Now, I won’t bother you with the full circumstances from which this poem came to be but, if you are curious how this seemingly impossible (to me) act happened, turn to the end of this missive.

Beautiful Ruins

If the shore could tell its stories, it would be
of the bent figures who move slowly along its edge,
gathering stones that the ocean has edited
— rounded edges, whitened bones, marked by
the reddish veins of the earth nearby.

The vase; small, black and white,
the vessel pieced together by these stones,
that remember that water.

It is small, contained. It stands without leaning
on explanation. The scar along its left side
is less a damage than a seam, a place
where what was once scattered agreed
to remain together. What belonged to another
time is not erased; it is contained.
The missing bits are now the link to the unseen.

Released from use, it rests in its own authority,
holding a larger history.
It contains what it resisted,
and makes room for the future.

I imagine lifting it,
cupping its weight,
filling it with breath.

And I think:
Could the meeting between a person and an object
be the beginning of a story?

I signed up for a poetry workshop and kept wondering what exactly I thought I was doing there. But because it involved spending time with artworks, the possibility of writing a poem felt slightly less improbable to me. A wonderful poet, Simone Zapata (1) led the session and, crucially, had prompts ready for us to respond to while observing the works around us.

She suggested we use stream of consciousness rather than overthinking. “Just let the ideas come and write them down.”

A beautiful zine, Sites of Encounter: An Ekphrastic Poetry Zine (2) came out of the afternoon, along with photographs of our time together that were later sent to all of us who participated.

1. Simone Zapata is 2025 Emerging Writer Poetry Fellow for the Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College

2. ICA Miami, Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College Shared Printmaking Facilities

There is a moment when the gallery fills with laughter.

Not a polite laugh, not the kind that passes quickly and returns to composure, but something looser, collective, almost disobedient. It takes a second to register that this is happening inside a gallery, that the object of attention is Claudia Bitrán: Titanic, A Deep Emotion (Cristin Tierney Gallery), a solo exhibition centered on a three-channel video installation, nearly an hour and a half long, and surrounded by paintings, storyboards, and notes. In it, handmade sets, cardboard props, and improvised costumes restage the sinking of the Titanic with deliberate artifice. What unfolds is a reenactment of a story we already know too well. The ship, the fall, the bodies, the music, so familiar it no longer moves.

It would be easy to read this as irreverence, or as a strategy of deflation. But the laughter does not dismantle the work; it circulates through it, producing a different kind of attention, less monumental, more porous. Sara Ahmed¹ reminds us that emotions are not simply felt but directed, that they adhere to objects and arrive trailing expectations already in place. Some stories come to us saturated; we know how to receive them, how to position ourselves in relation to them. To encounter the Titanic is to inherit a script: mourning, awe, a kind of disciplined sadness. What happens then when laughter appears where grief has been assigned?

The question is not whether the tragedy is diminished. If anything, something else becomes visible: how firmly its meaning has been fixed, how little room it has to move. Bitrán does not erase the event; she alters its conditions of reception. Joy, here, is not escape. It changes how the story is received.

It was a cold March afternoon in New York, and we moved from one gallery to the next without pause. The rooms we had passed through held a certain seriousness, works that seemed already resolved, already carrying their weight. It followed us back out into the cold. Until it didn’t.

Not far from Bitrán’s show, we next visited Bruno Munari: Useless Machines, at Kaufmann Repetto. Across time, the work unfolds with a quieter insistence. Suspended elements, plywood, wire mesh, aluminum, printed cardboard, hover and rotate, responding to currents too slight to see. Nothing accumulates. Nothing resolves. The works do not perform; they keep going. It is difficult to say what they do, exactly, if doing is understood as producing an outcome. They occupy space without stabilizing it.

In his notes on lightness, Italo Calvino describes a subtraction: not the removal of meaning, but of weight. A refusal to let things harden into inevitability. He turns to figures who survive not by confronting force directly, but by shifting their relation to it, by changing the angle of encounter. Lightness, in this sense, is not fragility. It is a form of precision.

As Bruno Munari himself wrote, it was a matter of freeing abstract forms from the stillness of the canvas and suspending them in the air, allowing them to inhabit space with us, responsive to the real atmosphere around them.²

Munari’s machines do not oppose the logic of utility; they suspend it. In the 1930s, when the machine was the emblem of progress, speed, and production, he proposed something else: a structure that moves without purpose, that responds without striving. The gesture is subtle but exact. If a machine can be useless, then usefulness is no longer a given, but one possibility among others. They do not ask for our attention, nor do they compete for it. In contrast to the technologies that now surround us (designed to capture, and retain our attention) Munari’s machines remain indifferent to our presence. They do not hold us; they allow us to be present without being held.

