How to write from trauma? How to write about it? My body houses inherited traumas, I am a fervent believer in this idea; I can say it from situated knowledge because I inherited traumas from my grandparents, from my father, from my uncles who were repressed and subjected to violence during a war and the years that followed (those who speak of forgetting do so because they lack a memory with wounds). I also harbor traumas lived in my own flesh, which have traversed my body and transformed it, which inhabit the scars that I slowly trace with my finger as a somewhat naive way of healing a little more each day; because healing from trauma is not forgetting, but remembering it and turning pain into something else.My colleague Marina Vargas, who transforms it into a creative act, asked me to write about her latest exhibition, a work traversed by pain, by fear, but also by courage; pieces that speak of the body, of the canon, and of beauty, but of an “other” beauty alien to Apollonian bodies, a beauty that is found in the folds of flesh, in accumulated fat, in sweat, in the reunion with pleasure and with enjoyment, which, why not, flourishes from the swollen scar of non-normative bodies. I accepted without hesitation because we have both gone through the same illness, because I am also mastectomized.
It has been difficult for me to write about trauma, about cancer, among other things because, although I had talked about it a lot, I had not done the exercise of vomiting it into a text; perhaps I lacked the courage to face what was happening to me from the realm of creation, perhaps I fled toward topics that dislocated me less. When we still knew each other epidermically and I found myself at exhibitions with the work of Marina Vargas (That Noli me tangere. The incredulity!), I envied that woman who had decided to heal her traumas in production, as a way of making. To those who have not lived it, it may seem strange that Marina and I speak about cancer as something naturalized, and that, sometimes, without verbalizing it we know, and we laugh: because, although experiences are always different in each body, there is a part that is common. Working on trauma is a delicate act, but at the same time fierce, of bravery.
Marina Vargas has made use of the vast options offered by contemporary visual language and its disciplines to narrate in a sharp, radical, incisive and profound way what words sometimes fail to tell. Trauma resides in the body because it came from the body, and there were silences, but also screams. In her work one hears a poetic body, but also a political one in images that are truth, sincerity, in a tempered and paradoxically abyssal way that I have rarely found. She draws on references to the history of art, fundamentally on representations of canonical bodies inherited from Classical Antiquity (seven heads, seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine… a great dilemma), but also on analogies and resources that in many cases come from the unconscious and from letting the mind wander without limits, from chance… or from moving through life without inhibition, sometimes abruptly, other times in gushes. In these pieces dwell affects, tactility, fragmented memories…, and she allows herself to speak in leaps; linearity is unnecessary because the artist accepts confusion and error as a mode of knowledge, as an almost magnetic formula of creation that instills patterns and energy to continue meandering, regarding what happened and what it left us: fear, fragility, strength… the friends who accompanied us in moments of panic[1]. Addressing trauma does not seek to close it, but the simple act of generating an image of what has been lived is a form of repair and also of resistance that makes evident to what extent illness and the formulas with which it is protocolized also have gender.
The first works by Marina Vargas that this exhibition at the ADN gallery recovers welcome us from behind and reflected in a large mirror. They are the sculptures that composed the corpus of the project Ni animal ni tampoco ángel and that evidenced the construction of gender, calling for a reading both symbolic and political of women's bodies[2]. By appropriating and manipulating statues from European Classical Antiquity that have served for centuries to mark the canon, beauty stereotypes, and that represented some archetypes that have their origins in very remote times, she evidenced how women (and in this the nineteenth century was especially bloody) were tied to scarce symbolic options: they could be objects of desire, sacrificial angels of the home, and as in Puccini's operas, a symbol of redemption from sin which for females was the hypostasis of lust and “un-controlled” love).
In these works, which ooze a pink material between magmatic and cotton candy[3], the artist places herself in a new position that questions the Manichaean readings of the two spheres: she shows that the construct “gender” is pure violence, designed relations of power or submission, an inherited framework that is of no use. Marina Vargas rejects these categories and proposes another space; in reality, a limbo, in which there is no possibility of conciliation, a realm in which the reading of the image cannot be anything other than political and is so, moreover, because it resists classification.
