in every space.

The mould, which is normally discarded in the sculptural process, acquires the status of a work of art in its own right in your work. Do the titles you give them – É o Que Falta (It’s What is Missing), A Sombra do Outro (The Shadow of the Other), Ausentes (The Absent) – allude to the memory of the sculptural matrix?

I’m interested in the working process, the preparation, what happens before the work is finished. In my imaginary, titles feed on the work’s execution, but in the meantime they allude to something real since I’m working with the empty and the full. A mould is an empty space that used to contain the positive when the positive and the negative were conjoined. In fact, A Sombra do Outro refers to the absent positive.

Your work is not explicitly feminine or feminist, but the narration is clearly that of a female voice. You talk about the everyday, food, the memory of the matrix, the tactile, the proliferation of life through repetition and difference, etc.

It is a reflection on my relationship with the world, with my likes and dislikes. Working hands are very present in my imaginary. I refer to them in several of my writings and they figure in a Super-8 film of 1982 and a video of 1997. There are also the works on the ‘hand that makes’, which relate to the sculptures/installations and to the installations Terra Modelada. And there are other motivations that could be seen as metaphors of the female body, the inside and the outside, and which relate to the positive and the sculptural mould. But the metaphors of the body are unconscious, since the work wants to be in a real space far removed from anything allegorical. So the associations with sexual and bodily aspects are the interpretations of others, of the viewers. On the other hand, in my earlier writings are clearly formulated images that leave no room for doubt, as in the poem Tu + Eu (You + Me), where I say: ‘Sinto as paredes do meu oco na presença do outro’ (I feel the walls of my hollowness in the presence of the other).

I think both your writings and your work reflect a relational subjectivity that goes out to meet the other, and that is more common in the work of women artists.

This reminds me of your first visit to my studio, when I told you that the difference between the work of male artists and the work of women artists could be interpreted by comparing their orgasms. You remember? I hope I’m not generalising too much here, but the male orgasm goes in a straight line right to the end, while women are lucky that their orgasms go in a spiral sense, with the possibility of multiple re-starts. This circular, spinning motion can be compared to the facility women have to express their affection for what lives ‘between’ things. And since for women small can be large, their choices are not hierarchical, they’re simply related. Besides, we have a disposition to sacrifice, which has been socially imposed on women because traditionally they take care of others. I don’t believe we have to sacrifice ourselves for others, rather to be with others with affection, as Tarkovski says in Sculpting in Time, a book that has greatly influenced me.

In 1994, you began making large installations with unfired clay, which are ephemeral. When did you decide to discard the mould?

It became very difficult to transport the large quantities of segments that make up the sculptures/installations for an exhibition. And since one of the most important aspects of these works is the sensorial feeling of ones hands on the clay, I decided to discard the mould. I opted for manual work, the work of happy hands, moved by will and desire and away from the supremacy of formal vision. Besides, working without a mould allowed me to make more segments in less time and to concentrate on the installations. It was a liberation, as was the subject of the permanence of the work!

Besides the subjects of food and defecation that we have already mentioned, these ephemeral installations allude to something primordial. You use basic movements of the hand, which are common to everyone, and which evoke in our memory a vital impulse in everyday life towards gesture, repetition, work and tiredness.

José Gil, a Portuguese philosopher, says that a body carries the legacy of the dead and the social imprints of the ritual. Our hands carry the memory of the history of humanity’s work since the first gesture of our ancestors, when the hands became the first working tools, giving rise to language and the domination of matter. Since the actions of the hand are immutable in time, the primordial and the ritual are relived in this work. These installations are based on repetition and difference, and on supporting the ‘principle’ of work.

Faced with the mounds of segments made by tiredness – a satisfying tiredness – the audience can identify with their own daily work.

You said earlier that in the eighties you were searching for an art that would help you forget the contemporary malaise. I think these installations are part of that search, especially at a time when, as Agamben points out, everyday life in a large metropolis has lost track of experience. Your installations evoke that transforming capacity of experience.

It is true that contemporary man is incapable of translating everyday life, which is the raw material of experience, into experience, and that’s what makes the here and now so unbearable. But I want to be optimistic about the future, and to believe that what is permanent in the human, its need for transformation, will prevail. For now, I spare myself, I protect myself, I take refuge in the memory of that first working of the hand, reviving the memory of knowledge, not of the alienating work of industrialisation, or of the virtual, but of those first working actions of the hand that are common to us all since the beginning of humanity.

Deleuze says that artists develop ‘percepts’, which are combinations of sensations and perceptions that survive those who experience them. The coincidence between your ‘percepts’, and the concepts developed by Deleuze, like difference and repetition, is amazing. Had you read Deleuze?

I read him in 1997 because my son Micael introduced me to him. First I read Difference and Repetition, and I felt it was very close and very intimate. Then I read his other books. To me it is clear that, intuitively, I have developed a work that is very close to his philosophy. On the other hand, his philosophy is very close to life.

Your work has also been related to Eva Hesse. Did you know her work? Did you see it when you lived in New York from 1968 to 1971?

I can’t remember if I saw her work when I was living in New York, because at that time ‘I lived yet did not live in me’, with two small children, without any help or time. I saw her work years later, in publications and exhibitions. There are confluences between her work and mine; they are rather formal, like a certain phallic aspect that is visible in our work – at times Hesse seems to have a certain phallic irony – and also in the use of the series and the metaphors of the body. But as I said before, I’m indebted to Brazilian art. Now they’re showing works of Hesse that were found in her studio, made from 1966 to 1969. These precarious works reveal Hesse’s wish to arrive at a non-art, a question that was in the minds of many artists at that time. For instance, in 1966, Lygia Clark was working on her precarious and sensorial objects, in works like Natureza (Estrutura cega) [Nature (Blind Structure)], 1966–67; Pedra e ar (Stone and Air), 1966; Respire conmigo (Breath with Me), 1966; Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue with Hands), 1966. This last one consists of a Moebius elastic band tied to the wrists of the participants, and these participants establish a dialogue with the movements of their hands. I mention these works by Lygia because, together with ‘the nostalgia of the body’ that she talked about so much, I think they really are the origin of the work I did after 1992, when I understood that the phenomena produced by the materials with which I work, as well as my own body, are the co-authors of my work. A good example of what I’m saying is the series Codificações Matéricas (Matter Codifications), where the movements of the hands on the paper, the drop of ink and the force of gravity are the mediators in the realisation of the drawing. It is obvious that, formally, they have nothing to do with Lygia’s work, but they share some basic premises.

And yet you do see a relation between your ephemeral installations and Arte Povera.

The use of worthless, ephemeral materials, and the emphasis on aspects of the ritual and on manual work, mean that there is something in common between these installations and Arte Povera. Also with the metaphors that can be established with the pasta fatta in casa (home-made pasta), and with the relationship between the preparation of food and the fiesta and the ritual, which transform elementary human situations into signs. On the other hand, when the segments of clay/earth are laid down on the floor, there is an analogy with the ploughed fields, and with the marks of man and his culture.

In the drawings of the nineties, as in those of the seventies, you don’t use traditional methods either. These series, which are always open, are elaborated with repeated gestures or actions, like moving the paper so the drop of ink sliding on it can do the drawing, as in Marcas da Gota and Codificações Matéricas; or sewing giving priority to the tactile, looking only occasionally, while you draw on both sides of the paper, as in Indícios (Traces); or to elaborate ‘families’ of drawings using the common marks that you leave while painting on Japanese paper, as in Vestígios. In all these series of drawings, the result is as important as the process.

What I do is to keep the work process in the work. When I’m drawing like that I think of seriality, and I realise that it is to do with basic tensions: one brings the other, announces the next one, which is repeated but will always be another.

Since 1993, when I began the series of work on the ‘hands that make’, and until now, I have opted for the same work methodology in each series, the same materials and dimensions, so the series remain open and unfinished. It is the same with the series of sculptures and the series of installations with modelled earth. Each new piece already contains the morphological possibility of the next one, and so on. These series of drawings are defined by their methodology. They are structures that combine multiple possibilities. This same structure of mutant combinations reappears in all the films and videos I have made so far.

I sometimes think that by working like this, keeping the series open, I have found a way of escaping the tyranny of the new, since the ‘hands that make’ never repeat themselves, thanks to the vital tensions of the gesture.

I’d like you to talk about your last series of sculptures, Emanados (Emanations), which are transparent organic forms that you produce by blowing glass.

I’ve always thought of drawing as the product of a vital breath, for it is a very simple way of making art. Perhaps this is because I relate drawing to the mythology of creation, when God created Adam out of clay, and gave him life by blowing on him. Beautiful, don’t you think? So I’ve always loved drawing, it gives me an immense sense of freedom: to breathe and to draw, to draw and to breathe, like going from the lungs to the paper in a series of movements. I’ve always felt drawing was like a pneumatic being, a product of breathing, immensely vital, on the border between life and death. All these ideas kept turning in my head until 2007, when I finally made works where the principal media was blowing: Emanados. I made some myself, but most of them are made by professionals whose breath I guided like a conductor. The liquid balls of incandescent glass soon become simple oval forms, fragile, like life itself. They are containers of vital breath.

In one of your last videos, Um momento, por favor (One Moment, Please), you use your own image, something you had already done in the seventies when you made the Fotopoeamaçãos. You said earlier that in those pictures the political climate at that time was reflected through the body. How do you see Um momento, por favor?

The photos from the seventies are an emotional response to the political climate in Brazil at that time, but I think that Um momento, por favor also has political connotations. It is a visible and audible portrait, a self-representation in movement, made in parts, a face. The parts are corporal cartographies in movement, traces of worn flesh. It is an anti-erotic bodily space, where matter is revealed in all its tiredness. In this territory there is no room for mythification, or for lies, since the emotional galvanises the work with its own aesthetic. It has a great emotive and subjective charge that is shown to the audience unashamedly. The audience are facing a non-aestheticised subjectivity. My voice, which accompanies the Neapolitan songs of Roberto Murolo, is an internal text of the body; these are the imprints of a journey of the being through its own being. This work doesn’t follow the social and conventional demands for corporal perfection. It is a self-portrait that turns its own skin into a map.

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Endnotes:

1Held at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro – MAM/RJ – in April 1967, and organised by a group of artists and art critics, the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) brought together all the different national avant-garde movements –Concrete Art, Neo-Concretism, New Figurations – around the idea of a ‘new objectivity’. The creation of objects of various types, as well as the defence of specifically Brazilian solutions that did not copy what was being produced in international centres, defined the central spirit of the exhibition, which was a kind of summary of the different paths taken by Brazilian art. A compromise with political positions, the rejection of easel painting, the bodily, tactile and visual participation of the viewer, these were the basic ingredients of the new objectivity.

2 O Cordel is the popular literature typical of the northeast of Brazil. They are narrative poems illustrated with woodcuts, printed in the form of small booklets and hung from a string to be sold. The themes may be traditional or based on current events. They can be humorous, too.

3 The Anthropophagous Manifesto, written by Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), was published in May 1928 in the first issue of the recently founded magazine Revista de Antropofagia, a vehicle for the diffusion of Brazilian anthropophagous culture. With its metaphorical language, full of poetic and humorous aphorisms, the Manifesto became the theoretical basis for this movement, which questioned Brazil’s cultural dependence. The apex of early Modernism, the anthropophagous period was officially inaugurated during the Semana de Arte Moderno (Week of Modern Art), 1922. It highlighted the violent contradiction between two cultures – primitive culture (Amerindian and African) and Latin culture (of European descent) – which form the basis of Brazilian culture, through the transformation of the savage element into an aggressive instrument. It is not a question of harmonious, spontaneous assimilation between the two. On the contrary, primitivism now appears as a sign of critically devouring the other, the modern and civilised.

4 The text Declaração de Principios Básicos da Nova Vanguarda (Declaration of the Basic Principles of the New Avant-garde) accompanied the exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity. It was signed by Hélio Oiticica, Antonio Dias, Carlos Vergara, Rubens Gerchman, Lygia Pape, Glauco Rodrigues, Carlos Zilio, Mário Pedrosa, Maurício Nogueira Lima, among others.

5 The Semana de Arte Moderno was part of the celebrations of the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922. It was presented as the first collective public manifestation in the history of Brazilian culture, in favour of a new modern spirit and against the conservative art and culture that had been prevalent in the country since the nineteenth century. From 13 to 18 February 1922, a festival was held at the Teatro Municipal, São Paulo, with an exhibition of over one hundred works and three literary-musical evenings. Without a defined aesthetic programme, the Week can be seen, in the context of the history of Brazilian art, more as a rejection of the current conservatism in literary, musical and visual production, than as a constructive event with specific proposals for the creation of a new language. What united all the participants, according to the two principal ideologists Mário and Oswald de Andrade, was the negation of all ‘devotion to the past’ and the rejection of imported art and literature.

6 The Manifesto of 1959, signed by Amílcar de Castro (1920–2002), Ferreira Gullar (1930–), Franz Weissmann (1911–2005), Lygia Clark (1920–1988), Lygia Pape (1927–2004), Reynaldo Jardim (1926–) and Theon Spanudis (1915–), denounces Concrete Art for its ‘dangerous rationalist exacerbation’. Against the constructive orthodoxies and geometrical dogmatism, Neo-Concrete followers defend the freedom to experiment, the return to expressive intentions and the rescue of subjectivity. The recuperation of the creative possibilities of the artist – no longer considered as an inventor of industrial prototypes – and the effective incorporation of the viewer – who, by touching and handling the works, becomes part of them – are presented as the recuperation of humanism. For Neo-Concrete artists, art is not an industrial production, but a means of expression anchored in experience.

7 ‘…There is a curious echo of this description in the graphic portrayal of Calabria made by Norman Douglas at the beginning of the last century. In his book published in 1917, Douglas says that the Calabrese talk of figs as black and white, when we know that they are not black or white. Olives are also black or white. Stones are black or white. Wine is black or white. Snakes are black or white. They don’t have the slightest notion of what blue means, Douglas continues, probably because there are very few compact blue things in nature. Max Muller claims that the idea of blue is a modern achievement of the human race. Therefore, a cloudless sky is seen as “propio bianco” (pure white). Once the writer asked a boy what colour the sea in front of him was and he replied: “It’s like an almost dead colour,” when in fact it was a brilliant sapphire blue.’ Norman Douglas, Old Calabria (The Marlboro Press: Marlboro, Vermont), 1993 (1915), pp. 49–50.

O amor se faz Revolucionário

Diego Sileo

Anna Maria Maiolino nasce in Italia, a Scalea, Calabria, il 20 maggio del 1942 da madre ecuadoriana e padre italiano. È la più giovane di dieci figli. Inizia a disegnare alla Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Cristóbal Rojas di Caracas, Venezuela, dove era emigrata con i suoi genitori nel 1954. Successivamente, nel 1960, la famiglia Maiolino si sposta a Rio de Janeiro, Brasile, e anche qui Anna Maria si dedica a studi artistici, dando così inizio alla sua lunga carriera d’artista. Disegnare era come voler allontanare se stessa dai ricordi di un’infanzia trascorsa in un paese lacerato dalla guerra e liberarsi dai demoni interiori che la distruzione bellica aveva lasciato in lei. Da qui Maiolino inizia a spingere se stessa verso la creazione di una sua dimensione personale, che sembra, sin dagli esordi, voler sfuggire al controllo totale della ragione, provando quindi a raggiungere uno stadio sublime e spirituale in cui trovare il potenziale per l’umana liberazione. La caratteristica però più eminente di questa innata poetica metafisica di Maiolino è il suo rimanere sempre ancorata a terreni razionalisti, rivelando una forte resistenza all’anti-umanesimo. Sebbene la fantasia di Maiolino attinga le proprie risorse in spazi nemmeno visibili all’uomo, è pur vero che il suo sentiero narrativo si origina da enti reali. Luoghi geograficamente determinati sono utilizzati dall’artista per smuovere forze senza tempo. Nonostante si spingano a descrivere abissi sconosciuti, i suoi lavori prendono sempre avvio da un’ambientazione realistica. Le sue fantasie oniriche non nascono dal nulla, ma hanno bisogno, per mettersi in moto, dello stimolo rappresentato da una scena, da un oggetto o um evento reale. Il mondo che la circonda è il suo teatro d’azione, il libro da cui trae la sua ispirazione. Ogni luogo, delineato spazialmente e temporalmente, diviene il supporto per l’intrusione di forze atopiche ed acroniche.

Attirata dal fascino sperimentale della scena culturale brasiliana degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, nel 1967 Maiolino firma il manifesto della Nova Objetividade Brasileira. Di lì a poco le sue creazioni cominciano a proliferare e a debordare, alimentando così le sue inclinazioni e le sue visioni d’artista. In molti suoi lavori dell’epoca composizioni o immagini astratte evocano parti anatomiche, opere in cui il corpo umano si disfa, si filtra, si trasforma. Il corpo si presenta nell’opera di Maiolino come l’immagine della sua esistenza, come un nudo di significati grazie al quale l’artista esprime le modalità dela sua vita. Immagine nascosta di sofferenze insondabili e di una profonda angoscia esistenziale; immagine che si apre per lasciare che lo sguardo dell’altro penetri verso il suo interno. È attraverso questa apertura, attraverso questa sottile fessura che Maiolino tenta di entrare in una realtà di affezioni e sensazioni intime, in cui parla della sua vita di donna e di artista in un mondo a lei ostile e socialmente contrario (destino comune a molte artiste). Tutto ciò è espresso in scene spesso oniriche e al limite della “surrealtà”, dove però il corpo è l’attore principale. Il corpo è l’oggetto per il quale Anna Maria Maiolino trasforma il mondo in gesto grafico o pittorico. Qual è questo corpo che sembra ossessionarla a tal punto che parlare della sua opera è come parlare di un regno corporeo o di una corporeità che va oltre uma storia personale? Per Maiolino le relazioni che esistono tra la creazione nell’arte e la vita o, se si vuole, tra il fare arte e l’esperienza corporea, sono due termini di uno stesso segmento, intercambiabili l’uno con l’altro, dato che – in pochi altri artisti come in Maiolino – la vita e l’arte non sono che una stessa cosa. Maiolino si identifica così strettamente con la sua opera che arriva a trasformarla in una sorta di suo alter ego. È in questa straordinaria impresa che Maiolino porta a compimento con la massima efficacia la fusione tra opera d’arte e artista. La sua reiterazione del segno offre un punto di ancoraggio, una base sicura che non rivela altro dell’artista se non se stessa. A certe nature, discrete e prudenti, tale ripetizione si propone come un rifugio, indispensabile a volte alla maturazione e all’accumulo primitivo delle forze; ad altre, più impetuose e più sicure, permette di apparire in modo decisivo e riconoscibile nello spazio pubblico, pur lasciando aperta e disponibile l’intera gamma degli interventi avvenire.