What holds between these two bodies of work is not similarity of form, but a shared refusal of inevitability. Weight—whether emotional, historical, or industrial—presents itself as necessary. It tells us: this is how things must be held, this is how they must be felt. Both Bitrán and Munari loosen that claim, not by denying weight, but by redistributing it.

There is also, in Bitrán’s work, a refusal at the level of the image itself, its visible construction, its resistance to cinematic polish, that recalls what Hito Steyerl has described as the “poor image,” loosened from the demands of resolution or authority.³

If emotions can attach themselves to things, they can also shift. Not disappear, but move, change direction, settle differently. In Bitrán’s work, laughter doesn’t cancel the tragedy; it interrupts how we’re used to receiving it. It opens space for another response to exist alongside it, a small shift that changes the atmosphere of the room.

Munari’s lightness works differently, but toward a similar release. It isn’t overtly joyful, but it softens the need for things to resolve. The eye follows, adjusts, waits. Nothing insists. The work doesn’t carry you; it asks you to stay with it, in a kind of attention that is neither urgent nor fixed.

It begins to feel, then, that lightness is not the opposite of seriousness, and joy is itself a form of thought. Both are methods, ways of working against the pressure to fix meaning too quickly, too completely.

The ship sinks again, but differently.
The elements shift, but never settle.

And somewhere between suspension and laughter, something opens, not a conclusion, but a condition in which things can still move.

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¹Ahmed, Sara. “The Contingency of Pain.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4q.6.

²Pierpaolo Antonello, “Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines,” in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, ed. Günter Berghaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 14.

³Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Lines assemble into circles and arcs, suggesting systems without fixed destinations. The works feel architectural in their precision, yet they resist inhabitation in any conventional sense. They propose worlds that resemble maps, cities, or landscapes, but remain resolutely psychological: spaces shaped by attention rather than geography. Grodin’s drawings behave like thinking itself: recursive, provisional, and resistant to closure.

Several works unfold through a calibrated tension between control and openness, where precision gives way to interruption. In light language_dark matter (2024), made during Grodin’s residency at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center, marks accumulate without settling into legibility. What emerges is not a language to be read but a system that suggests structure without delivering syntax. The viewer senses coherence without access, encountering a form of cognition that resists translation while remaining insistently present.

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One small drawing, surreal tongue (2024), brings these questions into especially sharp focus. Composed of freehand ink marks on mylar, the work carries the visual cadence of an alphabet without resolving into readable script. Lines thicken and taper like letters caught mid-utterance, stacking vertically as if attempting syntax while continually undoing it. The scale encourages intimacy, drawing the viewer close, where the marks oscillate between writing and drawing, intention and impulse. What emerges is not language as communication, but language as gesture: thought briefly held before meaning settles.

As Grodin reflects, “I’m not sure where meaning properly happens in the making of art, whether it exists before perception or only afterward. For me, the work begins in a sensory, meditative state, connected to something beyond narrative. Naming usually comes later.” Meaning, here, is not embedded but emergent; formed through proximity, duration, and attention rather than decoding.

In toroidal universe (2025), Grodin expands her inquiry into a more explicitly spatial register. The drawing unfolds symmetrically from a dense central axis, its mirrored forms radiating outward in controlled repetition. Electric blues and blacks anchor the composition, while finer linear tracings disperse across the surface, suggesting movement held in suspension. The work reads less as an image than as a system—centrifugal yet contained—where balance, interruption, and recurrence coexist. At this scale, the drawing functions as a diagram not of a place, but of circulation itself, tracing how thought loops, doubles back, and reorganizes without fixed orientation.

In Rorschach transmutation (2025), Grodin turns decisively toward projection. Referencing Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot tests, the drawings redirect attention away from interpretation and toward projection. Forms resist stabilization, offering no hierarchy or legible structure to hold on to. What comes into focus is the viewer’s own act of seeing, where meaning gathers or disperses not in the image itself but in the conditions of perception.