Vargas appropriates monuments precisely because they are born with a vocation of permanence and representation. And for this reason she generates new ones showing that which is hidden, made invisible: an “incomplete” female body does not exist for the canon (let us recall on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), by Marc Quinn, a white marble sculpture that referred to Greco-Roman statuary portraying this British artist born without arms and with short legs, pregnant and naked). Monuments construct a symbolic hierarchy in which men usually have names, are examples of behavior or heroes, while female bodies are always allegorical (let us recall in Spain Influencia cultural, y nada más que cultural, de la mujer en las artes arquitectónicas, visuales y otras piezas by Paz Muro from 1975: together with Pablo Pérez-Mínguez she photographed female statues in Madrid underlining that they are never real historical subjects). And it is that women could be read as the pure instinctive and exuberant nature of surrealism, the “sweet” submission generated by the construct of the “angel of the home” or the unattainable spiritual ideal of the weightless and ethereal woman in the nineteenth century. And Vargas is categorical: women are not a construct, but different subjects, citizens who are each born in a determined context, embodied subjects.
There is in these pieces prior to the illness something visionary: what is that magmatic and ambiguous material that comes out of the sculptures or invades them, that grows in the face of the impossible resistance of marble made symbol but inanimate? We have a long tradition of visionaries in the history of culture: from the Sibyls who brushed the future with an enigma without managing to narrate or go into detail, to Hildegard of Bingen with her prophetic visions sheltered in the realm of mysticism. Women, in general, as illustrated by the myth of Cassandra, were discredited, silenced, when not pointed out as witches to be seen burning tied to a wooden stake. More recent examples lead me to the chewing gums that Hannah Wilke stuck to her body as decorations, but also as stigmas in S.O.S.– Starification Object Series (1974–82) to be shortly after diagnosed with lymphoma and leukemia; between 1989 and 1993, Wilke documented her illness in the series Intra-Venus. Moving away from the illness of the body to enter that of souls, the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a dystopia, a warning, that seems closer than we ever imagined.
In the Robayera room, a space then programmed by Marta Mantecón, Marina Vargas brought together some of the pieces from the previous series and added others under the title Intra-Venus, which borrows its name from Hannah Wilke. The statement refers in the first instance to the goddess Venus, a stereotype of idealized beauty made to be contemplated, for scopophilic pleasure; but we are more interested in the “intra” that co-substantivizes the goddess of love: the “intra” connects the skin with the interior and delves into the internal, the viscera, the entrails, mucosities, fluids and the organs that allow life and that remain hidden under the skin: «Ce qu’il y a de plus profond chez l’homme, c’est la peau» said Paul Valéry; she is skin of polished white marble without wrinkles that age her, but she is also wounds, scars, tumors and humors, elements apparently in conflict but that coexist, need each other, since the origins of life.
In the wet collodion metal and black glass photographs, the female body, that of the artist herself after surgery, chemotherapy treatments, radiotherapy and hormonization with Tamoxifen, is presented as a symbolic battlefield[4]. It is a body that, at times emulating the eroticized position of a venus, is added reclining to the erect Winged Victory of Samothrace, one of whose wings comes out of Vargas's back (Has she fallen like Icarus? Has she kept the wing as a symbol of her victory over pain and the context of illness?). It is a naked body that disturbs, that cannot be objectified: it is not smooth, it is not cold, it has pubic hair and scars, the head has lost the long and silky hair of a “nymph”, of an ethereal being. It is a body that weighs and that does not offer itself to the gaze, but expels it, disturbs it. It is a rebellious, resistant, real, carnal, visceral, bruised body, a body that rises to its feet and raising its fist signals its strength as a form of resistance. A situated body, individualized in pain and lack, pregnant with memory and time, that climbs onto the sculpture of the most beautiful torso ever sculpted, that of the Belvedere from the Vatican collections: it sometimes receives her as in a Pietà (the body of the artist embodied in the image of Christ), at other times it seems to fit into a copulation.
There is nothing more thunderous than the silence of these photographs.
[1] Thank you, thank you Yen and Marina.
[2] The artist appropriated a poem by Sylvia Plath for the title of this 2015 exhibition at the CAC of Málaga. A title that is returned in this show crossed out.
[3] They are made of expanded polyurethane, so the final form of the work is generated slowly while the artist sleeps.
[4] Vargas employs this technique because it was used in 19th-century medical photography, a century in which, in the medical field, women were viewed as perpetually ill and constantly subjected to medical treatment simply because they were born with a uterus. Faced with the impossibility of diagnosis, they were subjected to medical treatment and, in many cases, institutionalized.