Dopo essersi trasferita con il marito a New York, nel 1968, Maiolino inizia a sperimentare diversi linguaggi artistici, sviluppando da qui in avanti un’attività straordinaria e unica. Facendo ricorso a un’ampia gamma di strategie con una precisione simile a quella della ricerca scientifica, e anticipando la retorica del minimalismo americano, ciò che accumuna Maiolino ad artisti come Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape è l’indagine delle proprietà materiali e visuali della superficie, della luce e del colore, nel tentativo di creare un’arte che sia antimetaforica, uniforme e priva di qualunque riferimento che non sia a se stessa. Nelle invenzioni di Maiolino e degli altri artisti brasiliani suoi compagni di viaggio in quegli anni l’immateriale e il materiale si affrontano sistematicamente. Sono tutti autori di opere che ci parlano non tanto di assoluto che si materializza e si fa visibile, non tanto di un’epifania, di una manifestazione di una qualche assolutezza, qui e ora nel concreto della materia; esse ci parlano, al contrario, di una traccia che rivela l’occultarsi, il risalire verso un infinito punto di fuga della materia, che afferma il vuoto, forse addirittura il nulla. Parlano  dell’assolutamente altro rispetto all’epifania dell’assoluto nella materia. È come se facessero cenno a un movimento che va in  direzione contraria, opposta, rispetto al movimento della rivelazione dell’assoluto nel supporto materiale, nel quadro, nell’icona; parlano non della manifestazione dell’invisibile nel visibile, ma del ritrovamento del visibile nell’invisibile. Dunque il nulla e il vuoto. Plotino, che su questi concetti ha riflettuto a lungo, distingueva tra  il nulla che sta in alto e il nulla che sta in basso.1 Il nulla che sta in basso è il nulla  overo, misero, dell’annientamento, che ci imprigiona in una rete, è la necessità. Il nulla che sta in alto è proprio il contrario, è la libertà, è il fatto di non aver schemi, qualcosa che si impone a noi e ci domina. Ed è proprio l’artista a farci provare la possibilità di questa più alta esperienza del nulla. L’artista di fronte all’opera s’interroga, cerca di capire che cosa deve fare. Quella sola cosa, quel gesto, quel tratto che poggia sul nulla, ed ecco che il cerchio si chiude. Quali possono essere dunque degli illustri referenti di questi artisti? Probabilmente, a parer mio, Lucio Fontana. Perché non c’è nulla di nuovo nel gesto di Fontana, ma c’è l’essenziale: egli ha saputo ricapitolare ciò che – per esempio – Maiolino cerca di fare con i suoi disegni, ossia predisporsi verso l’opera sapendosi guidata non da un criterio oggettivo, da un principio, da un canone, da un ordine, bensì sapendosi guidata semplicemente da qualcosa.

Di ritorno in Brasile, nel 1971, Maiolino si ritrova coinvolta negli orrori della dittatura e realizza i suoi lavori in un disinibito percorso di azioni e di immagini in cui convivono le più disparate sensazioni, le emozioni, il disagio, la repulsione, la sgradevolezza e il rifiuto. Ed è qui che per la prima volta Maiolino definisce e sviluppa la sua immagine corporea. Con l’espressione “immagine del corpo umano”2 Paul Schilder definiva il quadro mentale che facciamo del nostro corpo, vale a dire il modo in cui il corpo appare a noi stessi. Noi riceviamo delle sensazioni, vediamo parti della superficie del nostro corpo, abbiamo impressioni tattili, termiche, dolorose, sensazioni provenienti dalle innervazioni muscolari e sensazioni di origine viscerale. Ma al di là di tutto questo vi è l’esperienza immediata dell’esistenza di un’unita corporea, che, se è vero che viene percepita, è d’altra parte qualcosa di più di una percezione, è uno “schema del nostro corpo” o “schema corporeo”. Lo schema corporeo è l’immagine tridimensionale che ciascuno ha di se stesso e può essere definito anche come “immagine corporea”. Questo termine indica che non si tratta semplicemente di una sensazione o di un’immagine mentale, ma che il corpo assume un certo aspetto (“modello posturale”) anche in riferimento a se stesso; esso implica inoltre che l’immagine non sia semplicemente percezione, sebbene ci giunga attraverso i sensi, ma comporti schemi e rappresentazioni mentali, pur non essendo semplicemente una rappresentazione. Quando, parlando delle sue performance di quegli anni, Maiolino scrive che non erano solo azioni simboliche, ma la realtà, esprime chiaramente come un mondo interiore che viene attestato e dotato di una forma visibile possa diventare reale proprio come il mondo che effettivamente si osserva. Considerando inoltre che la dimensione di Maiolino investe di prepotenza corpo e mente, è chiaro che le sue ossessioni e paure appartengono in larga misura al genere umano, lo coinvolgono nel profondo, alla base della sua essenza di pulsioni e di sensazioni. Abbiamo un’immissione e una produzione, una tendenza a mantenere l’immagine corporea dentro i suoi confini e una tendenza ad espanderla e ad estenderla, a mantenere riunite le parti e a disperderle dappertutto. Le più profonde forze intime della mente umana, unità e parte, integrazione e differenziazione, trovano la loro espressione immediata nel modello posturale del corpo, che è causa ed effetto di tendenze costruttive e distruttive. Le immagini visive delle performance di Maiolino possono essere o non essere reali, ma sono comunque il punto di transizione verso l’immagine onnicomprensiva del terrore ineludibile rappresentato dal suo potenziale annientamento. È naturalmente molto difficile, in questi casi, stabilire la differenza tra quello che è un effettivo cambiamento dei sensi e delle percezioni, e quindi delle rappresentazioni riguardanti il modello posturale del corpo, e quella che è una sensazione di paura riguardante l’immagine del corpo. Sappiamo che immagine e percezione sono basate sugli stessi processi somatici, ma dobbiamo considerare che ci sono anche processi intellettivi, processi di pensiero, elementi illusori riguardanti il corpo. Il lavoro sul corpo intrapreso da Maiolino, il suo uso come strumento di misura o di esperienza, di decorazione frammentaria, la sua traccia, la sua valorizzazione come sede del desiderio e del dolore, il suo compimento narcisistico o sacrificale, la sua erotizzazione, l’individuazione della sua estraneità, il suo ruolo nella trasgressione, il suo funzionamento meccanico, costituiscono pratiche di sperimentazione a partire dalle quali si avvia una produzione definita secondo termini scelti esclusivamente dall’artista che ne affronta la realizzazione, senza alcun condizionamento esterno. Proprio in virtù di questo suo immaginario visivo così poco convenzionale, spesso si legge l’aggettivo “onirico” in riferimento alla poetica di Maiolino. La sua visione della realtà però non è un sogno surreale, ma è il contrario di esso. I suoi segni sintetici e codificati non possono essere visioni oniriche perché non sono il frutto di un processo di simbolizzazione e non c’è uno spazio mentale interno che li contiene. In Maiolino l’impulso a fare arte non obbedisce più alle regole dell’inconscio della mera psicologia classica, non è sottoposto a censura e il suo contenuto manifesto non rimanda a uno latente. Il tradizionale punto di vista freudiano sull’inconscio non è qui negato nella sua validità generale, ma nel caso di Maiolino vengono a mancare i presupposti per la sua completa applicazione. Questo perché il mondo dell’inconscio per lei è una gabbia reale che la limita, perciò le sue immagini non sono un sogno vago, quanto piuttosto un modo di esternare la sua realtà interiore. Un approccio utile è quello di Donald Meltzer, che indaga le modalità con cui l’inconscio riesce a creare forme simboliche adeguate per rappresentare l’esperienza emotiva e l’esperienza estetica 3. L’opera di Maiolino ci fornisce già una didascalia figurativa della sua poetica: nonostante l’intricato contesto sia di chiara origine organica, le immagini e i colori svelano (senza rivelarne il significato) pulsazioni miste di dolore e piacere. L’interferenza corporea con l’esperienza era stata al centro dell’evoluzione dell’arte contemporanea occidentale negli anni della sua formazione, quando Maiolino si sentiva artefice e portavoce di un qualcosa di nuovo rispetto alle proprie tradizioni, e ciò rappresentava il suo lato più emozionale e intimo, capace di condurla alla sua realizzazione totale. Con le sue esplicite allusioni sessuali, ad esempio, l’artista gioca con i cliché della femminilità, facendo di essi una satira cosciente e usandoli, allo stesso tempo, anche per promuovere se stessa e il suo lavoro. Il punto straordinario della particolare forma scultorea di Maiolino è che può benissimo essere intesa come astratta pur non essendo tale, astratta nel senso di una logica formale modernista in cui, attraverso l’uso di un mezzo tradizionale come l’argilla, il cemento o la ceramica, cerca di affrontare direttamente la realtà. Sotto questo aspetto gli oggetti scultorei di Maiolino possono essere messi in relazione con le tondeggianti protuberanze materiche di Louise Bourgeois, sculture evocative di una dirompente e complessa sessualità. Il significato dell’arte di entrambe le artiste, di conturbante violenza e di determinante incisività, non si definisce molto per parole, ma piuttosto come qualcosa di viscerale. Fisico prima ancora che intellettuale. Il modo in cui la loro opera va dritta al punto, senza altra intermediazione che non sia quella della forma artistica, fa appello alla verità del corpo prima ancora che alla comprensione intellettuale, ossia forma di difesa, strumento con cui afferrare il mondo e la scomoda realtà dell’esistere. Scomoda infatti è la realtà raccontata sia da Maiolino sia da Bourgeois: i traumi familiari, le paure, i dubbi di due donne mai pronte ad aderire alle definizioni, siano quelle della femminilità e della maternità o quelle della creatività e dell’intellettualità. La pluralità di forme materiche impiegate da entrambe le artiste sono la testimonianza di una stessa complessità e di una comune irriducibilità a qualsiasi regolamentazione dell’operare artistico e della vita interiore, che anzi si intrecciano in modo tumultuoso, ribelle e infinitamente pericoloso. Una ferita che necessita di numerosi conforti, dalla religione all’arte, dalla politica alla psicoanalisi, tentativi di nascondere quel nulla che ci fa orrore. Per fortuna ci attende la “non follia”, l’apparire dell’eternità di tutte le cose. Noi siamo eterni e mortali perché l’eterno entra ed esce dall’apparire. La morte è un breve assentarsi dell’eterno. Quali spettacoli dunque si mostrano, se si mostrano, dopo la morte? La morte, per Maiolino, ha un significato che sta al di là di ciò che si intende comunemente con questo termine. Sta al di là della stessa contrapposizione tra morte e immortalità. Molti pensatori contemporanei la intendono invece come annientamento, salvando in alcuni casi l’anima o la coscienza che continuerebbero ad avere una loro vita. Maiolino cerca di dimostrare con la sua arte che la persuasione che l’Eternità possa annientarsi con la morte è follia essenziale. È la follia più profonda che possa manifestarsi non soltanto nel mondo umano, ma nel Tutto. Chiaramente Maiolino vuole che il suo pubblico veda quello che lei stessa “vede”. Mediante questo processo l’inconscio cessa di essere uno stato mentale concreto che imprigiona il soggetto e diventa un fatto antropofago in cui l’esperienza viene digerita e trasformata 4. L’energia assertiva che sostiene l’arte di Maiolino sembra consistere nello sviluppo di un sistema ideativo in cui l’immaginazione grandiosa prende il posto della comune capacità di valutare i propri e altrui processi mentali. Con l’immaginazione Maiolino si sente libera di creare, sa che sta esplorando una nuova realtà che ancora non le appartiene, che ancora non conosce del tutto e che non può ancora capire. L’immaginazione le serve a cercare la realtà non ancora vissuta. Quando però l’immaginazione smette di avere un rapporto potenziale con la realtà, diventa essa stessa la realtà. Essa funziona come un organo sensoriale che genera e proietta all’esterno i dati che si accumulano nella memoria. La realtà così prodotta entra a far parte di questa memoria, in cui i motivi scatenanti rimangono immagazzinati in un archivio pronto a riattivarsi ogniqualvolta l’artista decide di creare un’opera.

La fenomenologia è un metodo, un atteggiamento che porta ad occuparsi delle forme essenziali della coscienza nella quale appaiono i fatti, che diventano appunto fenomeni; una volta scoperto ed accettato che fatti e coscienza collaborano insieme alla costituzione dei fenomeni, la filosofia della conoscenza è pronta per individuare le essenze, i caratteri invarianti delle percezioni (intese come ogni fenomeno di coscienza). Alle essenze si giunge praticando specifiche operazioni, innanzitutto l’epoché fenomenologica, la sospensione di ogni giudizio sulla realtà del mondo verso cui la coscienza si indirizza, che consente di conseguire due obiettivi: considerare quella realtà solo in quanto “fenomeno di coscienza” e cogliere la coscienza stessa e la forma dei suoi atti (intenzioni). Attraverso le operazioni intenzionali della coscienza – che Edmund Husserl chiama noesi – come il volere, il ricordare, il percepire, l’immaginare, l’oggetto diventa un fenomeno, ossia un’esperienza vissuta, l’unica esperienza propriamente reale. L’oggetto esterno, infatti, può anche non esistere, ma quel che si presenta alla coscienza, il noema, esiste sempre 5. Poiché l’arte di Maiolino è di fatto analisi dell’esperienza umana dell’artista, il suo oggetto di indagine non può che essere l’esperienza vissuta indicata dalla fenomenologia. Il secondo momento previsto dal metodo fenomenologico è quello della riduzione eidetica: questa operazione consiste nel variare un concetto, o un fenomeno percettivo, cioè aggiungere o sottrarre caratteri per verificare quanto il concetto stesso risulti modificato; in questo modo si comprende quali caratteri siano davvero essenziali e quali  invece accessori. Poiché la riduzione eidetica rimuove ogni fattore soggettivo e mutevole, utilizzando questo metodo si può giungere a definire i contenuti universali della coscienza, o per meglio dire il modo essenziale (eidetico) in cui ciascun fenomeno appare (si manifesta) alla coscienza. Tramite la riduzione eidetica l’insieme eterogeneo dei fenomeni seriali che caratterizzano i lavori di Maiolino apparirà come sotteso da un unico elemento. Un atteggiamento fenomenologico nella poetica dell’artista è certamente testimoniato da quella tensione per la ricerca dell’essenza che è sempre percepibile nelle sue opere e dal suo interesse per la definizione dei concetti oltre che per la riflessione intorno ad essi; a ben vedere, la fenomenologia, con il metodo della riduzione eidetica, offre all’artista lo strumento utile a definire i suoi concetti essenziali, come quello di spazio e quello di tempo. Maiolino sa bene che la sua arte si allontana da una semplice definizione estetica: l’interpretazione non è mai interamente verificabile e l’oggetto interpretato non si lascia mai comprendere del tutto, conserva una sua durezza e un suo ermetismo. Per comprendere meglio la poetica di Maiolino bisognerebbe quindi renderla meno parziale e trasformarla in un’antropologia, cioè dare più agio ai temi della corporeità, della sessualità, della natura animale dell’uomo. La soluzione espressa da Maiolino nelle sue opere consiste nel pensare senza esitazione al “che cosa” dell’esistenza umana e non al “chi” o “come”. Ciò risulta possibile solo pensando all’uomo come una specie animale dotata di caratteristiche specifiche, limitate, tra l’altro, dalla sua fisicità, dalle proprietà del suo sistema sensoriale. Sebbene un approccio come questo alla complessa produzione di Maiolino possa sembrare riduttivo, vale la pena però ricordare che il problema della corporeità impegna intensamente Maiolino per gran parte della sua carriera e che la sua arte otterrebbe in questo modo due vantaggi: l’esclusione di ogni forma di trascendenza e l’obbligo a confrontarsi con la realtà prima che con qualsiasi forma di immaginazione. A questo punto, si assiste in Maiolino al coraggioso tentativo di riabilitazione del “mondo della superficie”, il mondo dei sensi. La polemica che può intravedersi in Maiolino con una certa tradizione brasiliana va letta principalmente in quanto opposizione al programma da quest’ultima finalizzato alla riduzione del mondo dei fenomeni nella sua struttura funzionale soggiacente. Il confronto tra Maiolino e la tradizione è dunque segnato principalmente dal problema della definizione dello statuto epistemologico del mondo fenomenico. La denuncia espressa con forza in molti lavori di Maiolino è che i sensi sono stati considerati troppo spesso meri veicoli dell’informazione, senza mai considerarne il valore reale. Il mondo non è fondato, come vorrebbe Cartesio, dai e sui giudizi (“evitare gli errori seducenti in cui sono caduti Cartesio e i suoi successori”, suggerisce Husserl); al contrario, il mondo – il mondo della vita – è prelogico e prescientifico. Proprio perché la facoltà raziocinante non può essere ritenuta in misura assoluta fondante, l’esperienza sensoriale è il vero presupposto di ogni esperienza. L’assonanza tra Maiolino e Merleau-Ponty è qui straordinaria: entrambi riconoscono l’esistenza di un mondo che precede la conoscenza teoretica, un mondo che non è stato ancora reso oggetto, che è sentito prima di essere percepito, che è paesaggio prima di essere mappa geografica, del quale l’uomo ne occupa immediatamente il centro. Un mondo al quale ciascuno di noi è connesso, o meglio “inerisce”, tramite il proprio corpo, ben prima che diventi oggetto di conoscenza teoretica. Il sentire, dunque, per Maiolino precede ogni conoscenza e costituisce la possibilità della relazione stessa con il mondo. Per meglio intendere la distinzione tra sentire e percepire bisogna far riferimento a quella più generale tra momento gnosico e momento patico 6. Il sentire è connesso al momento patico, il momento in cui l’uomo si apre al mondo e si stabilisce il come di ogni singola sensazione; questo momento patico è il momento in cui si instaura la relazione originaria ed affettiva tra il soggetto ed il mondo, assolutamente preconcettuale. Patico è appunto l’essere afferrati dalla situazione, il darsi immediato e incontrollabile del rapporto col mondo. Il momento gnosico è invece il momento della conoscenza, in cui è l’oggetto ad essere afferrato sensibilmente e concettualmente. L’arte solitamente si occupa del solo momento gnosico, delle sensazioni e raramente del sentire, di ciò che precede ogni conoscenza e che resta allo stadio più originario dell’esperienza vissuta 7. Ma la differenza è assolutamente necessaria se si vuole andare a fondo nelle opere di Maiolino. Quanto detto sulla differenza tra il sentire ed il percepire rinvia chiaramente all’opposizione tra sapere teoretico e sapere pratico che – come è noto – risale agli albori della filosofia, e in particolare ad Aristotele nella sua Metafisica. L’arte di Maiolino si rivolge principalmente al luogo di origine di questo sapere pratico: i sensi. Al tentativo di rivalutazione della sensazione e della sua autonomia sono state mosse alcune obiezioni da una parte della critica moderna; ad esempio, è stato notato come la gnoseologia di Maiolino non riesca ad allontanarsi poi molto dalla concezione tradizionale della conoscenza, perché non arrivi a considerare la sensazione in sé come una forma effettiva di conoscenza. In questo modo Maiolino continuerebbe, neppure troppo implicitamente, a postulare l’esistenza di una verità unica ed assoluta – da conoscere razionalmente – e la conseguente fallibilità dei sensi, che tornerebbero ad essere strumenti non in grado di cogliere quella verità. In realtà, in oltre cinquant’anni di attività, Maiolino si è sempre adoperata proprio per costruire le condizioni di possibilità per un’autonomia della sensazione. La varietà delle interpretazioni soggettive è sempre stata problematica per l’interpretazione delle sue opere, ma lo scioglimento della difficoltà è possibile quando il pensiero sulla coscienza assume una curvatura divergente da quella proposta dalla tradizione. Potrebbe sembrare che l’apologia dei sensi alimentata dall’artista trovi il suo completamento in quella concezione del sapere che prevede che esso sia tanto più efficace quanto più in grado di determinare il significato di una percezione in relazione al contesto. In questo senso, la qualità di una percezione è dipendente direttamente dal soggetto percipiente e proporzionale alla consapevolezza del suo coinvolgimento nella cultura di riferimento. Quel che in verità accade è che Maiolino si serve di tutto ciò che può essere fornito dall’analisi antropologica e culturale per raggiungere un livello più profondo di riflessione e riuscire così a rintracciare gli errori che hanno condotto e conducono alla svalutazione della sensorialità. Infatti, lo sbaglio principale che si può fare nei confronti dell’arte di Maiolino è quello di trascurare il “sentire” che precede la sensazione: ignorare il momento patico conduce ad un fittizio primato della sensazione, la quale, senza il suo fondamento diviene solo uno strumento minimo della conoscenza intellettuale. La sensazione è conoscenza solo se riferita al “sentire” originario, altrimenti si trasforma necessariamente in un’ancella al servizio della ragione e per capire l’arte di Maiolino questo non basta. La rivalutazione della sensazione deve essere dunque interpretata come il riconoscimento della capacità umana di instaurare una relazione simpatetica preconcettuale in cui il mondo si dà come un intero, non parcellizzato in unità, siano esse percezioni sensoriali o pensieri analitici. Compito della critica d’arte è rinvenire la specificità, il modo in cui la relazione simpatetica col mondo si è rovinata. Usando una terminologia cara alla fenomenologia, noi siamo carne sensibile e impressionabile, e il mondo è materia che impressiona questa carne e nel fare ciò esso impressiona anche se stesso. Le teorie fisiologiche, all’opposto, isolano l’organismo e trasformano la materia in stimoli, e la carne sensibile in recettori di stimoli, delegando ad una coscienza che si pone oltre la carne il compito di organizzare gli stimoli che provengono dal mondo. Queste teorie staccano la coscienza dal corpo e il corpo-cosciente dal suo mondo, ignorano, cioè, che essere coscienti è soprattutto “inerire” al mondo tramite le possibilità del proprio corpo. Secondo Merleau-Ponty, la vita della coscienza è sottesa da un arco intenzionale. Tale arco intenzionale costituisce l’unità dei sensi e dell’intelligenza, quella della sensibilità e della motilità 8. Tramite questo arco, che congiunge il mio sé corporeo al mondo, io inerisco al mondo e la coscienza è inerire alle cose tramite il corpo. Il mio corpo non è nello spazio come un qualsiasi oggetto. Esso abita lo spazio. Ciò che chiamiamo “coscienza” è l’arco che unisce, in un dato istante, l’oggetto intenzionale verso cui si è protesi con lo sfondo vitale di sensazioni e di attività che risiede nel corpo. Dunque, se le teorie fisiologiche allontanano l’organismo dal proprio mondo-ambiente, le opere di Maiolino, invece, esprimono un mondo organizzato in aree dalla fisionomia ben definita, laddove la fisionomia è assegnata dalla tipologia della relazione tra soggetto e oggetto.