Augmented reality elements extend these inquiries into three dimensions, heightening emotional response while underscoring Grodin’s fluency across analog and technological modes. The exhibition’s center of gravity, however, remains drawing: the hand following thought as it takes shape.

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Grodin’s drawings are not texts to be decoded but terrains to be entered, apprehended sensorially before they are understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would have it: where perception precedes language. Where Do I Go From Here? offers no resolution to its title’s question. Instead, it sustains the conditions of not knowing, inviting thought to move, pause, and reorient without the pressure to arrive.

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It was then I realized that geometry in Brazilian art is not simply a language; it’s a kind of genetic code. For artists who came of age in the decades following Neo-Concretism (1970s and 1980s), geometric abstraction feels instinctive, as if absorbed through the eye rather than learned. Its roots reach back to Rio de Janeiro’s Grupo Frente, where in the late 1950s artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica broke with the strict rationalism of Concrete Art to form the Neo-Concrete movement. They sought something more human—an art that could breathe, move, and touch. As Ferreira Gullar wrote in his Theory of the Non-Object (1959), the work of art was not a thing but “a synthesis of sensorial and mental experience.”¹ It was a way of feeling thought; of making thought visual.

Neo-Concretism was the moment when geometry in Brazil stopped being cold and became sensorial. It replaced intellectual distance with bodily engagement, with the idea that perception itself was creative. That shift, born in postwar Rio, still reverberates in artists like Caneca, who carry that inheritance almost unconsciously. What began as a rebellion against rigidity became a way of seeing—an understanding that structure could hold emotion, and that abstraction could speak in human terms. This was the legacy of Grupo Frente: to turn geometry into language, to let form feel.

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A former cinematographer, Caneca composes with the discipline of the frame and the fluidity of water. In one photograph, the tiled steps of a pool curve beneath the surface, the grid trembling with the light’s refraction. In another, a lap pool stretches across the frame, its red and blue lane dividers forming an accidental abstraction: part architecture, part rhythm, like a flag dissolving into reflection. The photographs unfold like scenes from a silent film, each one suspended between stillness and movement.

Standing before these images, I thought about how Brazilian abstraction has always sought the meeting point between order and feeling. Neo-Concretism replaced logic with sensation, and Caneca’s pools may have inherited that logic. Their tiled surfaces are alive with reflections that never repeat, their stillness disturbed by memory. In her work, geometry resurfaces, refracted through light and the lingering idea that order, too, can feel. And maybe that’s what I sensed in her studio that afternoon: a way of seeing shaped by training, yes, but also by something older weaving its way forward.

¹ Ferreira Gullar, “Theory of the Non-Object,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer, trans. Michael Asbury (London: InIVA/MIT Press, 2005)

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Art Week, for those of us who live here, starts earlier, before Thanksgiving and sometimes at the grocery store while you’re searching for thyme. Hosting and cooking bleed into openings and previews; errands blur with conversations about what might be worth crossing the causeway for this year, and how much of the chaos we’re willing to let in. From the inside, it feels less like a spectacle and more like choreography: a domestic prelude that rearranges your days long before you step into a tent. Maybe that’s why this year I found myself less focused on taking inventory altogether.

If I trace what stayed with me—not in the itinerary but in the mind—it wasn’t a single fair or booth. It was a mood, a sharpening of attention. Very small paintings were everywhere, almost apologetic in scale. Ceramics edged out textiles. Figurative work eclipsed abstraction. Books and bookshelves sprouted like small ecosystems—as if what people craved most was continuity and understanding, not accumulation. And scattered across the city, Philippe Katerine’s buoyant pink Monsieur Rose figures broke the week’s self-seriousness. Beyond the tents, the institutions felt in command of their moment: MOCA opened Field of Dreams, a show by local artist Diana Eusebio. At Art Nexus, Mulheres: Proposals from Brazil offered a concise but resonant glimpse of how Brazilian women have shaped the country’s artistic language across generations. Locust Projects, Primary Projects, Supermarket Gallery, and Tunnel, among others, held strong shows by Miami-based artists. Taken together, these moments underscored Miami’s growing sense of artistic self-definition—a city with a mature cultural spine.

Of course, the frictions were everywhere. Traffic felt mythological, the city seemed reduced to a network of traps. We never made it to Es Devlin’s Library of Us; even the sidewalks around there looked impossible from our car window. At times, it made me wonder whether certain events become too popular for their own good, and why we insist on staging art on the beach. David Byrne’s concert on Friday night felt like a reset. My favorite moment happened in the concert line. A man in an official jacket sprinted past shouting what sounded like a warning, but his thick Miami accent left the mostly Basel-week crowd perplexed. Then someone in our group cracked the code: “Porsche Cayenne!” Suddenly it all made sense—a luxury car blocking the way, an owner nowhere in sight, and a line of people powerless to help. It felt like a perfect Art Week parable: urgency without clarity, delivered at full volume. And still we waited, laughing, inching along, willing to be moved by music, by art, by each other.

By the end of the week, what stayed was the subtle recalibration that happens when the city absorbs so much attention at once. And the books—their surprising recurrence. There’s a growing confidence in the creative community here, a sense that artists are navigating the week on their own terms and that Miami’s cultural ground feels stronger underfoot. Art Week always asks something of those who live here—patience, flexibility, the capacity to hold beauty and absurdity in the same breath. And maybe that’s why the stories linger more than the artworks: because they reveal how we move through all of it together, stitching meaning from whatever the week places in our path.

Here’s to more Porsche Cayenne moments!

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At Espacio 23 artist Tania Candiani created a performance around her installation Substrata, shown there as part of the current exhibition A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible. The performance featured original music by Mexican composer Concepción Huerta and the Miami Sound Space chorus.

Young children are known not only to have a high tolerance for repetition, but also thrive in it. As a child I would beg my mother to tell us Little Red Riding Hood or Mowgli as many times as she was capable of (truth be told she impersonated characters and sang beautifully). On researching Leo Castañeda’s work ahead of a conversation we had planned, I found out that as a child he would ask his father to draw Batman over and over again. That meant I could skip that inevitable question: Where did it all start?

Leo’s studio (which he shares with artist Lauren Monzón) is spacious and cool, “My first with air conditioning”, he said. Theirs is one of the courtyard studios at The Bakehouse complex, in Miami. The dark gray metal double doors surrounded by bright, energetic yellow walls already suggests the startling world we’re about to enter. The small, white “Studio 55” vinyl sign followed by the names of both artists is minimalist, shy, almost an afterthought. 

Leo is a soft spoken artist with a kind disposition and sharp, observant eyes of a deep thinker. I have known him for quite some time and his work has intrigued me for much longer. Recently we got together for a conversation on the interconnectedness of painting and gaming and reimagining beings in a way that is more mutualistic, sustainable and interconnected, the influence of AI and the evolution of gaming.

Carmen: In your statement you describe yourself as “an artist working at the intersection of virtual reality, gaming performance and interactive sculpture,” and that you “deploy and deconstruct the social economic racial mythological and post-human anatomies embedded in the structure of video games.” Could you unpack this definition? 

Leo:Thank you, Carmen. That artist's statement is from a few years ago and we’ve been trying to figure out how to make it more accessible. We're looking into how the gaming companies communicate and how to make those concepts be more accessible to people that are not artists.

The mediums that I work with are feedback loops between gaming, painting and drawing which are all interconnected. It's a process where the handmade and digital are interconnected. 

The axis of the work, the main video game that I've been working on for many years, is called Levels and Bosses, which is the traditional, antagonist and progression structure of video games where there is some kind of oppositional force you have to defeat after every level, usually through violence. So the game (and the work) is about trying to figure out different, sustainable interaction models that are not necessarily bound on conquering or destroying something or extracting energy in a way that is not mutualistic. 

A big part the work is trying to create this alternate world using mythology as a lens to understand people and nature.

CT: What would you say your work is mainly concerned with? 

LC: The number one idea is to reimagine beings in a way that is more mutualistic, sustainable and interconnected.

CT: Ok, thank you. I would like to jump to something else. Being the creator of worlds where you reimagine beings that are more mutualistic, sustainable and interconnected, as you just said, you are addressing political and social structures. Would you consider yourself an activist artist? 

LC: I don't think I'm an activist artist. When different political events happen I don't feel compelled to voice my opinion online, for example. For me it’s more about listening, learning, internalizing and reinterpreting through my art and adapted behavior. Perhaps, for now, I’m introverted in that way.

CT: If we consider that your main concern is to create beings that have a more mutual understanding in worlds that are more sustainable, that is a clear social and political commentary. 