La profonda considerazione della corporeità umana è probabilmente il punto di forza dell’arte di Maiolino, è l’elemento che consente di connettere il fattore biologico alla dimensione esistenziale, legame teorico che permette di dimostrare l’essenza delle sue opere. “Il corpo – scriveva Erwin Straus nel 1963 – è il mediatore tra l’io e il mondo”. Apparentemente una tale considerazione non può che portare al fallimento il tentativo di superamento del dualismo corpomente tradizionalmente inteso, ma la difficoltà è superata dalla definizione di coscienza elaborata dal sapere fenomenologico: la coscienza è una relazione determinata da una pluralità di fattori (storici, culturali, genetici, ambientali, etc.). Nella definizione di corpo di Straus l’elemento centrale è in realtà il concetto stesso di mediazione: nessuno dei termini può essere compreso in se stesso, ma solo nei termini stabiliti da una relazione, o meglio da un sistema di relazioni, caratterizzato dalla contrapposizione e dalla tensione, sia che l’uomo cerchi l’unione con il mondo sia che ne cerchi l’indipendenza. Sembra proprio che anche Maiolino rifiuti in modo categorico la separazione cartesiana di corpo e mente come quella tra uomo e mondo. In linea con l’indirizzo fenomenologico, nella poetica dell’artista queste relazioni sembrano intrecciate e gli elementi in relazione sempre dialetticamente dipendenti. Uomo e mondo, corpo e pensiero, emergono contemporaneamente in un rapporto di necessaria dipendenza. Lo spazio nel quale si muove Maiolino è uno spazio “ottico”, in cui il movimento è finalizzato, orientato, direzionato, e procede da un centro verso un punto ben definito; è perciò anche uno spazio “storico” nel senso che, in ragione della sua articolazione, il movimento avviene nel tempo: al trascorrere del tempo la posizione occupata si sposta in una certa direzione. Si può dire che lo spazio ottico è uno spazio direzionale sia per quel che riguarda il movimento sia per quel che riguarda il tempo. Le osservazioni sulla spazialità in Maiolino non hanno solo un interesse artistico-filosofico, ma ci aiutano anche a capire meglio in che modo e in che misura lo spazio e le sue qualità si alterano nei suoi lavori; si tratta dell’alterazione dello spazio vissuto, le cui qualità non sono misurabili ma hanno piuttosto a che fare con i caratteri originari del nostro rapporto con il mondo, quei caratteri definiti dal momento patico, dal quale ogni ulteriore percezione e conoscenza procedono. Le considerazioni sul tempo che possiamo fare intorno all’opera di Maiolino sono legate a doppio filo a quelle sulla corporeità: la principale ragione è che la forma originaria della relazione umana è essenzialmente fisica, passa per il corpo e si fissa nell’opposizione tra corpi. Maiolino, oltre ogni considerazione assimilabile alla riflessione di Merleau-Ponty, legge il movimento, l’azione fisica, corporea, come ciò che introduce una consequenzialità nel mondo: il movimento articola il corpo con lo spazio e con il tempo. Inoltre, è la capacità di muoversi che consente all’uomo di sviluppare la forma causale del pensiero. Non solo il corpo è un operatore simbolico che realizza l’organizzazione simbolica dello spazio, ma è anche ciò che attraverso il movimento dà forma logica al pensiero. Il movimento è una conseguenza del desiderio, il carattere fisico è un effetto dell’anima monadica che attende eventuali sollecitazioni dall’esterno. Certamente l’analisi delle strutture temporali della coscienza è quanto di più utile possa servire per interpretare al meglio la poetica di Maiolino. Il metodo fenomenologico da lei adottato può essere legittimamente definibile come un metodo basato su categorie storico-psicologiche e incline a comprendere l’uomo quale essere in divenire. Senza tentare di stabilire teorie o definizioni precise, ma più sotto forma di una ricerca, ci stiamo muovendo tra le creazioni di Maiolino in un vagabondare, in un nomadismo tra la sua vita e la sua opera. L’opera d’arte è la sintesi delle intensità, delle passioni, della vita interiore del suo creatore; della stessa forma, parlare d’arte è costruire un discorso che si converte in un luogo di risonanze dove si coniugano sia le affezioni dell’artista sia quelle di colui che parla. L’opera di Maiolino è il riflesso di uno stato dell’anima, la materializzazione di una visione della realtà che risveglia sentimenti ancora non espressi, di quelli che è possibile incontrare nel grembo di un tempo perduto, immagine di eternità; è la perfetta armonia di se stessa e dell’essenza più intima del suo autore. L’esperienza personale dell’artista, piena di significati, alleggerisce o intensifica la grandezza del suo lavoro di creazione; ma fino a che punto? La vita e la creazione nell’arte sono due realtà indissolubilmente unite da una forza che in alcuni momenti le sorpassa e, quindi, l’opera emerge con una vita propria. Sommersi in questo ambiente in cui la problematica dell’arte molte volte sembra desolante, dove il fare artistico spesso si ritrova in una strada senza uscita, emerge l’opera di una donna il cui fine è sempre stato quello di voler andare molto più in là di se stessa.

Per cogliere l’intima relazione che esiste tra l’arte di Maiolino e la sua vita, affrontiamo affascinanti e numerose opposizioni; una curiosa mescolanza di energia e di fragilità, di entusiasmo esaltato e di dolore. Ma qual è la relazione che la donna ha all’interno del processo della creazione artistica? In che modo affronta il problema dell’arte? Attraverso quale linguaggio e quali sono i suoi mezzi? Risulta innegabile che il pensiero delle donne è determinato, nella maggior parte dei casi, dalla struttura del loro corpo: specchio che le mette a confronto, giorno dopo giorno, con se stesse, corrente dell’esistenza che è la prova indiscutibile e miracolosa della vita stessa. Il corpo è spazio in continuo divenire dove il suo essere si manifesta. Nel terreno dell’arte il corpo della donna, ricettacolo della vita, nutre e articola costantemente la sua concezione e il suo lavoro di artista. Non è mia intenzione però esaltare il ruolo della donna nell’arte attraverso l’opera di Anna Maria Maiolino, né polarizzare la sua specificità di donna nella creazione artistica. Mi limito solamente ad evidenziare come il linguaggio della donna artista parta da una realtà specifica e concreta: l’immagine del corpo. Un linguaggio che si fa anatomia, che si fa corpo e, per questo, è altro e differente. A tal proposito, mi piace l’idea di creare un confronto tra il linguaggio di Maiolino e quello di Eva Hesse, due artiste che io amo molto e che solo apparentemente risultano essere molto lontane. Anche per Hesse il corpo è il luogo cerebrale e fisico dove s’incontrano la vita e la morte. Il senso di disagio e la fragilità che rivela Hesse provengono da un passato scomodo, fatto di paura per le persecuzioni naziste e segnato da tragici eventi familiari, come il suicidio della madre. Un disagio ossessivo che ha portato spesso l’artista verso l’autodistruzione, così come anche alla distruzione, di propria mano, della quasi totalità delle sue opere. Maiolino ed Hesse strutturano la comprensione dell’identità e dell’arte attraverso un criterio semplice di libera associazione fra materiali, in grado di far emergere le qualità più intime degli stessi. Tale pratica è condotta dalle due artiste sia su materiali artificiali sia su quelli naturali, e anche sul concetto che sottende l’identità cerebrale e fisica. Questa dinamica relazionale che esalta gli opposti acquista programmaticamente nelle loro opere una carica spiccatamente femminile. Esiste quindi un colloquio o un rimando al dentro e al fuori (interno/esterno) che per entrambe le artiste confluisce nell’ambito materno e fetale. La femminilità, nella loro poetica, è evidente non solo nella qualità dei materiali utilizzati o nella scelta di forme tondeggianti e circolari, ma soprattutto nel modo di evocare il lato organico femminile della materia. Secondo Maiolino ed Hesse, i materiali contengono all’interno tutta la loro energia e spetta all’artista il compito di controllarla e disporla. In senso formale la figurazione circolare (cerchio chiuso come visione introspettiva) che contraddistingue sia il lavoro di Hesse sia quello di Maiolino evidenzia il carattere psicologico e la suggestione sessuale della loro arte. Conseguentemente a queste caratteristiche formali la loro produzione artistica acquisisce anche una certa connotazione erotica, oltre che femminile. Questi aspetti implicano in realtà una disciplina più complessa, fatta di lavoro costante e critico nei confronti dell’identità e della società. Insistendo su questa via, ho avuto modo di leggere le ricerche di Didier Anzieu sulla produzione dell’opera per mano del suo artefice e sul modo in cui l’artista proietta nel proprio lavoro l’immagine del suo stesso corpo 9. Anche se i lavori di Anzieu sono limitati allo studio della letteratura (a eccezione dell’ultima parte del suo libro Le corps de l’oeuvre in cui si riferisce alla produzione di Francis Bacon), ho preso alcune delle sue idee per spiegare le relazioni di Maiolino con la sua arte e la forma in cui le sue opere prendono corpo, a partire dall’intensità e dalla forza con le quali l’artista si rappresenta nel mondo. L’immagine del corpo è una delle pietre angolari del pensiero di una donna artista. Questo si manifesta attraverso una maniera di apprendere le cose, intima e interiorizzante, che l’artista esprime con un linguaggio di metafore, di silenzi, di discontinuità, di sentimenti opposti, un linguaggio straordinariamente ambivalente e segreto, prossimo alla poesia. In questo modo Maiolino ricorre all’immagine del corpo, reale o traslato, come luogo di referenza privilegiato a sua disposizione verso l’esterno: ossia, attraverso di esso i fenomeni che giungono da fuori – tra questi il fenomeno dell’arte – incontrano la loro risonanza nella struttura interna del corpo, nella sua anatomia e anche nel suo pensiero. Per mezzo della propria arte Maiolino trasmette un mondo dolorosamente affascinante, fatto di emozioni e sensazioni legate alla sua vita di donna. Essendo la produzione di Maiolino in gran parte legata alla sua biografia, l’artista rivela nelle sue composizioni desideri e ossessioni che evidenziano un’inclinazione per la sofferenza, la passione, il dolore, la morte, per un amore che sia rivoluzionario, temi che si impadroniscono di lei e che appaiono come immagini ricorrenti nella sua opera. L’esperienza individuale traspare in modo talmente poderoso e autentico che trascende il proprio carattere puramente personale per diventare sempre più universale; per questo motivo Maiolino ha affrontato le sue creazioni come un flusso di intensità, come un movimento di energie espresse in immagini organiche e in colori forti, decisi, acidi, vere linee di forza sulle quali ha costruito la sua arte. Da qui l’importanza accordata all’immagine del corpo in questo universo, immagine a partire dalla quale si tesse il linguaggio delle forme per costruire un’opera che non permette la sua decomposizione in strutture, ma dove il corpo sembrerebbe inglobare e contaminare la forma artistica, infondendole un ritmo biologico che la rende eminentemente viva. Corpi assenti, silenziosi, immobili, paralizzati e prigionieri. Nelle opere di Maiolino incontriamo l’immagine del corpo che funziona come centro e maestro dello spazio, a partire dal quale tutto sembra entrare in un’inquietante dialettica dell’Io e dell’Altro. Dalle rappresentazioni più ingenue – se ingenue possono definirsi le composizioni di questa artista – fino alle metamorfosi in argilla, in ceramica, in cemento, o anche in vetro, il corpo è per lei uno scenario dove tutto può succedere, uno scenario in cui qualcosa v. a a liberarsi, lo scenario dell’essere. In effetti, è grazie al corpo che l’esistenza del mondo e delle cose si rivela a noi come qualcosa di “già dato”, che “sta lì”, anteriore a qualsiasi riflessione e a tutto il sapere scientifico. Esiste, inoltre, una relazione spontanea tra il mondo e il corpo espressa dal desiderio di afferrare le cose dalla loro origine, di trovare un contatto semplice e ingenuo con il mondo, di scoprire le cose nella relazione stessa in cui esse guardano verso ogni individualità corporea; in una parola, dal desiderio di scoprire l’atto del sentire. È questo, in sintesi, l’oggetto della fenomenologia in Maiolino. All’interno di questa stretta relazione si verifica un intercambio tra l’Io (corpo) e il Tu (mondo), il che significa che esiste una reversibilità. Nel pensiero di Merleau-Ponty questa reversibilità o “chiasma”, come egli la chiama, costituisce il passaggio che ci permette di esistere in questo flusso magico che va da noi verso il mondo e dal mondo verso noi. Ma perché esporre qui il problema della fenomenologia e confrontarlo con la concezione di un’artista per la quale l’atto di creare arte si situa in un delicato limite tra l’esperienza del corpo e l’esperienza del mondo esteriore? Forse perché Maiolino decodifica e instaura precisamente un linguaggio attraverso questo lungo cammino interiore del corpo, cercando di apprendere e di proiettare quel che succede in esso. Così, nell’universo di questa artista l’identificazione e la coesistenza tra il suo corpo e il mondo sono soggette a un processo costante di embricatura; c’è una relazione intima e stretta della sua immagine di fronte al mondo esterno. Per quasi tutta la sua produzione, il corpo di Maiolino, reale o immaginario, è presente, anche se non lo vediamo rappresentato; esso tesse una trama di figure e situazioni provocatorie che svegliano nello spettatore alcune volte confusione e altre volte stati di evidente angoscia. È qui, in questa stretta relazione tra l’esperienza corporea e la creazione di forme e di personaggi, che si sviluppa la sua opera e dove andrebbe cercata la struttura del “chiasma”. Data la profonda coscienza che l’artista ha del corpo, questo si converte nell’unico veicolo del suo essere attraverso il mondo, pertanto sarà nel centro di ciò che è visibile; il suo corpo è il termine impercettibile verso cui tutte le cose guardano. È il supporto del suo universo. Collocandosi, nella maggior parte delle volte, in una situazione strategica dove il corpo la unisce direttamente agli altri elementi della rappresentazione, soprattutto trattandosi di composizioni dove lei non figura in modo oggettivo, esiste una prevalenza assoluta del corpo che serve da fondo alla prevalenza relativa delle forme che la circondano. La trascendenza del corpo è di fatto ciò che caratterizza le sue opere. Narcisismo? Probabilmente. Però, non è forse vero che esiste un narcisismo fondamentale alla base di tutto? Giacché è il corpo che modella le cose e, all’inverso e simultaneamente, le cose modellano il corpo, esso si proietta nel mondo e il mondo si riflette in esso. Così, l’immagine del corpo, centro della figurazione, si converte nel ricettacolo di tutta la visibilità. Esso è il principio e la fine del suo universo, attraverso la sua immagine Maiolino modella l’insieme delle sue creazioni come qualcosa che fa parte della sua stessa definizione, come un annesso di se stessa, come un prolungamento del suo essere.

Il percorso artistico di Maiolino, fatto di indagine e sperimentazione, trasmette anche un’effusione apparentemente incomprensibile dell’erotismo. Una sessualità che si espone – nelle sue sculture così come nei suoi disegni e nei suoi dipinti – in tutta la sua vulnerabilità, e alla fine conduce a quell’esplosione di piacere che Georges Bataille qualifica come “piccola morte” 10. Dopo il coito, i due individui coinvolti nell’atto sessuale tornano a essere discontinui e percepiscono questo momento come un abisso angoscioso. L’atto sessuale è attraente proprio come la morte, in quanto entrambi si rivelano all’uomo in prima istanza come momenti di continuità, immagine però presto sostituita dalla discontinuità che di fatto caratterizza la loro vera natura. L’attrazione è un’attesa, un’illusione di continuità che dal sesso e dalla morte è vanificata. L’attesa diviene tensione, diviene paura, diviene angoscia. E per ovviare a questa tensione l’individuo si affanna a costellare la sua vita di tutta una serie di piccole morti, di esperienze che lo portino a vanificare, seppur per un istante, quella discontinuità che lo rende solo e che gli impedisce di comunicare con gli altri individui. La componente erotica evocata da Maiolino attraverso le sue opere sembra sempre avere questo aspetto distruttivo, ha sempre quest’incrinatura; ma profondamente, segretamente, tale incrinatura, essendo propria della sessualità umana, appartiene di diritto al piacere.

Il principio stesso dell’erotismo appare dapprima esattamente l’opposto di quest’orrore paradossale. È la pletora degli organi genitali, è un movimento animale in noi che è all’origine della nostra esistenza; ma l’ansia degli organi non è “libera”, non può sfogarsi senza il concorso della volontà. Nel suo essere sede di contrari l’erotismo provoca nei soggetti una frattura, una ferita che, nell’atto della piccola morte, riesce a fare in modo che essi infrangano se stessi e che superino i loro stessi limiti. Ciò che si tenta di raggiungere è l’Impossibile11. L’erotismo in Maiolino non è quindi che un pretesto per raggiungere l’Infinito, il suo Impossibile, quello stadio verso cui tende gran parte della sua arte. L’atto sessuale è allora sintetico di tutte le contraddizioni, sì che la sua caratteristica di continuità riassume in sé l’essere discontinuo dell’uomo e della donna e li avvicina l’uno all’altra in un’esperienza interiore prossima all’Impossibile. E l’Impossibile non è che la sospensione, il non-senso, il momento del passaggio attraverso la fessura che è essa stessa l’Impossibile, l’attimo della dissoluzione dell’Io prima che il passaggio si sia compiuto. Luogo di contraddizione quindi e di sintesi dei contrari: la pienezza e la frammentazione, l’orrore e il godimento coincidono in un’intollerabile eccedenza dell’essere. A questo eccesso insostenibile si unisce anche quello del pensiero, che nell’eccesso è vanificato ed annullato. L’eccesso infatti annulla la coscienza, e l’espressione – in quanto estrema – esige, più che l’abbandono, l’espulsione dalla coscienza. L’essere viene misconosciuto da se stesso. Non solo, il paradosso è accentuato nell’erotismo in quanto l’erotismo è l’attività sessuale di un essere cosciente. Di tale consapevolezza dell’eccesso del pensiero e della sua espressione Maiolino fornisce una rappresentazione visiva: l’Impossibile, in quanto sospensione del dicibile, è un non detto, meglio un non-dicibile, figurato tramite – ad esempio – protuberanti macchie di colore sulla carta e sulla tela o in solchi profondi scavati nella materia. Lì dov’è l’Impossibile v’è solo il silenzio ed è un silenzio angoscioso. Il corpo in Bataille è però un coacervo di interiora maleodoranti, come la rosa anch’esso ha in sé l’idea della sua fine; non v’è mai contemplazione estatica di una bellezza canonica, non vi sono mai proporzionate membra che affascinino lo sguardo del narratore, il corpo è attraente solo nelle sue proiezioni più oscene, più disperate e all’estasi è associato il dolore consono al sacrificio 12. In Maiolino, invece, sebbene vi sia una constatazione della bellezza dolorosa e al dolore sia accostato l’estasi, il corpo ha un universo potente in cui gode di tutte le attenzioni dovute; ma proprio perché indeterminabile, l’essenza del desiderio erotico può allora oscillare tra un grado e l’altro della repulsione, della fascinazione esercitata dall’osceno, tra l’iconoclastia batailleana che distrugge i corpi e quella di Maiolino che prima di perderli, li costituisce come esempio di bellezza assoluta. Si può allora affermare – basandosi sulla distinzione che Mario Perniola ha fatto all’interno del “fenomeno” erotismo, ossia erotismo iconoclasta ed erotismo libertino – che lo statuto batailleano rientri nel primo dei due tipi, cioè iconoclasta, mentre quello relativo all’opera di Maiolino nel secondo, cioè libertino. Incontriamo così in lei una corrispondenza intima tra il corpo e l’esterno, un’animazione che il corpo fa di tutto ciò che lo circonda; è attraverso questa linea di forza, quella della propria anatomia, che l’arte di Maiolino va ad avvolgere il suo essere, conducendolo in un mondo dove le frontiere tra l’arte e il corpo tendono a sparire nel momento stesso in cui i sentimenti sono profondamente sperimentati e le sensazioni e i dolori intensamente sentiti. A partire da una creazione corporea, o meglio da un’identificazione corporea attraverso l’opera d’arte, l’individuo arriva a questo meraviglioso patto “erotico-estetico” evocato in molte delle creazioni di Maiolino: un’arte dove esiste un doppio gioco di erotismo e di piacere estetico, in cui il corpo è simultaneamente tema e oggetto della creazione 13. Nei lavori di Maiolino non si parla mai di indistruttibilità, ma bensì del consumo (corruzione) del corpo e della morte come condizione necessaria della vita. Un’opera d’arte e un sacrificio partecipano insieme alla ricerca di un istante sacro andando più in là del tempo profano, dove le proibizioni garantiscono la possibilità della vita. Per chiarire meglio il significato di queste proposte estetiche di Maiolino si può fare un confronto con alcune proposte di Yayoi Kusama sullo stesso tema. Ovviamente sia le modalità esecutive sia gli obiettivi delle due artiste sono molto diversi tra loro: Kusama assimila una forma di piacere estremo e sofferto, a tratti masochistico, Maiolino invece, attraverso le sue scomode ma inoffensive protuberanze falliche, si muove verso un obiettivo di liberazione corporale. Ciò che le accomuna è la volontà, per entrambe le artiste, di fare della propria arte una vera scienza dell’uomo che tenti di riallacciarsi a tutte le forze dell’inconscio, alla memoria dell’umano, del sacro, alla mente e alla morte, per restituire alla coscienza la sua forza primaria. Occorre così vivere il proprio corpo, ossia scoprirne la debolezza, la servitù tragica e impietosa della sua limitatezza, usura e precarietà, prendere coscienza dei suoi fantasmi, che non sono altro che il riflesso dei miti creati dalla società.

Senza voler esagerare troppo con una visione psicoanalitica dell’opera di Maiolino, mi sovviene alla mente quanto letto su “il complesso di Elettra” come alternativa chiave di lettura di alcuni suoi lavori dall’aspetto e dal contenuto più espliciti. A teorizzare tale inclinazione della psiche femminile è Jung nella sua opera del 1913 Saggio di esposizione della teoria psicoanalitica 14. Freud sconfessa apertamente questa concettualizzazione in un articolo del 1931, giudicando aberrante la postulata simmetria junghiana dei due sessi per quanto attiene la rispettiva posizione verso le figure genitoriali 15. Per lungo tempo però, a dire il vero, Freud aveva ammesso che – mutatis mutandis – il complesso edipico descritto per il bambino potesse essere trasposto tale e quale nel caso della bambina. Questo postulato è stato poi demolito dalla sua tesi sull’organizzazione genitale infantile della libido, secondo cui per entrambi i sessi nella fase fallica, cioè all’apice del complesso di Edipo, vi è un solo organo importante, il fallo, e dalla progressiva valorizzazione dell’attaccamento pre-edipico alla madre. Questa fase pre-edipica è particolarmente manifesta nella bambina, dato che per lei il complesso di Edipo comporterà uno slittamento dell’oggetto d’amore dalla madre verso il padre. Il complesso di Edipo femminile presenta quindi caratteristiche distintive. La perdita del fallo, che nel bambino è vissuta come conseguenza di un castigo, nella bambina costituisce invece un presupposto: ella scopre sin dall’inizio di non averlo e non percepisce la sua mancanza attuale come un carattere sessuale, ma la interpreta supponendo di aver posseduto una volta un membro di cui in seguito sarebbe stata privata. Nei suoi testi tardivi Freud accentua la constatazione di questa mancanza da parte della bambina e la conseguente imputazione della responsabilità di tale mancanza alla madre, anch’ella peraltro rivelatasi mancante. La privazione del pene viene tollerata non senza un tentativo di rivalsa. Su un altro versante, invece, il vuoto – ampiamente rappresentato dalle tante cavità nei lavori scultorei di Maiolino – evoca una situazione di vacuità, solitudine, perdita, oppure evoca l’ignoto, ed è connesso al sublime, non in termini descrittivi, ossia individuando ciò che è bello o maestoso, ma piuttosto in senso emotivo e psicologico, come qualcosa che ispira soggezione e può suscitare terrore, quasi un ritorno alle origini, una rinascita, una rigenerazione, che può essere vissuta come un regressus ad uterum, un “ritorno nell’utero” (termine che viene spesso usato nei riti d’iniziazione). È un ritorno simbolico a un particolare stato primordiale dell’essere che accomuna ogni uomo. La regressione riporta solo in apparenza alla madre; questa in realtà è la porta che si apre sull’inconscio. Di fatto la regressione, quando non è disturbata, non si arresta alla madre, ma risale al di là di essa per raggiungere un eterno femminino prenatale, il mondo primordiale delle immagini archetipiche 16. In Maiolino assistiamo a una rivalutazione della regressione, concepita come premessa indispensabile ad ogni rinascita spirituale. In un momento cruciale dell’esistenza s’impone all’uomo, nei fatti, il compito di mutar vita, di mutar mente. L’uomo paventa, esita, poi – spesso – ritiene miglior partito fuggire all’indietro nel tempo e trovare rifugio nelle proprie fantasie. Ronald Laing scrive che la regressione può essere intesa dalle persone come un ritorno al concepimento prima che esse possano nuovamente voltarsi ed una volta ancora progredire, e la definisce come un “viaggio” (all’indietro e poi di nuovo in avanti) che conduce ad una trasformazione di tipo potenzialmente liberatorio, per la quale propone il termine di metanoia 17. Il soggetto quindi non soltanto scopre la vera ragione delle sue brame infantili ma, spingendosi oltre se stesso, entro la sfera della psiche collettiva, fa prima il suo ingresso nel favoloso regno delle idee collettive e poi in quello della creatività. Metanoia indica l’iter che l’uomo deve compiere per raggiungere la propria individuazione: toccare il fondo dell’inconscio per risalire e risorgere successivamente in una veste più nuova e veramente autentica. Metanoia significa “cambio della mente”: è un viaggio che conduce ad una trasformazione profonda di se stessi e che ognuno di noi cerca di intraprendere in un momento particolare della propria vita; è un viaggio all’indietro, una regressione a stadi primitivi di sviluppo, che Maiolino percorre attraverso le sue opere, per poi di nuovo ricominciare a progredire nell’acquisizione di una rinnovata se stessa. L’obiettivo è riuscire a vivere per sempre in un eterno ritorno.

Pubblicato Anna Maria Maiolino. O Amor se Faz Revolucionário, Milano, PAC e Silvana Editoriale, 2019

Pubblicato in Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019)

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1 Plotino, Enneadi, II, Giuseppe Faggin (a cura di), Bompiani, Milano, 2010.

2 Paul Schilder, Immagine di sé e schema corporeo, Franco Angeli Editore, Milano, 1973, pp. 36-41.

3 Donald Meltzer, La vita onirica. Una revisione della teoria e della tecnica psicoanalitica, Borla, Roma, 1989, pp. 53-54.

4 Cfr. Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago, 1928: “Solo l’Antropofagia ci unisce. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente. Unica legge del mondo. Espressione mascherata di tutti gli individualismi, di tutti i collettivismi. Di tutte le religioni. Di tutti i trattati di pace”.

5 Cristian Muscelli e Giovanni Stanghellini, L’approccio fenomenologico di Erwin Straus, nota introduttiva alla traduzione di Erwin Straus, Sull’ossessione, Giovanni Fioriti Editore, Roma, 2006, pp. 8-9.

6 Mauro Carbone, Della differenza tra il sentire e il percepire, nota introduttiva alla traduzione di Erwin Straus, Della differenza tra paesaggio e geografia come differenza tra il sentire e il percepire, il Mulino, Bologna, 1996, pp. 283-300.

7 Erwin Straus e Henri Maldiney, L’estetico e l’estetica, Mimesis, Milano, 2005, p. 81.

8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologia della percezione, Bompiani, Milano, 2005, p. 191.

9 Catherine Chabert, Didier Anzieu, Armando, Roma, 2000.

10 Georges Bataille, L’erotismo, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano, 1969, pp. 87-97. L’erotismo secondo Bataille racconta il rimando continuo tra orrore e voluttà, dolore finale e insopportabile gioia. Ecco perché questo irresistibile trasporto coincide, in ultima istanza, con la morte, anticipata dalla “piccola morte” del rapporto erotico.

11 Georges Bataille, op. cit., p. 110.

12 Mario Perniola, L’iconoclasma erotico di Bataille, in Philosophia Sexualis, Ombre Corte, Verona, 1998, p. 142.

13 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, Pantheon, New York, 1988, p. 60.

14 Carl Gustav Jung, Saggio di esposizione della teoria psicoanalitica (1913), in Opere, vol. IV, Boringhieri, Torino, 1973. Il nome viene dal personaggio mitologico di Elettra, figlia di Agamennone e

Clitennestra: questa fece uccidere il suo sposo dal proprio amante Egisto e, quando Elettra scoprì di chi fosse la responsabilità della morte di suo padre, si vendicò uccidendo sua madre. Nell’intervista a Maiolino realizzata dal sottoscritto in occasione della mostra (e pubblicata in questo catalogo) il nome di Jung è spesso stato citato tra le letture dell’artista.

15 Sigmund Freud, Sessualità femminile (1931), in Opere, vol. XI, Boringhieri, Torino, 1989.

16 Carl Gustav Jung, Libido – Simboli e trasformazioni, Boringhieri, Torino, 1965, p. 323.

17 Ronald Laing, Metanoia, in “Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane”, n. 2, aprile-giugno, 1971, pp. 1-4.

O amor se faz Revolucionário

Diego Sileo

Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Scalea, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, on 20 May 1942, to an Ecuadorian mother and an Italian father. She was the youngest of ten siblings. She began drawing at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Cristóbal Rojas in Caracas, Venezuela, where she had emigrated with her parents in 1954. In 1960, the Maiolinos moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Anna Maria continued studying and began her long career as an artist. Drawing, it was as if she wanted to distance herself from the memories of a childhood spent in a war-torn country and free herself from the demons that the destruction of war had left within her. Maiolino began to push herself towards the creation of a personal dimension, seemingly wanting, right from the beginning, to escape the total control of reason, trying to achieve a sublime, spiritual state in which she could find the potential for human liberation. The most salient feature of Maiolino’s innate metaphysical poetics is, however, that she always remains anchored in rationalism, revealing a strong resistance to anti-humanism. While Maiolino’s imagination draws on spaces that are not even visible to humans, her narrative originates in reality. The artist uses geographically determined places to stir timeless forces. Though they push themselves to describe unknown depths, her works always start from the real. Her dreamlike fantasies do not materialise out of thin air. To get off the ground, they require the stimulus of a setting, an object or a real event. The world around her is her theatre of action, the book from which she draws inspiration. Every place, spatially and temporally delineated, becomes the support for an intrusion of atopic and atemporal forces.

Drawn by the experimental allure of the Brazilian cultural scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Maiolino signed the Manifesto of the Nova Objetividade Brasileira in 1967. Soon after, her work began to spread and grow, feeding in turn her artistic inclinations and visions. In many of her works from that period, abstract compositions and images evoke anatomical parts. The human body is taken apart, filtered and transformed. It is presented in Maiolino’s work as the image of her existence, a nude full of meanings through which the artist expresses the conditions of her life. A hidden image of unfathomable suffering and profound existential anguish. An image that opens itself up to let the gaze of the other penetrate its interior. Through this openness, this subtle fissure, Maiolino tries to enter a world of intimate affections and sensations, in which she talks about her life as a woman and an artist in a world that is hostile and socially opposed to her (a fate shared by many female artists). All of this is expressed in often dream-like scenes at the limits of the surreal, where the body is the main actor. It is the object through which she transforms the world into a graphic or pictorial gesture. What is this form that seems to obsess her to such a degree that talking about her work is like talking about a bodily realm or a corporeality beyond personal history? For Maiolino, the relationships between artistic creation and life, or, if you will, between making art and bodily experience, are two interchangeable ends of a single segment, since in her work, as in few others’, life and art are one and the same. Maiolino identifies so completely with her work that it becomes a kind of alter ego. In this extraordinary feat, the artist effectively completes the fusion between art and artist. Her reiteration of the sign offers an anchor, a secure base that reveals nothing of the artist if not her very self. To those of a modest, prudent nature, this repetition is like a refuge, at times indispensable to the maturation and initial accumulation of one’s forces. To those of a more impetuous, confident nature, it makes it possible to appear decisively and recognisably in public space, even while leaving the whole range of works to come open and available.

After moving with her husband to New York in 1968, Maiolino started to experiment with different artistic languages, developing her work in an extraordinary and unique direction. Employing a broad range of strategies with almost scientific precision, and anticipating the rhetoric of American minimalism, Maiolino has in common with artists like Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape the investigation of the material and visual properties of surfaces, light and colour, in an attempt to create art that is anti-metaphoric, uniform and lacking all reference except to itself. In the work of Maiolino and the Brazilian artists she associates with in those years, the immaterial and the material systematically confront one another. They are all artists whose work speaks to us not so much of the absolute that materializes and makes itself visible, a manifestation of some absoluteness, here and now in the concrete nature of the material, but, on the contrary, of a trace that reveals the material’s self-concealment, its return to an infinite vanishing point that affirms the void, perhaps even nothingness. It speaks of the absolutely other with respect to the epiphany of the absolute in the material. It is as if it were noting a movement that goes in the opposite direction than that of the revelation of the absolute in the material support, the painting, the icon. It speaks not of the manifestation of the invisible in the visible, but rather of the rediscovery of the visible in the invisible. And so, nothingness and the void. Plotinus, who reflected at length on this concept, distinguished between the nothingness above and the nothingness below.1 The nothingness below is the poor, miserable nothingness, the nothingness of annihilation, that imprisons us in a net; it is necessity. The nothingness above is the exact opposite, it is freedom, it is the fact of not having frameworks, something that imposes itself upon and dominates us. And it is the artist who gives us a taste of the possibility of this higher experience of nothingness. Before the work, the artist questions it, tries to understand what it needs to do. That single thing, that gesture, that stretch that rests on nothingness, and so the circle closes. Who, therefore, might be the illustrious influences on these artists? Probably, in my view, Lucio Fontana. Because there is nothing new in Fontana’s gesture, but the essential is there: he is able to sum up that which – for example – Maiolino tries to do with her drawings, which is to say, predispose oneself towards the work knowing that one is guided not by an objective criterion, a principle, a canon, an order, but rather knowing that one is guided simply by something.