LC: As an artist, I show that through my work and not necessarily through political activism. In a video game you have the ability to choose how to interact. In this video game, you could choose to be destructive or choose to be violent, but it's easier to be more sustainable and mutualistic. That has been one of my challenges.

CT: But you are the one who creates those choices, is that correct?

LC: Yes. The video game has a spectrum of intensities that one connects with. So, for example, you can use the beings in that world to create vibrational fields through their hands that can stabilize the ground. But if you intensify those fields then they destroy it. There's always this spectrum. 

CT:That also speaks to one having a certain power within oneself that can be overused, creating a world where you have energy that can be used in different intensities.

LC: Yes. In terms of narrative building, it's been a bit of a challenge because a video game is not an exact linear narrative like a movie or a book. I guess there are some books or movies that have branching pathways, but one of the challenges has been: does one show an ideal or utopian world by just showing it, or does one also show the oppositional force of it?

Actually one of the situations that has been interesting from an art perspective is this new work that is the prologue of the game, this kind of village where these amphibious beings are all around this teleporting machine, and they're dancing and they're taking turns going on the teleporting machine to launch themselves into an explosion. And, the explosion has non-linearly affected them already. It's the source of their energy at the same time.

CT: So it creates and destroys them?

LC: Yes. And they're taking turns to leave everything behind and go and understand that potential. And they're also dancing before it. So it’s the combination of what is good, what is bad, what is dangerous, what is afterlife versus going to just discover new things. I'm enjoying the tension that's happening there, where it's not fully known. They might be beings that can live sustainably with their landscape, but there's still macro climate change situations that are affecting them. 

It’s been interesting to try to figure out, as the game and the game worlds evolve, if all beings in that world are just adapting to change in different ways or if they are actually going to be beings that are, I wouldn't say evil, but antagonistic in a very specific way towards others, as when you read a book or see a movie and you can identify that character as representative of jealousy, for example.

CT: The basic formation of this idea that you described is related to our notions of faith, and with ideas of creation and destruction. It seems like this idea that you are transferring into this work is not only a game but also an experiment on other ways of living. Would that be a correct assessment?

LC: Yes, that would be an ideal assessment.

CT: Do you think that neural networks, in the future, could allow creators of video games to let the game evolve as the characters evolve?

LC: Yes. Yes. We're not there yet, but the tools are definitely evolving towards that. And that would be amazing because one of the ideas that games could do better than other media is create an open mythology. There are some video games, like Fortnite for example, that are made with the same program. Fortnite sales allows the company that makes the Unreal Engine, Epic Games, to be free and accessible to artists. Last year Epic Games opened Fortnite to have user generated content so people could just create their own levels. And that's definitely something that I really want to do one day. I would also like to work with other collaborators so I’m not the only designer. I feel like creating a full spectrum of open, varied and deep models for Level and Bosses is beyond my individual comprehension for the game to evolve to its potential. 

CT: If you want to evolve from your initial creation, it would have to include other minds?

LC: Yes. And the mind could be an AI. The beings of this world could be future AI beings as well. They don't necessarily have to be human. They could be future sea slugs or robots for example. 

I'm definitely interested in what AI's morality is going to be. Will it be just a regurgitation of all the imperfect organizational structures that we have as humans?

CT: So far, yes.

LC: Yes. There was a podcast that I heard with Grimes inquiring whether there would be a way to feed AI stories or mythologies or ways of being that could help it create new models? Maybe it can do that eventually, but on its own, maybe it won’t have our human imperfections that make us kind of destroy the earth while we're progressing.

CT: Do you think, then, that neural networks and AI could be the way that your art and gaming could evolve?

LC: Yes. It's definitely a long conversation with many questions like how AI is affecting art. People are reacting to AI. They’re worried it's going to take their jobs. I think governments and companies are discussing universal basic income, for example.

CT: Yes, I agree. That's a long conversation.

I wanted to ask you one last question. Surrealism is an art movement that interests me immensely. It came about in Europe's interwar years where art felt the need to detach itself from reality and from what was, and look elsewhere for reason and meaning. Surrealism is making a big comeback now. Do you feel its return may be because we’re in a similar situation, having to detach ourselves from a reality that is difficult to grasp and in need to imagine and create alternate worlds?

LC: Yes. AI is coming and it's the biggest scare. It’s seen as the most realistic version of that old fear of aliens landing on our planet and conquering us. So we have basically a God arriving on Earth as we speak.

CT: Do you feel that we create alternate worlds because we don’t know what’s coming?