Returning to Brazil in 1971, Maiolino again found herself caught up in the horrors of the dictatorship and created her work along an uninhibited path of actions and images, where the most disparate sensations, emotions, unease, disgust, ugliness and rejection coexisted. This is when Maiolino defined and developed her bodily image for the first time. With the expression, ‘image of the human body’2, Paul Schilder defined the mental picture that we create of our body, which is to say the way our body appears to us. We receive sensations, we see parts of the surface of our body, we have tactile sensations, sensations of heat, of pain, sensations coming from muscular innervation and visceral sensations. But beyond all of this is the immediate experience of the existence of a bodily unity, which, if it is true that it is perceived, is on the other hand something more than a perception, it is a ‘framework for our body’, a ‘bodily framework’. The bodily framework is the three-dimensional image that everyone has of themselves and can also be described as a ‘bodily image’. This term indicates that it is not simply a sensation or a mental image, but that the body also takes on a certain appearance (‘postural model’) in reference to itself. It also implies that the image is not simply perception, even if it reaches us through the senses, but involves mental frameworks and representations, even though it is not simply a representation. When, in reference to her performances from those years, Maiolino writes that they were not just symbolic actions, but reality, she is clearly expressing how an interior world that is proclaimed and given visible form can become real just like the world that one actually observes. Also considering that Maiolino’s dimension invests body and mind with force, it is clear that her obsessions and fears are in large part those of the human race, involving it deeply, at the base of its essence of drives and sensations. We have an intake and a production, a tendency to maintain the bodily image within its confines and a tendency to expand and extend it, to keep its parts together and to scatter them everywhere. The deepest intimate forces of the human mind, part and whole, differentiation and integration, find their immediate expression in the postural model of the body, which is cause and effect of constructive and destructive tendencies. The visual images of Maiolino’s performances may or may not be real, but they are in any case the transition point towards an all-encompassing image of the ineludible terror represented by her potential annihilation. It is naturally very difficult, in these cases, to establish the difference between what is an actual change of feelings and perceptions, and so of representations concerning the postural model of the body, and what is a feeling of fear concerning the image of the body. We know that image and perception are based on the same somatic processes, but there are also intellective processes, thought processes, illusory elements concerning the body. Maiolino’s work on the body, its use as a tool for measurement or experience, for fragmentary decoration, its trace, its valorisation as the seat of desire and of pain, its narcissistic or sacrificial behaviour, its eroticisation, the identification of its extraneousness, its role in transgression and its mechanical functioning are all experimental practices from which one launches a form of production defined in terms selected exclusively by the artist, who tackles its creation without any kind of external conditioning. It is by virtue of her unconventional visual imaginary that we often see the word ‘dreamlike’ used in reference to Maiolino’s poetics. Her vision of reality is not, however, a surreal dream, it is just the opposite. Her synthetic and codified signs cannot be dreamlike visions because they are not the result of a process of symbolisation and there is no internal mental space that contains them. In Maiolino, the impulse to make art no longer obeys the rules of the unconscious of classical psychology, it is not subjected to censure and its manifest content does not refer to latent content. The traditional Freudian perspective on the unconscious is not negated here in its overall validity, but in the case of Maiolino, the premises for its full application fall away. This is because the world of the unconscious is a real cage that limits her, and so her images are not a vague dream, but rather a way of externalising her interior reality. One useful approach is that of Donald Meltzer, who explores the ways in which the unconscious creates symbolic forms that can be used to represent emotional and aesthetic experiences.3 Maiolino’s work already provides us with a figurative caption for her poetics: although the intricate context has a clearly organic origin, the images and hues disclose (without revealing the meaning) mixed pulsations of pleasure and pain. Bodily interference with experience was at the centre of the development of Western contemporary art during her formative years, when Maiolino felt herself to be the creator and mouthpiece of something new with respect to her own traditions, and this represented her more emotional and intimate side, the one capable of leading her to her total realisation. With her explicit sexual allusions, for example, the artist plays with the clichés of femininity, making them into conscious satire and, at the same time, using them to promote herself and her work. The extraordinary thing about Maiolino’s particular sculptural form is that it can be easily understood as abstract even though it isn’t, abstract in the sense of a modernist formal logic within which she tries, through the use of traditional mediums like clay, cement and ceramic, to confront reality directly. From this perspective, Maiolino’s sculptural objects can be put in relation with the round, material protuberances of Louise Bourgeois, sculptures that evoke a disruptive and complex sexuality. The meaning of both artists’ work, marked by a seductive violence and incisiveness, is not defined so much through words, but rather as something visceral. It is physical before it is intellectual. Their work goes straight to the point, without intermediation beyond that of the artistic form, appealing to the truth of the body before intellectual comprehension, or rather is a form of defence, a tool for understanding the world and the uncomfortable reality of existence. And the reality expressed by both Maiolino and Bourgeois is indeed uncomfortable. The family traumas, fears and doubts of two women who always resist definitions, whether those of femininity and motherhood or those of creativity and intellectualism. The plurality of material forms used by both artists indicates the same complexity and shared irreducibility to any form of regulation of artistic practice and interior life, which instead intertwine in a tumultuous, rebellious and infinitely dangerous way. A wound that requires comfort from numerous sources, from religion and art to politics and psychoanalysis, attempts to conceal the horrifying nothingness. Fortunately, what awaits us is ‘non-madness’, the appearance of the eternity of all things. We are eternal and mortal because the eternal enters and exits from appearance. Death is a brief absence of the eternal. What sights – if any – reveal themselves, therefore, after death? For Maiolino, the meaning of death goes beyond what is commonly understood by the term. It goes beyond the very opposition of death and immortality. Many contemporary thinkers understand it instead as annihilation, in some cases saving the soul or the consciousness, which continue to have a life of their own. With her art, Maiolino tries to show that the conviction that Eternity can annihilate itself with death is sheer madness. It is the most profound madness possible, not just in the human world but in Everything. Maiolino clearly wants her viewers to see what she ‘sees’. Through this process, the unconscious ceases to be a concrete mental state that imprisons the subject, and becomes anthropophagous, digesting and transforming experience.4 The assertive energy that supports Maiolino’s art seems to consist in the development of a creative system in which the grand imagination replaces the common capacity for assessing one’s own mental processes and those of others. With her imagination, Maiolino feels free to create. She knows that she is exploring a new world that is not yet hers, that she does not yet fully know and that she cannot yet understand. She uses imagination to seek out the reality that has not yet been experienced. When, however, the imagination ceases to have a potential relationship with reality, it itself becomes reality. It functions as a sensory organ that generates and projects outward the data that accumulate in the memory. The reality produced in this way becomes part of memory, where the released patterns are stored in an archive, ready to be reactivated whenever the artist decides to create.

Phenomenology is a method, an approach that entails occupation with the essential forms of the consciousness in which facts appear, which then become phenomena. Once one discovers and accepts that facts and consciousness work together to create phenomena, the philosophy of knowledge is ready to identify the essence and unvarying character of the perceptions (understood as the phenomena of consciousness). One comes to essences by carrying out certain operations, first and foremost phenomenological epoché, suspension of all judgement concerning the reality of the world addressed by consciousness, which makes it possible to achieve two goals: consider that reality only insofar as it is a ‘phenomenon of consciousness’ and perceive consciousness itself and the form of its actions (intentions). Through the deliberate operations of consciousness – which Edmund Husserl called noesi – like desiring, remembering, perceiving and imagining, the object becomes a phenomenon, or rather a lived experience, the only truly real experience. Indeed, the external object can even be something that does not exist, but what presents itself to the consciousness, the noema, always exists.5 Since Maiolino’s art is in fact an analysis of the artist’s human experience, the subject of her investigation can only be the lived experience indicated by phenomenology. The second moment of the phenomenological method is eidetic reduction, an operation that entails the variation of a concept or a perceptive phenomenon, which is to say adding or subtracting aspects to see whether the concept itself remains unchanged. This way, one can see which aspects are truly essential and which are merely accessory. Since eidetic reduction removes all subjective and changeable factors, this method can be used to define the universal contents of consciousness, or better the essential (eidetic) way in which each phenomenon appears (manifests itself) to the consciousness. Through eidetic reduction, the heterogeneous complex of serial phenomena that characterise Maiolino’s work seems to be underpinned by a single element. The presence of a phenomenological approach in the artist’s poetics can be seen in the drive to seek out essences that can always be perceived in her work and in her interest to define and reflect on concepts. Looking closely, phenomenology, together with the method of eidetic reduction, offers the artist a tool for defining her essential concepts, like those of space and time. Maiolino knows that her art is distanced from simple aesthetic definition. The interpretation can never be fully verified and the interpreted object never allows itself to be fully understood; it preserves a certain hardness and hermeticism. To better understand Maiolino’s poetics, one would therefore need to make it less partial and transform it into a form of anthropology, that is, devote more time to the themes of corporeality, sexuality, the animal nature of humankind. The solution expressed by Maiolino in her works is to unhesitatingly think in terms of the ‘what’, and not the ‘who’ or ‘how’, of human existence. This is only possible when one thinks of humankind as an animal species with specific characteristics that are limited, among other things, by its physicality, the properties of its sensory system. Though this type of approach to Maiolino’s complex production might seem reductive, it is worth keeping in mind that the problem of corporeality has consumed Maiolino for much of her career and that, by virtue of this, her art has two advantages: exclusion of all forms of transcendence and obligation to take on reality before any form of imagination. At this point, we see in Maiolino’s work a courageous attempt to rehabilitate the ‘world of surfaces’, the world of the senses. The polemic one can glimpse in Maiolino’s work with a certain Brazilian tradition should be read primarily as opposition to the latter’s aim to reduce the underlying functional structure of the world of phenomena. Comparison between Maiolino and tradition is therefore mainly marked by the problem of the definition of the epistemological statute of the phenomenal world. The powerful condemnation expressed by many of Maiolino’s works is that the senses are all too often considered mere vehicles of information, with no consideration of their real value. The world is not founded, as Descartes believed, by and on judgements (as Husserl put it, avoid the seductive errors made by Descartes and his followers). On the contrary, the world – the world of life – is pre-logical and pre-scientific. Since the rational faculty cannot be presumed in an absolutely fundamental way, sensory experience is the true premise of all experience. Here, the assonance between Maiolino and Merleau-Ponty is extraordinary: both recognise the existence of a world that precedes theoretical knowledge, a world that has not yet been made an object, that is felt before being perceived, that is landscape before it is geographic map, a world in which humankind immediately occupies the centre. A world to which we are all connected, or betterthat ‘pertains’, through one’s own body, well before it becomes the object of theoretical knowledge. For Maiolino, therefore, feeling precedes all knowledge and constitutes the possibility for one’s relationship with the world. To better understand the distinction between feeling and perceiving, one needs to refer to the more general one between the gnostic moment and the pathic moment.6 Feeling is connected to the pathic moment, the moment in which man opens himself to the world and establishes the how of every single sensation. This pathic moment is the moment in which one establishes the original and emotional relationship between the subject and the world. Pathic is when the situation seizes being, the immediate and uncontrollable exchange of the relationship with the world. The gnostic moment is instead the moment of knowledge, the moment in which it is the object that is sensibly and conceptually seized. Art usually deals only with the gnostic moment, with sensations and rarely with feeling, with that which precedes all knowledge and remains at the most primitive stage of lived experience.7 But the difference is absolutely necessary if one wants to reach the depths of Maiolino’s works. This difference between feeling and perceiving clearly references the opposition between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge that – as is well known – can be traced back to the dawn of philosophy, and in particular to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Maiolino’s art is primarily addressed to the place of origin of this practical knowledge: the senses. Modern critics have made objections to the attempt to reassess sensation and its autonomy. To take an example, it has been noted that Maiolino’s gnoseology is unable to distance itself much from the traditional conception of knowledge, since it does not consider sensation in itself as an effective form of knowledge. In this way, Maiolino is seen as continuing, and not even very implicitly, to postulate the existence of a unique and absolute truth – to be known rationally – and the consequential fallibility of the senses, which return to being tools incapable of grasping that truth. In reality, in over fifty years of activity, Maiolino has always laboured to construct the conditions for the possibility of autonomous sensation. The variety of subjective interpretations has always been problematic for the interpretation of her work, but this difficulty can be unravelled if the curvature of one’s thinking on consciousness diverges from that of tradition. It might seem that the apology of the senses nourished by the artist is completed by the conception of knowledge in which the more effective it is, the more capable it is of determining the meaning of a perception in relation to the context. In this sense, the quality of a perception is directly dependent on the perceiving subject and proportional to awareness of its involvement in the culture of reference. What really happens is that Maiolino uses everything that can be provided by anthropological and cultural analysis in order to reach a deeper level of reflection and thus be able to track down the errors that have led and lead to the disparagement of the activity of the senses. Indeed, the main mistake that one can make regarding Maiolino’s work is that of neglecting the ‘feeling’ that precedes sensation. Ignoring the pathic moment leads to a false primacy of sensation, which, without its foundation, becomes merely a minor tool of intellectual knowledge. Sensation is knowledge only if ascribed to the original ‘feeling’, otherwise it necessarily transforms into a handmaiden in the service of reason. This is not enough to understand Maiolino’s art. The reassessment of sensation needs to be interpreted as recognition of the human capacity to establish a preconceptual sympathetic relationship in which the world presents itself as a whole, not divided into units, whether these are sensory perceptions or analytic thoughts. The task of art criticism is to unearth specificity, the way in which the sympathetic relationship with the world is ruined. To use terms dear to phenomenology, we are sensible and impressionable flesh, and the world is matter that impresses this flesh and, in so doing, impresses itself as well. On the contrary, physiological theories isolate the organism and transform matter into stimuli, and sensible flesh into receptors of stimuli, delegating the task of organising the stimuli that come from the world to a consciousness placed beyond the flesh. These theories detach consciousness from the body and the conscious body from its world, ignoring that being conscious is above all ‘pertaining’ to the world through the possibilities of one’s own body. According to Merleau-Ponty, the life of consciousness is underpinned by an intentional arc. This intentional arc constitutes the unity of the senses and of intelligence, that of sensibility and of motility.8 Through this arc, which joins my bodily self to the world, I pertain to the world and consciousness is pertaining to things through the body. My body is not in space like an ordinary object. It inhabits space. What we call ‘consciousness’ is the arc that unites, in a given instant, the intentional object that one stretches towards and the vital background of sensations and activities that resides in the body. Therefore, while the physiological theories distance the organism from its own world-environment, Maiolino’s works, instead, express a world organised into areas with well-defined features, where physiognomy is assigned by the type of relationship between subject and object.

Profound consideration of human corporeality is probably the strong point of Maiolino’s work. It is the element that connects the biological factor to the existential dimension, a theoretical tie that makes it possible to reveal the essence of her works. In 1963, Edwin Straus wrote: ‘The body is the mediator between the I and the world’. On the surface, a consideration of this kind cannot help but lead to the failure of the attempt to get beyond the traditionally understood body/mind dualism, but this difficulty is overcome by the definition of consciousness formulated by phenomenological knowledge: consciousness is a relationship determined by a plurality of factors (historical, cultural, genetic, environmental, etc.). In Straus’s definition of the body, the central element is in reality the very concept of mediation: none of the terms can be understood in and of themselves, but only in the terms established by a relationship, or better by a system of relationships, characterised by opposition and tension, man seeking union with the world and man seeking independence. It seems that Maiolino also categorically rejects the Cartesian separation of body and mind like that between man and world. In line with the phenomenological direction, these relationships seem to be intertwined in the artist’s poetics and the elements in relation are always dialectically dependent. Man and world, body and thought, emerge simultaneously in a necessarily dependent relationship. Maiolino moves in an ‘optical’ space, where movement has an aim, an orientation, a direction, and proceeds from a centre towards a definite point. It is therefore also a ‘historical’ space, in the sense that, due to its formulation, the movement happens in time: as time passes, the occupied position shifts in a certain direction. One can say that optical space is directional space, in terms of both movement and time. These observations on spatiality in Maiolino’s work are not just of artistic-philosophical interest, but also help us to better understand how and to what degree space and its qualities are altered in her works. Specifically, we find an alteration of lived space, the qualities of which cannot be measured and instead have to do with the original features of our relationship with the world, the features defined by the pathic moment, from which all further perception and knowledge derive. The reflections on time that we can make around Maiolino’s work are hand in glove with those on corporeality. The main reason for this is that the original form of the human relationship is essentially physical, it passes through the body and becomes fixed in the opposition between bodies. Maiolino, beyond all considerations assimilable to Merleau-Ponty, reads movement, physical, bodily action, as that which introduces consequentiality into the world. Movement articulates the body with space and time. Moreover, the capacity to move oneself is what makes it possible for man to develop causal thought. The body is not only a symbolic operator that symbolically organises space, it is also that which gives logical shape to thought through movement. Movement is a consequence of desire, physical character is an effect of the monadic soul that awaits external stimulus. Of course, analysis of the temporal structures of consciousness is the most useful thing for interpreting Maiolino’s poetics. The phenomenological method she adopts can be legitimately defined as a method based on historical/psychological categories, inclined to see man as a being in a state of becoming.

Without trying to establish theories or pin down precise definitions, taking instead a more research-like stance, we are moving among Maiolino’s works in a wandering, nomadic way, between her life and her work. The work of art is a synthesis of the intensity, passions and interior life of its creator. Similarly, talking about art is constructing a discourse that converts into a place of resonance where the inclinations of both the artist and the writer combine. Maiolino’s work is the reflection of a mood, the materialisation of a vision of reality that reawakens still unexpressed feelings, those that we can encounter in the womb of a lost time, an image of eternity. It is the perfect harmony of oneself and the innermost essence of its author. The artist’s personal experience, full of meanings, lightens or intensifies the magnitude of her creative work. But up to what point? In art, life and creation are two inextricably linked realities with a force that sometimes surpasses them, and so, the work emerges with a life of its own. Submersed in this environment where the problematic of art often seems melancholy, where artistic practice often finds itself on a road with no exits, what emerges is the work of a woman whose aim has always been wanting to go far beyond herself.

To grasp the intimate relationship between Maiolino’s art and her life, we encounter numerous intriguing oppositions. A curious mix of energy and fragility, exalted enthusiasm and pain. But what relationship does the woman have within the process of artistic creation? How does she tackle the problem of art? What languages and what means does she use? It is indisputable that women’s thought is, in most cases, determined by the structure of their body. A mirror that places them in comparison to their own selves, day after day, a current of existence that is unquestionable and miraculous proof of life itself. The body is a space in continuous becoming where its being is manifested. In the terrain of art, the woman’s body, receptacle of life, nourishes and constantly articulates her conception and work as an artist. It is not, however, my intention to exalt the role of woman in art through the work of Anna Maria Maiolino, nor to polarise her specificity as a woman in artistic creation. I will limit myself to highlighting that the language of the woman artist starts from a specific and concrete reality: the image of the body. A language that makes itself into anatomy, that makes itself into a body, and is, for this reason, other and different. In this regard, I like the idea of comparing the language of Maiolino and that of Eva Hesse, two female artists that I deeply love and that only appear to be very distant from one another. For Hesse, too, the body is a cerebral and physical place where one encounters life and death. The sense of discomfort and fragility that Hesse reveals comes from a difficult past, made up of fear of Nazi persecution and marked by family tragedy, including her mother’s suicide. An obsessive discomfort that often led the artist towards self-destruction, as well as the destruction, by her own hand, of almost all of her works. Maiolino and Hesse structure understanding of identity and art through a simple criterion of free association among materials, capable of bringing out their innermost qualities. The two artists apply this practice to both artificial and natural materials, as well as to the concept that underpins cerebral and physical identity. This relational dynamic, which exalts contrasts, programmatically acquires a markedly feminine charge in their work. There is, therefore, for both artists, a conversation or reference to the inside and the outside (internal/external) that converges in the maternal and fetal setting. In their poetics, femininity is clear not only in the quality of the materials used or in the choice of round and circular forms, but most of all in their way of evoking the organic female side of the material. According to Maiolino and Hesse, materials contain all of their energy within them and it is the task of the artist to control and position it. In a formal sense, the circular figuration (closed circle as introspective vision) that distinguishes the work of both Hesse and Maiolino highlights the psychological character and sexual aspect of their art. Through these formal characteristics, their art also acquires a certain erotic, as well as female, connotation. In reality, these aspects imply a more complex discipline, made up of constant, critical work on identity and society. Pursuing this path of inquiry led me to read Didier Anzieu on the production of the work by the hand of its maker and the way in which the artist projects the image of his own body into his work.9 Although Anzieu’s writing is limited to study of literature (with the exception of the last part of his book Le corps de l’oeuvre, where he discusses the work of Francis Bacon), I draw on some of his ideas to explain Maiolino’s relationships with her art and the form in which her works take shape, starting with the intensity and force with which the artist represents herself in the world. The image of the body is one of the cornerstones of the thought of a woman artist. This is manifested through an intimate, interiorising way of understanding things, which she expresses through a language of metaphors, silences, discontinuities and contrasting feelings, an extraordinarily ambivalent and secret language, close to poetry. Maiolino employs the real or translated image of the body as a privileged place of reference to use in relation to the outside. Put another way, through it, phenomena that come from outside – including the phenomenon of art – find resonance in the internal structure of the body, in its anatomy and in its thinking. Through her art, Maiolino transmits a painfully fascinating world, made up of the emotions and sensations of her life as a woman. Since much of Maiolino’s work is linked to her personal life, the artist reveals desires and obsessions in her works that highlight an inclination towards suffering, passion, pain, death and a revolutionary form of love, themes that take hold of her and appear as recurrent images in her work. The individual experience comes through in such a forceful and authentic way that it transcends its purely personal character, becoming increasingly universal. This is why Maiolino approaches her works as a flow of intensity, like a movement of energies expressed in organic images and strong, decisive, acid hues, lines of force that form the foundation of her art. This explains the importance of the image of the body in this universe, an image from which one weaves the language of forms to construct a work that cannot be broken down into structures, but where the body seems to absorb and influence the artistic form, infusing it with a biological rhythm that makes it eminently alive. Absent, silent, immobile, paralysed, imprisoned bodies. In Maiolino’s works, we encounter an image of the body that functions as the centre and master of the space, from which everything seems to enter into a disquieting dialectic of the I and the Other. From the most ingenuous representations – if one can ever call this artist’s works ingenuous – to the metamorphoses in clay, ceramic, cement and even glass, the body is for her a setting where everything can happen, a setting where something goes to free itself, the setting of being. It is in fact thanks to the body that the existence of the world and of things is revealed to us as something ‘given’, that ‘is there’, before all reflection and all scientific knowledge. There is also a spontaneous relationship between the world and the body that is expressed by the desire to grasp things from their origin, to find simple, ingenuous contact with the world, to discover things in the relation in which they look towards all bodily individuality.

In a word, from the desire to discover the act of feeling. This is, in synthesis, the aim of Maiolino’s phenomenology. Within this close relationship, we find an interchange between the I (body) and the You (world), which indicates the presence of reversibility. In Merleau-Ponty, this reversibility or ‘chiasm’, as he called it, is the passage that makes it possible for us to exist in the magical flow that goes from us to the world and from the world to us. But why air the problem of phenomenology here, and compare it to the conception of an artist for whom the creative act is situated at the delicate border between the experience of the body and the outside world? Perhaps because Maiolino decodifies and institutes a language through this long interior journey of the body, trying to understand and project what happens within it. In the universe of this artist, empathy and coexistence between her body and the world are thus subject to a constant process of imbrication. There is an intimate, close relationship between her image and the outside world. Maiolino’s – real or imaginary – body is present in almost all of her work, even if we do not see it represented. It weaves a web of challenging situations and figures that sometimes awaken confusion in the viewer, other times clear distress. It is here, in this close relationship between bodily experience and the creation of forms and figures, that her work develops and where the structure of the ‘chiasm’ can be found. Given the artist’s profound awareness of the body, it is converted into the sole vehicle of her being through the world, and so it will be in the centre of the visible. Her body is the imperceptible end that all things look towards. It is the support of her universe. Placing it, in most cases, in a strategic situation in which the body connects it directly to the other elements of the representation, especially in the case of works where she is not represented objectively, there is an absolute prevalence of the body serving as background for the relative prevalence of the forms around her. The transcendence of the body is in fact what characterises her works. Narcissism? Probably. However, is it not perhaps true that there is a fundamental narcissism at the basis of everything? Since the body is what shapes things and, conversely and simultaneously, things shape the body, it projects itself into the world and the world is reflected in it. The image of the body, centre of figuration, thus converts into the receptacle of all visibility. It is the beginning and the end of her universe. Through her image, Maiolino shapes the whole of her work like something that is part of her very definition, like an annex of her own self, an extension of her being.

Maiolino’s path as an artist, made up of investigation and experimentation, also transmits an apparently incomprehensible outpouring of eroticism. A sexuality that displays itself – in her sculptures as well as in her drawings and paintings – in all of its vulnerability, and in the end leads to that explosion of pleasure that Georges Bataille described as a ‘little death’.10 After coitus, the two individuals involved in the sexual act return to being discontinuous and perceive this moment as an agonizing abyss. The sexual act is attractive in the same way as death, since both reveal themselves to man initially as moments of continuity, an image that is, however, quickly replaced by the discontinuity that in fact characterises their true nature. The attraction is an expectation, an illusion of continuity that is thwarted by sex and death. The expectation becomes tension, fear, anguish. And to remove this tension, the individual strains to fill his life with a whole series of little deaths, experiences that bring him to thwart, if only for an instant, the discontinuity that makes him alone and keeps him from communicating with other individuals. The erotic component that Maiolino evokes through her work always seems to have this destructive aspect, this breach. But this breach, being proper to human sexuality, profoundly, secretly belongs by rights to pleasure. The principle of eroticism initially appears to be the exact opposite of this paradoxical horror. It is the plethora of genital organs, an animal movement within us that stands at the origin of our existence. But the eagerness of the organs is not ‘free’, it can only unburden itself with the concourse of will. As a place of opposites, eroticism triggers a fracture in subjects, a wound that, in the act of little death, ensures that they transgress themselves and go beyond their own limits. What one is attempting to achieve is the Impossible.11 Maiolino’s eroticism is nothing more, therefore, than a pretext for reaching the Infinite, its Impossible, the stage that is the goal of most of her art. The sexual act therefore summarises all contradictions, its characteristic of continuity sums up the discontinuous being of man and woman and draws them near one another in an interior experience close to the Impossible. And the Impossible is no other than suspension, non-sense, the moment of passage through the breach that is itself Impossible, the instant of the dissolution of the I before that passage is complete.

A place of contradiction, therefore, and of the synthesis of opposites: fullness and fragmentation, horror and enjoyment, coincide in an intolerable excess of being. This unsustainable excess is joined by that of thought, which is thwarted and wiped out by excess. Indeed, excess wipes out consciousness, and expression – because extreme – demands not so much abandonment as expulsion from consciousness. Being is unrecognized by itself. Not only that, the paradox is accentuated in eroticism because eroticism is the sexual activity of a conscious being. Maiolino provides a visual representation of this awareness of the excess of thought and of its expression: the Impossible, as suspension of the speakable, is an un-said, or better, an un-speakable, pictured through – for example – protruding blots of paint on paper or canvas or in deep furrows dug into the material. Where the Impossible is, there is only silence, and it is an anguished silence. In Bataille, the body is, however, an accumulation of malodorous entrails; like the rose, it, too, contains within it the idea of its end. Here, there is never ecstatic contemplation of a canonical beauty, there are never proportionate members that fascinate the narrator’s eye, the body is only attractive in its most obscene, most desperate projections, and ecstasy is associated with the pain consonant with sacrifice.12 In Maiolino, instead, although there is recognition of painful beauty and pain is paired with ecstasy, the body has a powerful universe in which it enjoys all of the attentions it is due. But because it is indeterminable, the essence of erotic desire can oscillate between degrees of repulsion, of the fascination with the obscene, between the Bataillean iconoclast who destroys bodies and that of Maiolino who, before losing them, establishes them as an example of absolute beauty. One can therefore state – basing oneself on the distinction that Mario Perniola made within the eroticism ‘phenomenon’, namely that between iconoclast eroticism and libertine eroticism – that the Bataillean statute belongs to the former, which is to say iconoclast, while the one relative to Maiolino’s belongs to the latter, libertine. We thus find in her work an intimate correspondence between the body and the outside, an animation that the body makes of everything that surrounds it. Through this line of force, that of her own anatomy, Maiolino’s art envelops her being, leading it to a world where the frontiers between art and the body tend to disappear the very minute that feelings are profoundly experienced and sensations and pains intensely felt. Beginning from a bodily creation, or better from a bodily identification through the work of art, the individual comes to the wondrous ‘erotic/aesthetic’ pact evoked in many of Maiolino’s works. An art where we find a double play of eroticism and aesthetic pleasure, where the body is simultaneously the theme and object of artistic creation.13 In Maiolino’s work, one never talks about indestructibility, but rather about the consumption (corruption) of the body and about death as a necessary condition of life. A work of art and a sacrifice both participate in the search for a sacred moment that goes beyond secular time, where prohibitions ensure the possibility of life. To better clarify the meaning of Maiolino’s aesthetic propositions, one can make a comparison with some of Yayoi Kusama’s ideas on the same theme. Of course, the working methods and aims of the two artists are very different. Kusama assimilates an extreme, painful, sometimes masochistic, form of pleasure; Maiolino, instead, through her uncomfortable but inoffensive phallic protuberances, moves towards an aim of bodily liberation. What unites them is the desire of both artists to make their art a real science of man that tries to be connected to all of the forces of the unconscious, to the memory of man, of the sacred, of the mind and of death, to restore the consciousness’s original force. It is thus necessary to experience one’s own body, or reveal its weakness, the tragic and merciless servitude of its limited nature, wear and precariousness, become aware of its phantoms, which are none other than the reflection of the myths created by society.

Without wanting to go too far with the psychoanalytical vision of Maiolino’s work, I am reminded of what I have read about the ‘Electra complex’ as an alternative interpretation of some of her works with a more explicit appearance and graphic content. Jung theorised this inclination of the female psyche in his 1913 book The Theory of Psychoanalysis.14 Freud openly repudiated the theory in an article published in 1931, deeming aberrant Jung’s idea that the sexes have symmetrical positions towards parent figures.15 And yet, it must be noted that Freud had long held that – mutatis mutandis – the Oedipal complex attributed to the male child could be transposed as-is to the case of the female child. This postulate was then demolished by his theory of the infantile genital organisation of the libido, according to which there is only one organ that is important  to both sexes during the phallic stage (and so at the height of the Oedipal complex), which is the phallus, and by the progressive promotion of the pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother. This pre-Oedipal phase is particularly manifest in female children, since for them the Oedipal complex entails the shift of the object of love from the mother to the father. The female Oedipal complex therefore has distinctive features. The loss of the phallus, which male children experience as consequential to a punishment, is instead an assumption in female children: they discover right from the beginning that they do not have one and do not perceive its current absence as a sexual characteristic, supposing instead that they had one before and were later deprived of it. In his late writings, Freud accentuated the female child’s recognition of this absence and her blame of her mother for it, who also, for that matter, does not have one. The deprivation of the penis is tolerated, but not without an attempt at revenge. On another front, however, the void – widely represented by the numerous cavities in Maiolino’s sculptural works – evokes a situation of vacuousness, solitude, loss or the unknown, and is connected to the sublime, not in descriptive terms, or rather that which is beautiful or majestic, but instead in an emotional and psychological sense, like something that inspires subjection and can provoke terror, almost a return to the origins, a regeneration, which can, however, be experienced as a regressus ad uterum, a ‘return to the uterus’ (a phrase often used in initiation rites).

It is a symbolic return to a particular primordial state that unites all human beings. This regression only apparently leads back to the mother. In reality, it is the door to the unconscious. Indeed, when undisturbed, regression does not stop at the mother, it goes beyond her to reach an eternal prenatal feminine, the primordial world of archetypal images.16 In Maiolino, we find a reassessment of regression, conceived as a premise indispensable for all spiritual rebirth. In a critical moment of existence, man is given the task of changing life, changing mind. Man is frightened, he hesitates and then – often – he decides it will be better to flee back in time and find refuge in his own fantasies. Roland Laing writes that regression can be understood by individuals as a return to conception before they can change and resume advancement, and he describes it is a ‘journey’ (backwards and then again forwards) that leads to a transformation of a potentially liberating kind, for which he proposes the term metanoia.17 The subject therefore not only discovers the true reason for his infantile cravings but, pushing himself beyond himself, enters the sphere of the collective psyche, first entering the fabulous realm of collective ideas and then that of creativity. Metanoia indicates the path that man needs to take to achieve his own individuation: touch the bottom of the unconscious to then go back up again and rise in a newer and truly authentic form. Metanoia means ‘change of mind’: it is a journey that leads to a profound transformation of the self and each of us tries to undertake it at a particular moment in our lives. It is a journey that goes backwards, a regression to primitive stages of development, which Maiolino travels through her works, to then once again return to moving forward towards the acquisition of a renewed self. The goal is to live forever in eternal return.

Published Anna Maria Maiolino. O Amor se Faz Revolucionário, Milano, PAC e Silvana Editoriale, 2019

Published in Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019)

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1 Plotino, Enneadi, II, edited by Giuseppe Faggin, Bompiani, Milan, 2010. Published in English as Plotinus, The Enneads, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

2 Paul Schilder, Immagine di sé e schema corporeo, Franco Angeli Editore, Milan, 1973, pp. 36–41. Originally published as Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1950 (first edition 1933).

3 Donald Meltzer, La vita onirica. Una revisione della teoria e della tecnica psicoanalitica, Borla, Rome, 1989, pp. 53–54. Originally published as Donald Meltzer, Dream-Life: A Re-Examination of the Psycho-Analytical Theory and Technique, Clunie Press, Perthshire, 1984.

4 See Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago, 1928: ‘Only Anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The only law in the world. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.’

5 Cristian Muscelli and Giovanni Stanghellini, ‘L’approccio fenomenologico di Erwin Straus’,  introductory note to Erwin Straus, Sull’ossessione, Giovanni Fioriti Editore, Rome, 2006, p. 8–9.

6 Mauro Carbone, ‘Della differenza tra il sentire e il percepire’, introductory note to Erwin Straus, ‘Della differenza tra paesaggio e geografia come differenza tra il sentire e il percepire’, translated by Andrea Pinotti, in Estetica 1995, il Mulino, Bologna, 1996, pp. 283–300. Originally published as ‘Vom die Verschiedenheit des Empfindens und des Wahrnehmens’, in Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegungen der Psychologie, Springer, Berlin, 1935.

7 Erwin Straus and Henri Maldin ey, L’estetico e l’estetica, edited by Andrea Pinotti, Mimesis, Milan, 2005, p. 81.

8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologia della percezione, Bompiani, Milan, 2005, p. 191. Published in English as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Londra 1962.

9 Catherine Chabert, Didier Anzieu, Armando, Rome, 2000. Originally published as Catherine Chabert, Didier Anzieu, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.

10 Georges Bataille, L’erotismo, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan, 1969, pp. 87–97. First published in English as Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality. A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, Walker & Company, New York, 1962. According to Bataille, eroticism expresses the continuous reference between horror and carnal pleasure, final pain and unsupportable joy. This is why this irresistible transport coincides, ultimately, with death, anticipated by the ‘little death’ of erotic relations.

11 Georges Bataille, op. cit., p. 110.

12 Mario Perniola, ‘L’iconoclasma erotico di Bataille’, in Philosophia Sexualis, Ombre Corte, Verona, 1998, p. 142.

13 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, Pantheon, New York, 1988, p. 60.

14 Carl Gustav Jung, Saggio di esposizione della teoria psicoanalitica (1913), vol. IV of Opere, Boringhieri, Turin, 1973. Published in English as ‘The Theory of Psychoanalisis’, in Carl Gustav Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1961. The name comes from the mythological figure of Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The latter had the former killed by her lover Aegisthus, and when Electra found out who was responsible for the death of her father, she got revenge, killing her mother. In my interview with Maiolino for this exhibition (published in the present catalogue), Jung’s name was often cited among the artist’s readings.

15 Sigmund Freud, Sessualità femminile (1931), vol. XI of Opere, Boringhieri, Turin, 1989. Published in English as S. Freud, Female Sexuality. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, Hogarth Press, London, 1953–1974.

16 Carl Gustav Jung, Libido. Simboli e trasformazioni, Boringhieri, Turin, 1965, p. 323. First published in English as Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, a Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle, Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, 1916.

17 Ronald Laing, ‘Metanoia’, Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, no. 2, April–June 1971, pp. 1–4. Published in English as Ronald Laing, ‘Metanoia: Some Experiences at Kingsley Hall’, in Going Crazy: The Radical Therapy of R. D. Laing and Others, edited by Hendrick M. Ruitenbeek, Bantam Books, New York, 1972.

Maiolino’s Earthen Work or Enfooded Art

Catherine de Zegher

Anna Maria, why are you so upset, why don’t you lose yourself in clay…

--Victor Grippo, 1989

The water that previously joined the ink invading the sheet of paper and drawing on the whiteness of the paper is now a milk of coagulating plaster ready to petrify and register the marks that the clay has left in the mould.

--Anna Maria Maiolino, 1989

At the end of the 1980s, out of love and fury, Anna Maria Maiolino begins to move from paper to bas-relief. Her gesturing hand connects drawing and sculpting in what is to become a vivid interaction rather than the drawing being only in a preparatory relation on paper. Emerging from the conquest of the tactile in the moist masses of clay, her early sculptural wall objects that constitute the New Landscape series (1989–1990) resemble relief maps. Although the contact of the hand with the clay is very sensual, the touch overwhelms Maiolino with another strong sense, that of being inside the solid — a handhold as it were. Hence, in her own hands, she discovers a new landscape, a new language, and a new soil…

Dealing with the wounding difficulties a migrant inevitably encounters — one mouth too many and incomprehensible speech—Maiolino’s work, from the very beginning, relates landscape to food to language and language to food to landscape. Attached to a vanished space and always feeling elsewhere, she belongs nowhere, except at the nexus of two othernesses, the having been and the endlessly deferred. This diagonal structure in her work can be read as what we can imagine as a chiasm, in which there is a repetition starting at the outside and moving to the intersection.1 It seems the artist’s life is filled with a resonance and reasoning cut off from the body’s bittersweet memory of childhood in another land: the mother’s tongue and breast. In order to be perfectly assimilated within the language of others, Maiolino is prepared for utmost effort and apprenticeship, asserting herself in, and through, hard labour — most apparent in her earthen work. According to Julia Kristeva, the foreigner is hardworking, “as if work were the chosen soil, the only source of possible success, and above all the personal, steadfast, nontransferable quality, but fit to be moved beyond borders and properties.”2

While childhood in her native Scalea (Calabria, Italy) leaves after-images on the retina of her memory, it is in Rio that Maiolino percipiently moves into experimental propositions that go to the heart of many pressing issues of contemporary art: space/time, the environment, the body, movement, the relation of the visual to the other senses, the status of the art object, the relation of the artist to the audience, and authorship. In 1967, she participates in the New Brazilian Objectivity exhibition organized by Helio Oiticica, which included works by Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, among others. Like these artists, Maiolino proposed a non-objective art within a participatory relationship of the audience aimed at the collective, and challenging ethical, social, and political determination. Resisting the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1984, many artists attempted to outwit censorship. During this period of brutal repression, Maiolino remains compelled by the way in which a freedom of expression, so critical of convention, is experimented with, and significantly persisted in Brazil. At the same time, desperately needing to establish herself in a definite place, she is drawn to these artists’ vivid experiences of the sensorial body in relation to the work of art. She eventually comes to identify with the new country’s culture and art.

Maiolino’s encounters with Oiticica, and even more so with Clark, have an impact on the development of her work. As co-founders of the Neo-Concrete movement (1959–1961), they proposed in the Manifesto Neoconcreto “to look for an equivalent to the work of art, not in the machine, or even the object as such, but…in living organisms.”3 In the first stages of her oeuvre, Clark holds to some Constructivist principles, such as the importance given to the material’s properties and the perception of structures generated through their action. In The Inside is the Outside (1963), Clark’s proposal of the “organic” is concerned with the fusing of opposites—inside and outside, the subjective and the objective, the erotic and the ascetic—and is marked by the rebellion against the dissociating experience of what she calls the “empty-full” in subjectivity. This dialectics of division that usually governs all thought of inside and outside, positive and negative, black and white, runs through Maiolino’s work but rather as chiasmic entity swirling from and to another being. For her, these qualities now suggest existence of fullness in the empty.

Maiolino’s exploring of paper and clay and their corporeity situates the work very close to Neo-Concrete practices, giving greater attention to the process of constructing than to what is constructed. Although her interest is similarly directed towards both the immediacy of the operation and the inevitable bodily connotation, she also tries to dissolve oppositions between subject and object, artist and spectator, nature and culture. Equally important as the exterior space is what Clark describes as “the feeling of a deep space inside ourselves”—the relation of a real outside space to an imaginary interior one. It is within the trivial tasks in every home that Maiolino finds a way to draw forth her moulded earthen work and to connect the subject with our primitive memory.

In a landscape of the quotidian

But it is the clay itself that showed me the method by which it should be worked. The archaic system of so-called little rolls [rolinhos] or little coils [cobrinhos], used by ceramists down through time, is imposed on the hand by the clay, as are the primary actions of ordering the matter, such as kneading, stretching, cutting, rolling, and pressing. From these actions come the basic forms: the little rolls, the little balls. These forms began to incorporate my language and later my discourse.