LC: Yes, and I think climate change is the biggest fear.

CT: Climate instability, economic insecurity, shelter instability.

LC: Yes. And wars.

CT: Wars. Genocides. And then there's AI.

LC: Yes. All happening at the same time. It’s interesting the association with Surrealism. I didn't start working on games because of its influence, or consciously reacting to Surrealism. I think it was because I loved video games and sci-fi. 

CT: Do video games and sci-fi always involve creating new worlds?

LC: Yes. And that's one of the things that I've enjoyed about this process: setting up this structure and then being open for life experiences and new knowledge to evolve it. One of the challenges I had in art school (especially in undergraduate school) when I started coming up with this series, was how to make conceptual art that felt genuine and fun; how to make art that felt like fun, that wouldn't feel like something that had to be difficult. I mean, it's very difficult  because it takes many hours, and it's been a hard journey to figure out how to make a game and how to learn all the software and put together a small team every once in a while.

Since I was a kid, I have had that childlike wonder after drawing characters like Spider-Man and imagining the story behind them.

The work goes back to that wonder, but informed by conceptual art and the world around us. So it's not just creating another comic book story.

CT: I have one last request. I read that when you were a child you would ask your father to draw you Batman, over and over again. I was wondering if you could draw a Batman for us?

That morning, our first stop was Mendes Wood DM, in the Barra Funda neighborhood. We arrived early and waited in the car, since the usually horrendous traffic hadn’t caught us. The day before, we had visited the Biennial; this morning was for galleries. It was a glorious spring day: mild, sunlit, full of promise. We were giddy, talking over each other, eager to begin. The day felt wide open.

Inside, the gallery was dimly lit, the walls painted black. A soft neon phrase glowed across one wall: Assembleia de Deuses, (Assembly of Gods). It was the first gesture in Nazarethana, Paulo Nazareth’s cartography of memory, ancestry, and presence. Organized in Cantos, like a poem unfolding in fragments, the exhibition didn’t follow a straight line. It moved through spirit, pigment, and rhythm. Each room opened into another register. The colors weren’t simply visual; they held meaning.

The black room evoked Calunga, the Afro-Brazilian spirit who binds sea to cemetery. Here, Nazareth began with mourning. His grandmother, Nazareth Cassiano de Jesus, had labored on farms laid over Borun Indigenous lands. Later, she was institutionalized at Colônia de Barbacena, where thousands of poor, Black, and Indigenous Brazilians disappeared. She was never seen again. His mother, Ana Gonçalves da Silva, remembered her only in fragments. Nazarethana doesn’t reconstruct their stories. It sanctifies them.

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The title Nazarethana fuses two names: Nazareth, his grandmother, and Ana, his mother. More than a tribute, it is a declaration of origin. The exhibition grows from their lives, disrupted, erased, remembered, and carries their names forward, room by room, like a refrain. Nazareth carries his grandmother’s name as a principle, a practice, and a path. His work—walking, witnessing, collecting—becomes a ritual of relation. He moves through the world as both participant and documentarian. His photographs, found objects, and ephemeral installations carry overlooked stories: migrants, the undocumented, the disappeared. “I am my people,” he has said. “There is the person, and then there is the collective. Everything is both, together and separated.” The “I” is never singular. It is family, and also strangers met on the road, uncounted and unrecorded.

The next room was yellow, bright and enveloping. It honored Oxum, orixá of fertility and love, protector of women and rivers. Nazareth’s works also referenced water deities from Nordic, African, and Brazilian traditions, figures often pushed to history’s edges.

Along one wall hung three photographs of his mother. In each, she holds a framed portrait: a photograph within a photograph. She wears white gloves, her expression both formal and tender. The images she holds were found in an exhibition in Paris, archival photographs of people once labeled “exotic” and taken to Europe to be displayed. Upon seeing them, she recognized something. Though her memories of her own mother were faint, she was certain: she had looked like the Indigenous woman in the picture.

Then came MAMA (Museum of the Mother): part monument, part archive, part invitation. This iteration held space for reflection. Visitors were invited to leave drawings or notes: portraits of their mothers, fragments of memory, gestures of care. Together, these became a collective act of visibility for mothers and the often-unseen labor of nurturing.