--Anna Maria Maiolino

Maiolino’s clay sculptures result from gestures that are repeated over and over each day, without our being aware of them, in the preparation of food, driven by primordial impulses and vital actions in the process of life. Initially, her sculptural process follows the familiar method of casting, developing in three phases: the object is moulded in clay (a positive) to execute the mould (a negative) of the final form cast in plaster or cement (a positive). Shaped through this process, the Others series (1990–1995) and the Codicilli series (1993–2000) assemble signs of a new language just as they resemble food displayed on a tray—in this, reminiscent of Piero Manzoni’s Achromes (1961–1962) with bread rolls and kaolin on canvas. Maiolino’s moulding gestures, paralleling the tasks of “la cucina italiana,” increasingly come to manipulate the earth as dough. In her body of work, form is at once dynamically affirmed and annulled, as she writes, “in search for an identification that never ends, thereby necessitating the action of another gesture to sustain desire.” It is within this action of the hand that positive and negative collapse into one another. Seeking confirmation of a subjectivity within a multiplication of clay forms, the artist, in an endless proliferation of drives, now invades the museum space with an installation of which each piece is made from one and another mould: One, None, One Hundred Thousand (1993).

During the 1990s, as the banal evidence of the doing hand in daily life moulds the clay, the working process itself seems to bifurcate, taking Maiolino’s sculpture along two parallel paths. One leads to works that find their final shapes in the arrest of the casting procedure at the second phase in the execution of the mould. The work is the retrieved negative itself in The Shadow of the Other no. I series (1993), The Absentees (1993–1996), It’s What’s Missing series (1995–2001), and In & Out series (1995). As Maiolino describes, “The titles of these works refer to the existence of the opposite, the absent positive that has been separated from the negative. They form only one body at a given moment during the process of making the moulded sculpture. Thus, the process of those works incorporates the nostalgia for the matrix.” The mould, usually forgotten and discarded, she continues, “is endowed with new value by the emphasis given to its generative properties, to the vacant space, in which the memory of the other exists in its not being there: the positive-present in absence.”4 Like in her Print Objects and Drawing Objects (1974-76), Maiolino repeats the attempt to make the reverse side of the paper, the negative, active and participatory.

As to the second path, it leads to works that assimilate the first and third phases of the casting procedure consisting only of the hand-made positive forms, all the same and different, paradoxically propagating like pre-industrial craft objects on an assembly line. In Many (1995) and More than One Thousand (1995) from the installation series Terra Modelada/Moulded Earth, the clay is worked on site and left to dry without any mould. This series first starts with a large-scale installation at the Beguinage of Kortrijk in Belgium.5 As Maiolino writes, “The work is the basis of these works. I would say that all of them really are part of one work. They change depending on the spaces where they are made and where they are deposited with their balls and rolls of clay. These basic shapes result from the few basic ways that hands can perform.”6 The cumulative process allows her to knead a larger amount of matter in a shorter period of time; but the time consumed in the elaboration of tons of clay remains contingent upon the factual accretion of the moulded forms in space, since the sculpture can grow as long as it continues to store shapes of the gesture at any moment and place in time, there being no prediction for its final configuration.

In chiasmic lines, Maiolino aligns her daily gestures of preparing food in her earthen work with the gestures of the potter or ceramist arranging rolls and circling coils of clay to create the earthenware, which will then in turn come to hold the food and drinks. Obversely, when it is used, each bowl can circle back to the earthen floor on which it once sat. When encountering the sculpturally held in Maiolino’s works, the eye seems to meet the hand and to reawaken our body’s own living chiasm of hand and eye. But more significantly, the mouth along with the “alimentary” or food-oriented body is brought fully into this tactility. According to Samuel Mallin, when considering prehistoric pottery, like a Minoan bowl, “we can sense how the dark colour on the inside of the bowl continues over the upper lip and, as such, helps to dissolve the distinction between outside and inside…The shape seems to give us a hold in order that we can join a line of alimentary being-in-the-world that runs through both us and nature in a unifying way. On the one hand, this line extends swirlingly through the bowl into the natural world and its nourishments that [the earth] holds up towards us. On the other hand, it swirls back intensively, and enlivening ourselves by means of our action of taking up the bowl and holding its hold. All the while, the eye and hand can dance and leap in and around it, both helping to direct, and rejoicing in, all these chiasmic interchanges, including that of passing it around communally.”7

Turned around by the potter and then mediating between the food that the bowl holds round, and the artist drawing it forth, and the viewer eventually taking it in, Maiolino’s art introduces one of the ways for our bending to nature through ingestion and digestion. With our tools and institutions food—literal or spiritual—is drawn forth, and hence our current inability to sense nature within our food can be considered. Because of our current calculated and aggressive production and distribution of food, and its final superficial consumption, the relation to our equipment for preparing and serving a meal is closely connected to our era’s uncommon use of any functional tool to create art.8 Consequently, Maiolino leads us to a new way of understanding art and how “we are bound in living chiasms (non-reductive crisscrossing influences) to one another, but also to non-human, natural or technical beings, which similarly are bound back into this same deepening-deep.”9 Ultimately, the artist undoes divisions into simple diametrical oppositions that can result in alienation and aggression, while she merges opposites in crosswise diagonal arrangements so that they constitute a reversal of parallels. This is how in becomes out, and negative becomes positive, and vice versa... Rooted in a profundity of being, the gestures of the artist, particularly in her inversion of the perspective on outside and inside (in the same way, for example, as the printing process generates a reversal of the image in the engraving), make us conscious of our continual hesitation between security “in here” or freedom “out there.”

From bowl to bowel

The alimentary is a region of our existence that most philosophers and even Merleau-Ponty missed and is one that wonderfully integrates the fourfolded particularities of our earths, skies, communities, and eras. We sense here how we can relate to nature with our eating, but also how fully allied and unalienated eating can become to building, art-making and even thinking, for we guide and steer this alimentary line of nature with human drawings of every kind which turn round it throughout its whole course.

Furthermore, it becomes progressively clearer here how lineate our lives are, as we draw round everything we encounter, use, take in, give out, love or fear; for example by cutting, carving, twining, thatching, weaving, coiling, forging, nurturing, caring, reasoning, constructing, planning, writing, and computing.

--Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought

Born during the chaos and terror of World War II, Maiolino considers it her task to challenge and disarm the modern subject as fascistic subject.10 As an artist, she celebrates precisely the “dark” forces that most frighten it: sexuality, jouissance, the unconscious, surrendering it to detachment and fragmentation. She proceeds by drawing in, out and forth, and sculpting abject subject matter—like the domestic and the scatological deemed inappropriate by conservative culture—or by performing and filming (often feminine) body parts mocking the ideal of plenitude. In her intriguing super-8 film In-Out, Antropofagia (1973), which has no linear narrative but has a montage of all the “ingredients” characteristic of Maiolino’s art, the scene features the in and out movement, the open and closed mouth, the red of the lips, the thread of chiasmic drawn and spoken lines, and… the egg. The first appearance of the egg in her film work is linked to ideas of fertility and sustenance. In the 1920s, both principles had been advanced by artist Tarsila do Amaral and writer Oswaldo de Andrade as crucial to forging a future Brazil. In meshing modernist movements, first Futurism and later Primitivism, with their country’s African heritage, the couple formulated the modern Brazilian theory of a cultural melting pot: Antropofagia (Cannibalism). Amaral, in her paintings Urubu (1928) and Antropofagia (1929), and Andrade, in his Manifesto Antropofago (1928), where he declared “Only Cannibalism unites us,” searched for a hybrid national culture in which spiritual, native, African and European elements were brought together. Andrade’s manifesto became the textbook of twentieth-century art in Brazil, including the Neo-Concretist movement and the social relevance of its art.

In the 1970s, Maiolino developed strategies from Neo-Concretism that, for a while, paralleled those of Clark’s, concerning modern art being faced with one of its most pressing issues: the reconnection of art and life—a connection believed to have been ruptured. Their aim is “liberating the artistic object from its formalist inertia and its mythifying aura by creating ‘living objects’ in which could be glimpsed the forces, the endless process, the vital strength that stirs in everything…freeing the spectator from his or her soporific inertia.”11 Touching upon the theory of Antropofagia and reclaiming access to the body as a hybrid site of a permanent reinvention of existence, Clark increasingly explores the therapeutic potential of her artistic proposition through her “relational objects,” while Maiolino promotes subjectivity as relational, constituted from the vibrant dynamic of moulding oneself in an encounter with the other through the pulsing and chiasmic life in all daily things and events.

Insisting on the idea of “living organisms” in regards to art, Maiolino took part in the exhibition Vagrant Myths in 1978 with two radical projects: Monument to Hunger consisting of two sacks, one of white rice and one of black beans,12 tied together with a ribbon and placed on a table in a square; and Scatological State featuring various types of toilet paper mounted on a street wall. The works evidence of activity at both opposite ends of the alimentary canal that flows as an imaginary line of transformation between them. In their relation with the vital process, these works do not propose mimesis or an expression of life in its constituted organic forms, but the incarnation, within the work, of life as a creating impulse. Maiolino’s search to reintegrate life and art through food and faeces is rooted in materialism, in George Bataille’s base materialism, as well as in Deleuzian vitalism. Distinguished from its evolutionist and mechanistic forms that turn into ideas of necessity and finality, this vitalism is based on the notion of life’s creativity, the permanent genesis of the world, and productivity.13

By exhibiting these two projects together—one work about the basic foods of Brazil, the other about the basic necessity of defecation—Maiolino connects what goes in and out of every body. In Scatological State, where the materials range from the most expensive toilet paper to the cheapest, from newspaper to plant leaves, she points to the state of equality among us all, even if the State and its systems continuously try to institute hierarchy. The work deals ironically with the pretensions of the rich consumer and with the market, which strives to confer status and differentiation through the most common bodily denominator. The digestive tract, that lies between in and out, and its transforming capacity can be likened to the artistic trajectory, and its unforeseeable becomings, as a commonalty, equal and accessible among us all. Here art is not about an image or sense of the world expressed by the artist as the transference of myths, but about the power of permanent creation in the sensing of self and the earth, which every person, as a living being, eventually possesses. The dual works presented in the Vagrant Myths exhibition, invoking oral and anal somatic processes, were crucial to Maiolino’s approach to the body, exemplifying its ability to create through its orifices onto paper. From the very beginning, the early painted high-relief and woodcut of the same title, Glu.. Glu.. Glu…, picture this idea in what can be considered as a chiasmic scene. Depicted in the upper part is a bust with its mouth wide open in front of food, and in the lower part an alimentary canal (in the high-relief) and a toilet (in the woodcut). Between the Two from the Constructed Projects series with its formalist paper structure, and Untitled (1981) from the Primers series with its representation of a water closet, anticipate the explicit materialization in later works of her purpose to awaken the perception of the transformative vitality in all, and not only in the artist.

From relief to relief

The topological accumulation of these same/different forms, like the sight of a tilled field with its imprints of man and cultivation, is moving. The clay is shown to be fulfilling the material destinies ordained for it. It transforms with dehydration, dries on exposure to the air, turns into stone, and cracks. It is in a state of surrender to what the future holds for it. Beyond doubt, one day it will return to dust. And once more, when blended with water, it will add new forms to the physical processing of matter, sustaining my desire.

--Anna Maria Maiolino, “Works in Processes,” unpublished text, March 1, 1997.

The artist identifies herself as the ploughwoman of language, the cultivator who steadily and laboriously cleaves, cuts, lifts, and turns over the soil to prepare a seedbed and infuse the earth with a faecal fertilizer. The discharge in her earthen work is, in fact, a matter of uprooting oneself from that clinging “remnant of earth,” that “Erdenrest” to which Goethe refers at the end of the second Faust: “Earth remnants molest us / To bear them is toil / Were they asbestos / They still would soil.”14 Whether praised or condemned, every time shit erupts in human history, rehearsing the ambivalent condition of the Erdenrest, woman and man are revealed in their earthiness as eternally, hopelessly soiled.15 Henceforth loose, without casts, Maiolino’s elemental clods or excremental forms in the Terra Modelada/Moulded Earth series multiply and accumulate in heaps proliferating into space like an eruption out of a mysterious geological time. Her immediate affinity with moist clay translates into sculpture that recalls remnants of unpredictable and cataclysmic upheavals of the earth’s surface. But even more so, as mentioned above, her earthen work with its rolls and coils alludes to earthenware, by which we draw food to ourselves and which completes “the process of drawing it from the earth and sky by means of drawing lines in the world at each step with ploughs, irrigation channels, fences, shelters, fish nets, and so on.”16 Food is drawn out from the earth and by means of earthenware brought up to humans. Sustaining the relation of the clay to the elements of earth, water, air, and fire, Maiolino materializes their chiasmic lines in her large clay installations. With caring gestures, she tenderly tends to the lines coming forth and brings them into sinuous relations with the human body and needs.

Referring to the earth’s power—eschatological and scatological—to suddenly shift, split, and excrete, Maiolino’s work also establishes a connection to language and its subversion. Conflating the “highest” forms of consciousness with the “basest” of human products (most explicitly in Scatological State), she hands excrement back to the fields of cultural production and consumption whose proper operation depends on its repression. As the artist maps the construction of the “I” across private and public spheres, she realizes that the policing of language and the politics of shit converge. This occurs in such a way that sometimes the history of faecal matter can be said to offer a detailed history of institutional efforts shaping an official language, “focusing on the instrumental role of a streamlined and rationalized language in the construction of a centralized capitalist state.”17 If language is cleansed and exquisite, it must be because city and speech have been expurgated to confer upon them order and beauty. Purified, language becomes the site of law, of translation, and of commercial exchange, and the State, as the Sewer, turns into the signifier of pure order. The more the State institutionalizes cleanliness and order, the more totalitarian it becomes. Thus it is apparent “that socialization is regularly subverted by the politics of waste. In many ways, the history of shit becomes the history of subjectivity, since the formation of the subject relates to language, as well as to the ‘abject’ that designates what has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered ‘other.’ It appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the ‘not-me’ as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject.”18

We make our way into nature, history and society through drawing lines. Maiolino draws ever more reflexive lines from and around the results of the lines of work done in the field, forest, plain and river, by means of the shape delineations in her earthen work. Depending on the size of Maiolino’s sculptural installation, the methodical arrangement of informe forms and minimal clots often resembles the storing of paste on trays in a domestic cupboard or industrial baking oven. Besides the reference to the manufacturing of earthenware, the analogy substantially covers the food cycle from bread and pasta to faeces as the “basest” human product.19 In this digestive excursus from the nutritive to the excremental, the artist as moulding is the medium and nexus between what goes in and out of the body. The palm of Maiolino’s hand is the casting mould doing what her will and the “will” of the material together indicate. In the repetition of these parallel moves lies her art as chiasm of bodily in-coiling and out-curling swirling lines—an art that not only turns around other lines but that is sinuous and reflexive about itself. Around and around it turns, questioning and celebrating its own making because it is made in an intense bodily way. It thus also allows an entry into human reflexivity…

Aroundness and matrix

When we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk…a refrain with endless verses.

--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Slowly and steadily, it becomes apparent that the forked path in the development of Maiolino’s late 1990s sculptural work, which consists of both the negative matrix (taken from the second casting phase) and the positive forms without moulds (taken from the coalescence of the first and third phases), is in fact one and the same path leading to the presentation of the casting mould as the actual work of art. If the matrix is manifestly visible in the former series, it is less conspicuous in the latter series, because it is the artist herself who is now the mould. In the process of her pleasurable labour, the execution of this corporeal mould is, at the same time, an accomplishment and an annihilation, because the art, once on view, is the absent “matrixial” body in the presence of its moulded remnants. Like the rejected mould, which was once the generative and uniting matrix, Maiolino’s body mediating between positive and negative, in and out, chaos and system, is at this stage outcast.

Her affirmation and abjection within the same motion externalize the inner process of intestinal moulding as a semiotic activity of creation. This othering of the self, this internal splitting, again suggests that Maiolino evolves at a nexus around which a hybrid subjectivity is formed along parallels as in a chiasm. In this movement of negotiation, the artist is able to establish the moulding of the self as a present positive by othering of the self as an absent negative. The flexible interaction between being both inside and outside allows, on this line of mutation, for the co-emerging of self and Other in a fusion that synthesizes the permanent task of reinventing subjectivity and its mode of existence. In embodying that nexus itself, Maiolino eventually succeeds not only in linking separate parts of self and Other that were abjected, but also in reconnecting art and life.

In contrast to Clark’s “relational objects,” Maiolino’s most recent clay objects cannot be manipulated by the audience, unless they participate in the production process itself or acknowledge their own daily gestures. The creative force of these transient, dough-like forms lies in their capacity to convey a transformational corporeality as objects that are relational in their merging of “inner” and “outer.” In this sense Maiolino is trying to reformulate the relation between the subject and its other. She wonders what precedes this encounter while making primary memory tangible. As the past continues to haunt the present, she lays bare traces of early infancy in her droppings of ink and clay, materializing essential drives which Sigmund Freud equated with creative vitality: “Inter urinas and faeces nascimur.” In between the passages of relief of base materials, being comes into existence. If that which enters is expelled, the artist traces its circuitous path in the repetitive act imbued with life. Always made within repetition, Maiolino’s late series of drawings and sculptures, oscillating between the tautological and the corporeal definition of art, have a continuity that remains unfinished and unresolved. As if hinging on the practices of the Italian Neo-avant-garde (in particular Manzoni) and the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement (in particular Clark), Maiolino introduces a “vitalism-in formalism.” In her aesthetics, considering the relation between subject and object, she defines entities as “absence-in-presence” and “distance-in-proximity.” In other words, she acknowledges the transmutation of the artwork into a self-referential entity, while maintaining, even if latent, the artist’s self-referentiality as corporeal individuality. It results in a reconnection of art and life, a fusion, so to say, in the form of a chiasm.

In the most recent series of sculptures and drawings, Maiolino accomplishes a resolved, matured, perhaps digested, fusion of separate and opposed parts by linking positive and negative forms within one object, while storing their differentiation in the material itself. In this way the dialectics of division is restored. One & Other (2000–2001) is a series of bas-reliefs made of the cement matrix that holds, inside its holes, the forms of small, kneaded rolls and balls of clay used for casting. The artist secures the moment in which they formed one “matrixial” body during the casting process. Indexes (2000–2001) is a series of drawings made with a needle and sewing thread that pierce the sheet of paper in a double movement to and fro both sides, creating a continuous yet different pattern as it appears positive and negative on recto and verso. Confounding the common metaphors of spatial distinction between inside and outside, Maiolino uses these linguistic terms to circulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired.

According to Judith Butler: “What constitutes through division the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity formation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which the Others become shit.”20 Questioning a binary distinction that consolidates the coherent subject, Maiolino mediates to blur the borderline by visualizing these excremental passages as transformational links between food and faeces, inner and outer, positive and negative, black and white, empty and full, conceiving of creativity in the relation between self and Other. In a poststructuralist manner, she problematizes the attempt to think difference as opposition, to oppose inside and outside, subject and its other. Consequently, in chiasmic terms, she moves us with her art into new perceptions of borderspaces between in and out, as much as earthenware does in its connectedness to the surrounding world.

It’s what is missing

Artworks are like fountains of light that are meant to shine on and disclose not themselves, but some essential features of the world that happen to be around them.

--Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art

Critical of an exhausted institutional modernism and suggesting alternative models, Maiolino focuses on the formalist and vital values of art without neglecting its historical determinations and transformational possibilities. Her career reveals itself as rigorous and consistent. This consistency is most noticeable in the language of the wonderfully concise titles throughout her oeuvre: for example, the title of the video What is Left Over (1974) finds a resonance in the title of the sculpture series It’s What’s Missing (1995). Early on, Maiolino’s art evolves in chiasmic lines, in the sense that it is motivated by the awareness that placing elements crosswise in a diagonal arrangement concerns a structural repetition of similar ideas in a reverse sequence in order to emphasize their relation rather than their separation. As such the dialectics of empty/full and in/out are resolved, constantly reversed and incorporated into existence. To be lived and produced her work asserts itself within the continuous challenge of subjectivity’s reinvention.

In terms of a socio-political analysis of compulsory behaviour, Maiolino continues to question the construction of the binary as hierarchical and opposite by making us aware that “the boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness;” and consequently, she has us understand that, similarly, “sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation.”21 From the point of gender and race as enacted, Maiolino investigates the fixity of gender and ethnic identity as an interior depth, said to be externalized in various forms of “expression.” In her urge to reunite the divided in a linked, though nonunifiable space, she increasingly takes on a strategy of blurring the boundaries between self and Other, so that separation dissolves when subverted by the work’s disintegration and return of matter to chaos. In her desire to reconnect life and art, she has recourse to the daily, the primal, and the abject as that, which does not respect borders, positions, and rules. Moreover, she considers that the diagonal, the diametrical and dialectical are relational and generative as in a chiasmic lecture of life.

More and more, the “in-between” as ambivalent and composite space becomes Maiolino’s working area. Relating psychoanalytic ideas of the “visceral unconscious,” the “bodily ego,” and “base materialism,” she criticizes dominant concepts of the mind/body duality and social taboo through her investigation of degraded elements. Although the concept of abjection has always been latent in modernism, it has been a central theoretical impulse in the art of the 1990s, which Maiolino has anticipated in her work of the 1970s-80s and is now interrogating and challenging. She clarifies that there is no ontological foundation of the subject; quite the contrary, there is a disruptive potential in every body through the repetitive, everyday deed of self-moulding, a subjectivity not as pre-discursive but as displaced and relational, creating the space of a new reality. This is what Maiolino has shown and written all along… The Before Is the After, The Inside Is the Outside, One & Other, Secret Poem [me + thou]…

In Maiolino’s oeuvre, her earthen work is crucial in materializing our connection to life and to the earth. Her primal sculptural works seem to embody a kind of ecofeminism descending from prehistoric times as well as anticipating our future that is to come. The work asks us to be attentive to the sinuous lines of connection and involvement to the earth, if we are to survive this century. It has this urgency to it. This notion of art as nonconceptual reflexion and as access to human reflexivity allows us to conceive of, and to give attention to, the relational nature of things. And our flexuousness becomes part of an imaginary line, a life line, that stretches itself to the world intensively and extendingly through her enfooded art. When Vandana Shiva argues that “the marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand”22 she points to the commonality of gendered and environmental oppression but also to the particular connection women have to the health and knowledge of the earth.

Through her work Maiolino demonstrates that it should be the domestic task of every human being to care and be a custodian of our natural resources and the heterogeneity of life. The earth is abundant in supply but we need to respect it. In order to sustain our communities, this recognition of the reproductive cycles of the earth is required. Interdependence is key, and all separations and fragmentations to fulfil the demands of capitalism have to be questioned and undone. In this way, Shiva states, “ecological stability, sustainability, and productivity under resource-scarce conditions are maintained.”23 I believe that, in this struggle today, women have taken the forefront and feel the final responsibility to be on their shoulders, many having as their purpose that ecological destruction be halted and the laying waste to the earth be averted. Through chiasm as relationship in her earthen work Maiolino shows us too that life cycles repeat themselves and renew hopes: in entropy and telluric epiphany, in the turning of the seasons and the turning of the earth, the planet, the earth beneath the plough, and the earth, the clay, we hold simply, and mould in our hands. Ultimately, her art is a guide to our understanding how aroundness and flexuousness is simultaneously a reflexion into the self.

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1 Literally, chiasm means “placing crosswise, diagonal arrangement.” This structural arrangement concerns the

2 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 18.

3 Manifesto Neoconcreto, reproduced in Ronaldo Brito, Neo-concretismo, Vertice e Ruptura, (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985), 12-13.

4 Esther Emilio Carlos, “The Memory of the Other,” in Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/A Life Line, ed. Catherine de Zegher (The Drawing Center, New York) 2002, 276.

5 Curated by the author, the series Terra Modelada / Moulded Earth was first conceived, performed and shown at the Beguinage in Kortrijk (Kanaal Art Foundation) in 1995 and became part of the exhibition Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of 20th-century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, which toured to ICA Boston; The Whitechapel, London; The Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington; and The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth in 1995-96.

6 Anna Maria Maiolino in a letter to the author.

7 Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, Boston, London) 1996, 147.

8 Ibidem, 150.

9 Ibidem, 17.

10 Even if Lacan does not specify his theory of the subject as historical, it can be argued that such a “traumatized, armored, and aggressive subject is not just any being across history and culture: it is a theory of the modern subject as fascistic subject.” See Hal Foster, “Postmodernism in Parallax,” October 63 (1993), 8.

11 Suely Rolnik, “Moulding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” 60.

12 Later there is also her installation Rice and Beans (1979) for which she filled plates laid out on a table for a meal with soil, in which rice and beans germinated during the exhibition.

13 Suely Rolnik, “Moulding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” 71

14 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Arndt (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1976), 303, lines 11, 954 - 11, 957. Cited from Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 9, 149-150.

15 Laporte, History of Shit, 34.

16 Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, Boston, London) 1996, 150.

17 Laporte, History of Shit, viii, 7.

18 Ibid., 29.

19 Whitfield, “Handling Space,” 35: “Years before, Fontana had likened one of his terracotta tablets to bread (with good reason: the work has a remarkable resemblance to a slab of Italian ‘focaccia’).”

20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 134.

21 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 133.

22 Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books), 2014, 164.

23 Ibidem, 167.

A Arte da Imanência

Marcio Doctors

“De Vita Migrare” ( morrer em Latim) de novo põe em questão a territorialidade. Esta paisagem (instalação) trata do homem e de sua história- o homem como dimensão de retorno.

A imagem luminosa, astronômica da Terra, revelada no interior do habitáculo, nos leva a uma extraterritorialidade, lá e aqui, na paráfrase do poeta Sousandrade. Produz uma ambivalência espacial: o espaço interior circunscrito abriga a imensidão exterior e cósmica.

A emigração e a morte ( sugerida na inscrição latina gravada no alto do habitáculo, que na tradução ao pé da letra significa: Emigrar da vida) são metáforas de si mesmas. A vida está presente nos seus quatro elementos (terra, água, ar e fogo).

O habitáculo existe na simbologia como nossa morada interior, morada anímica. Ao olhar, pode ser também um túmulo, um bunker, um celeiro ou uma casa.

A inscrição incisa no habitáculo é a marca do homem, é, portanto, a terra.

A água ocupa praticamente toda a área, define o espaço, impondo o caráter de paisagem. Seu caráter especular é o espelho d’água da fascinação do homem na descobeerta inconsciente, através de Narciso, de sua própria imagem.

O ar existe , pois a chama de fogo arde.

No universo, o fogo sempre estará presente debaixo do “Crisol da vida”, transmutando-a, e o saber do fogo é uma das marcas fundamentais que constituem o homem na sua historicidade concreta.”

 Começo citando este texto de Anna Maria Maiolino, que é o memorial poético que acompanha a instalação De Vita Migrare Anno MCMXCI, que apresentou na 21 Bienal de São Paulo, porque gosto das imagens que cria : vida e morte, interior e exterior, paisagem e instalação, lá e aqui, história e retorno. Fala de uma experiência  vivencial do espaço; o lugar como encaranção do tempo vivido. Fala do lugar da potência; o lugar onde as coisas buscam ser iguais a si mesmas. Em outras palavras, nessa instalação, vasculha a simultaneidade dos espaços (“lá e aqui”) para surpreender o momento/espaço em que as coisas se originam e se voltam sobre si mesmas; em que o retorno passa a ser o fundamento ( “o homem como dimensão do retorno”).Há nas suas palavras uma pulsação poética pré-socrática que quer dar conta das forças da matéria na sua dimensão metafórica. É um caminho de puras metáforas, que  surpreende na superfície do visível ,a  potência indicativa de sua própria profundidade (“metáforas de si mesmas”).

A potência da obra de Anna Maria Maiolino está em   tratar da questão da potência .Sua força é igual a sua busca. É movida pela  idéia de retorno. Ela quer repetir porque quer retornar. Repete porque quer repetir a potência do que é igual , para  que seja cada vez mais igual a si mesmo, cada vez mais próprio, cada vez mais singular. Sua apreensão de potência é Espinozana: “A potência de Deus é sua própria essência.” (Ética I, proposição 34) Em outras palavras, não repete por um ato de vontade; por livre arbítrio. A repetição tem uma função existencial e metafísica, no sentido de que é através dela  que se  reconhece a própria essência. O que se  repete é a essência e é a afirmação da essência que nos garante a potência. E é essa potência que é libertadora.

 A liberdade não é um ato da vontade, mas a consciência de uma impossibilidade   de ser diferente do que se  é. A potência está em ser igual a si mesmo, como o Deus de Espinoza. Não se trata nem de poder nem de dever moral.Trata-se de afirmação e necessidade.Trata-se de surpreender na aparência a  explicitação da essência.A realidade recupera seu esplendor porque passa a pulsar na espessura da superfície; na metafísica da imanência. O indivíduo  encontra sua potência porque passa a  ser igual a sua liberdade E é na superfície do mundo aonde  se dão os encontros das matérias e das liberdades. Daí a importância da arte: como o campo ético aonde estes encontros são presentificados  como práticas da existência. O Espaço de Instalações Permanentes do Museu do Açude quer ser o território possível de explicitação da consciência deste acontecimento.Por isso que Anna Maria Maiolino foi convidada a participar deste projeto que relaciona arte e natureza , como as  potências da vida.Sua obra é a encarnação desta idéia porque busca presentificar, na simplicidade do gesto,a dimensão afetiva  da existência.

Para aqueles que não estão familiarizados com a obra de Anna Maria Maiolino é importante esclarecer que ,durante a década de 90 ,passou a trabalhar com  argila , fazendo séries de formas que se repetem e  que têm as marcas  das mãos .São objetos que enfatizam o gesto, como unidade fundante da ação do artista. No ato de fazer formas simples, como cobrinhas ou bolinhas (técnicas primeiras da moldagem em argila), há uma retenção, uma marca, da singularidade. O que se  repete, então, no ato mesmo do fazer, para além das cobrinhas e das bolinhas , é a unicidade de um gesto que retem a singularidade que o produziu. E mais, cada gesto possui o limite da matéria, e é nesse jogo de trocas de afeto ( de afetar e ser afetado pela matéria), determinado a partir da ação, que estabelece-se o diferenciado. Aquilo que na repetição  da mão é diferente, é exatamente o lugar  em que se diferencia da repetição mecânica, ou seja, um desvio que é estabelecido pelo afeto. A obra de Anna Maria Maiolino ,  dá-se, então,  entre a afirmação da potência , como  repetição daquilo que busca ser igual a sua essência, e o campo dos afetos, que entregue ao fluxo da temporalidade, gera a repetição da diferença no encontro entre o indeterminado da matéria e a determinação da mão que executa o ato, que nunca é igual , porque atravessado pelo tempo.

Ao retornar para o gesto primeiro das lembranças de sua infância,das mãos que amassavam a massa do pão, remonta uma cadeia de repetições que extravasa sua biografia, que são as mãos de nossos ancestrais amassando o barro  para  fazer os primeiros utensílios. Essa circularidade do tempo, que vai do particular ao histórico  e  que se presentifica descolada de sua nervura espacial pretérita ou de qualquer sentimento nostalgico, é o tempo espacializado das instalações. É a potência do tempo particularizado permeando a matéria e fazendo com que ela se configure em novas imagens; em novos espaços de tempo, que se configuram a partir do retorno; da respacialização de uma experiência vivida no tempo. Isto é a Arte da Presença. Essa circularidade estabelece a identidade da diferença porque conserva a singularidade da experiência vivida  pelo corpo daquela memória.O corpo, então, é pensado como o local da experiência radical da singularidade , porque expressão da liberdade de ser igual a si mesmo.A arte é a prática dessa liberdade.E o gesto, é o conduto por onde essa liberdade  especifica-se  na sua diferença e  presentifica-se na forma.

A repetição do gesto em Anna Maria Maiolino comporta múltiplas camadas de significados. Mas há uma que recuso, porque exorbita o sentido mais contundente de seu pensamento plástico, que é a de comparar a sua repetição com a repetição mecânica da produção em série da linha de montagem industrial. Na história da arte, a repetição seriada tem uma função estética ligada à idéia de anulação da presença subjetiva do artista, que pode levar à essa visão mecanicista da repetição. Isso ocorre, por exemplo, quando ela é utilizada como recurso decorativo (como repetição da dinâmica interna de uma imagem) ou como opção calculada de fazer desaparecer as marcas de subjetivação ( como no projeto construtivo ou na minimal). Se a repetição mecânica e serial procura fixar  a identidade da diferença, em Anna Maria Maiolino, ao contrário, a repetição tem a função de fixar a diferença da identidade. Ela busca o diferenciado e não o indiferenciado. Daí o afeto. Ela busca dar conta da inversão de termos , que fica cada vez mais evidente na sociedade atual, que é o fato de que , no lugar da identidade  do um ,  temos a multiplicidade das diferenças como base da relaidade do mundo. Só que a explosão da multiplicidade das diferenças tem uma faceta perversa ( como a besta do apocalipse, cuja pele é toda coberta de olhos ) que é o fato da imagem Ter sido liberada de todo enervamento material: pura película descarnada deslizando fora do tempo. Trazê-la para a ordem do tempo é reencontrar sua potência; é reencontrar a matéria.

A  repetição do gesto,  então, na obra de Anna Maria Maiolino, tem uma função metafísica de dar corporeidade material e visibilidade ao momento onde a vida pulsa, que a sociedade atual bloqueou por ter estabelecido o espaço ilusório da representação como sendo a realidade. O gesto, para a artista ,  tem a densidade do momento do “ entre’’; do momento entre a tênue presença  em que a vida se dá e o enorme risco que tem de desaparecer.É na consciência da eminência possível deste momomento que a vida pulsa : quando corremos o risco real de desaparecer ou pela fim da natureza (poluição) ou pelo fim do humano (virtualidade). A repetição do  gesto tem  uma função  metafísica, não no sentido de uma revelação de  transcendência, mas , ao contrário, da captura de uma metafísica revelada no ato do gesto, porque imanente a própria matéria na sua especificação formal. A potência de sua obra está na apreensão dessa imanência metafísica da matéria. Na arte da imanência.

Na instalação Aqui Estão, no Espaço de Instalações Permanentes do Museu do Açude, Anna Maria Maiolino encontrou um  campo expressivo possível para evidenciar esse conceito de sua obra. De imediato, somos impactados pela precisão  e simplicidade da forma. Há algo de cristalino e revelador na sua presença. Não há nada escondido. É o que se apresenta. O próprio nome já diz: Aqui Estão. A escolha do nome e a escolha do material ( madeira ) não deixa espaço para a dúvida: o que ela quer é reiterar a presença. O que ela indica é que aqui está a madeira de volta de onde veio: a árvore. É interessante que esse pensamento tão simples gere tanto estranhamento visual. Mas o estranhamento é que ela está indicando a maneira de Sousandrade: “Lá e Aqui”.Ao juntar a madeira na arte (Aqui Estão) e a madeira na natureza  (árvore) cria uma cópula de identidades que se manifesta na pura diferença. Não é possível reduzir uma à outra. Não é possível igualá-las. Essa explosão de diferenças cataliza  nossa atençãoe dá concretude e densidade metafísica ao espaço, porque indica que na base da percepção está a diferençae não a identidade. A experiência da presença da diferença conduz à experiência metafísica da imanência. Assim como a liberdaade, a experiência do todo, não é tributária as misturas das diferenças, mas, ao contrário, é garantida pela conservação das identidades. “Lá e Aqui” são separados, mas se comunicam pelas diferenças, como no caminho de superfície, de implicações subterrâneas, da fita de moebius.

 Esses  400 rolos que parecem  pertencer e não pertencer à natureza, é parte da estratégia da obra.  Tem humor ( o que é raro em artes plásticas). Ficamos confusos ao sermos surpreendidos  pelo absurdo da situação : uma árvore que parece ter frutos de madeira.Que frutos são esses , que não conhecemos?  O descompasso que gera entre algo que parece absolutamente natural , mas que imediatamente percebemos como sendo completamente absurdo e não-natural, prende  nossa atenção visual e  absorve todo o espaço   em-torno da instalação, fazendo com  que o espaço se   presentifique.Aqui Estão exerce uma força catalizadora no espaço.

A potência dessa instalação está na forma direta e precisa com que se faz presente.Na evidência de sua realização. Na simplicidade de sua idéia.  A madeira que saiu da natureza retorna para ela atravessada pela ação da mão do homem. A estranheza também é gerada por essa semelhança diferenciada. A artista quer  aproximar-se tanto da paisagem, que devolve à natureza o que dela saiu. Devolve também como reafirmação de potência.A madeira , nessa instalação,  é tanto  metáfora  da natureza quanto  metáfora da arte.Mas é também metáfora de si mesma.Sua existência é igual a sua essência.    É como se ela recompusesse as camadas do mundo. É como se ela quizesse compartilhar das potências da natureza através da arte. Há uma sexualidade que pulsa nessas formas , que perpassa também pela maneira como envolvem a árvore  e a intimidade com que se acoplam nela. Há uma sensualidade que retorna da natureza , em forma de novas camadas ,que é a maneira como as aranhas envolvem a obra com suas teias e os insetos nela  se aninham e se acasalam. Aqui Estão cria uma tensão e uma comunhão entre arte e natureza. Explicita o espaço que existe entre uma e outra e devolve para cada uma delas sua própria potência.

Anna Maria  Maiolino desestabiliza o espaço para evidenciá-lo.   Somos sugados para aquele espaço, que deixa de ser uma paisagem para ser uma instalação. As pessoas que tiveram oportunidade de conhecerer o local antes da colocação da obra,  provavelmente se lembram dele como um espaço neutro e de passagem. Hoje, o que fica evidente é a explosão cromática  desse espaço, nas suas múltiplas nuances de verdes e amarelos , que foi desencadeado pela  a riqueza dos  tons da madeira da instalação. “Aqui Estão”  nos aproxima da paisagem (represntação ilusória ) para instaurar uma experiência de imanência desse espaço (instalação).

A trajetória plástica de Anna Maria Maiolino evidencia esta vontade de aproximação. De ficar cada vez mais perto da carnalidade do mundo.Ou melhor, de usar a arte como a potência capaz de nos aproximar da espessura do tempo. Como a potência capaz de reter, através do seu fazer ( das marcas dos gestos ) a velocidade crescente que faz desaparecer a imagem. Que faz desaparecer uma imagem , que é expressão potente da matéria, e não essa imagem enfraquecida, que é manipulada pelo mundo da virtualidade contemporânea e que nos é impingida a todo tempo e que ,hoje,tem uma presença avassaladora.  A radicalidade de Aqui Estão é que ela nos faz ver a presença. É a evidência de si mesma. É a pulsação de uma imagem que se impõe à natureza, articulando o sentido fundador da indagação filosófica que é a perplexidade diante da força das imagens , como expressão e acesso à  uma metafísica da imanência.