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In the white room, everything felt distilled. The floor, walls, and ceiling, white on white, were dedicated to Eleguá, or Exu, lord of thresholds and beginnings. Red and black beads scattered across the floor during a performance by Nazareth formed the installation as both offering and invocation. This Canto became a crossroads.

The rose-colored room belonged to Ewá, divinity of vision and intuition, associated with Saint Lucy in Christian tradition. Her presence was quiet, charged. Along the walls, photographs alternated with pontos riscados, spiritual diagrams in pemba chalk, traced from the archives of the Centro Espírita Caboclo Pena Branca in the Namastê Quilombola Community. At the center, a table recalled a Last Supper, set with resin replicas of saint-named goods: Guaraná Jesus, São Tiago biscuits, São João filters. Sacred and commercial coexisted—not as critique, but as condition.

A sand-filled pool stretched across the floor in the final room. Blue walls evoked sea and sky. The ground mirrored Dakar’s cobblestones, marked with royal emblems and a baobab tree whose roots hold memory. On the wall: Nós podemos nadar (We can swim). Nazareth doesn’t swim. Water had meant danger. Here, water wasn’t danger, it was beginning. The pool hovered between path and passage. A place of return.

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Nazarethana offers no final statement, no text to tell you what to take. Instead, it leaves you in motion. Between rooms, between histories, between worlds. It lingers not through spectacle, but because it stirs something inside you. We had more places to see, but something had shifted. What Nazarethana opened didn’t close when we left.

All works from Nazarethana by Paulo Nazareth, presented at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, 2025.
Images courtesy of Mendes Wood DM.

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“If you don’t step outside yourself, you’ll never discover who you are. […} each man is an island, …you have to leave the island in order to see the island.”
José Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, as cited by Fernanda Froes.¹

Born in Brazil, I’ve spent nearly twenty-five years in Miami, listening across languages and navigating spaces where meaning slips between cultures. Over time, a question began to surface: in a city formed by diasporas and defined by cultural exchange, why is little known about Brazilian art?

I kept returning to the actress Fernanda Torres, who said: “Brazil is a continental island: we know so much about the world, and the world knows so little about us.”² Paying attention to where Brazilian presence is already unfolding in the city, Miami-based artists Susanne Schirato, Fernanda Froes, and Liene Bosquê each respond to this question through their work. Their practices are rooted in research, place, and material. They do not present Brazil as a fixed identity, rather allowing it to surface through process, memory, and form.

Susanne Schirato’s work begins underwater, in the stillness of flooded caves. A diver and researcher, her expeditions across Brazil, the Arctic, and Antarctica, are translated into visual works shaped by physical intensity, risk, and the temporal scale of the natural world. Her art borrows scientific tools and methods, reimagining them as forms that speak to ecological fragility and human inertia.

When she moved to Miami three years ago, she feared losing touch with the environments that defined her practice. Instead, the city’s coastline, green spaces, and layered cultural life gave her new material. “Miami brought oxygen to my work,” she notes. Local pigments, new palettes, and community interactions began to enter her process, blending her Brazilian sensibility with Florida’s landscape.

She compares Miami’s diversity to a rainforest, where coexistence forms a kind of ecosystem. What Schirato offers Miami is not a material so much as a perspective: a way of thinking shaped by Brazil’s mix of science, spirituality, and ecological respect. Rooted in submerged landscapes, her practice invites a shift in how we relate to the natural world—above and below the surface.

When visual artist Fernanda Froes moved to Miami eight years ago, the distance from Brazil led her to research the country’s history and botany, eventually working with the red pigment extracted from pau-brasil (Brazilwood). When Froes speaks about pau-brasil, she isn’t just naming a pigment—she’s invoking a tree that gave Brazil its name, reshaped colonial trade, and was nearly driven to extinction. Rooted in drawing, fiber, and printmaking, her practice traces the entanglements between ecology, history, and identity. Rather than recreating Brazil, she began working from it using its materials and histories as a foundation for dialogue. The botanical pigments she works with—brazilwood, indigo, mangrove—carry color and cultural memory.

“In some way, we are all transplanted,” Froes notes. “Carrying our stories, memories, and roots.” Her recent focus on Rhizophora mangle, a species of mangrove native to Brazil, South Florida, and the Caribbean, reflects this. The pigment she extracts from its leaves becomes a way to connect geographies.It begins locally and expands outward, like the mangrove itself: adaptive, grounding, and quietly persistent.

For Liene Bosquê, a place is never just a backdrop. Her sculptures, installations, and socially engaged projects explore how the body relates to architecture, how spaces are shaped, and how they shape in return. Her work is tactile and participatory, using clay impressions, architectural fragments, and hammocks as vessels of memory, presence, and care.

Leaving Brazil in 2005, Miami began to shift her perspective in 2019, when she presented Collecting Impressions, a walking project in downtown Miami. Participants traced the city’s changing architecture by taking clay rubbings of its surfaces. “Rather than just observing, I was facilitating relationships,” she recounts. Miami was no longer a backdrop—it was becoming part of the work.

While studying in Chicago, she struggled to express the emotional depth of Portuguese in English. From that dislocation came Hamacas, a project where immigrant participants co-wove hammocks while sharing stories, gestures, and presence. In Miami, the nearness of Portuguese and Spanish created a hybrid texture. What is lost in translation can be recovered in resonance

What ties their work together is not a fixed identity or shared aesthetic, but a commitment to place—how it is inhabited, cared for, and listened to in its histories. Each artist proposes a slower, more attentive way of engaging with the world, whether through pigment, pressure, or architectural memory.

I resist the pull of labels, yet I see the value in being named. To be discovered is to be invited into conversation, not explained or reduced, but encountered. These gestures are not prescriptions, but propositions. Ways of sensing, making, and being that beckons a more textured engagement with place.

1. José Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (Orlando: Harcourt, 1999), p.32

2. Excerpt from Fernanda Torres’ interview with journalist Rodrigo Ortega published at the actor’s official website @oficialfernandatorres taken from the instagram account @viladospoetas published on December 19, 2024.

Stories don’t always vanish. Sometimes, they get paved over. In Miami Beach, where buildings rise quickly and memory is easily rebranded, I’ve learned to look for gestures that insist on preservation—not through spectacle, but through repetition, care, and language.

Artist Rosemarie Chiarlone’s longtime preoccupation with language as line, image, and texture is present in every work. Words are carved, perforated, or implied—never fully delivered. Installed at the Miami Beach Regional Library, her exhibition The Story centers on the fragility of cultural memory, taking shape through abstract wall panels, ink-and-salt paintings, a sand installation, and sculptural text drawings excerpted from a poem. Together, these pieces form a textured meditation on what language holds. “I don’t like a lot of words,” she told me during a recent walk-through. “I like it to be very simplistic.” But that simplicity can be deceptive

Along the gallery’s west wall, Chiarlone presents a series of abstract panels that partially recreate Albert Vrana’s 1962 concrete bas-relief The Story of Man. The original work encircles the nearby rotunda in Collins Park, designed by architect Herbert A. Mathes and once part of the Miami Beach Public Library. “Vrana always ties his work to the meaning of the building,” she told me. “Since there was a library attached to it, he called it The Story of Man.” The rotunda’s textured, abstract design alludes to the role of language, literature, the arts, and philosophy in shaping human civilization. “I love that,” Chiarlone added, “because what is the story of man? It is art, language, stories, history—everything that makes up civilization.”

The exhibition also turns to language. On the north wall, text drawings—phrases such as “From Nothing,” “To Something,” “On the Blue,” “Dot in Space,” “Developing Earth,” and “Being Human”—are excerpted from the poem The Story by Susan Weiner, with whom the artist collaborates. These spare text fragments function like constellations, to be read slowly across space and surface. This fragmentary approach recalls the work of 1960s conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, who used spare text to prompt active interpretation. Like her predecessors, Chiarlone presents language as something to be decoded rather than simply read.

Other pieces shift the exhibition’s focus outward—toward space, scale, and human perspective. Small, dark paintings made with ink, salt, and mica are inspired by Carl Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which frames Earth as a fragile point in the universe. At the center of the gallery, a porcelain vessel sits atop a platform covered in pale sand. The vessel is perforated with the words “from nothing.” The sand refers to the subtle, nearly invisible color of space (which is not black!) and to Vrana’s method of casting his bas-reliefs directly into wet sand. From the body to the building to the planet, The Story invites viewers to consider what holds—and what disappears—across scale, material, and time.

Having lived in Miami Beach for over 25 years, I often think about what gets remembered and what gets overwritten. Chiarlone’s work doesn’t shout, and maybe that’s why it lingers. In The Story, her careful tension between presence and impermanence becomes a call to attention. At a time when the preservation of culture is increasingly complex, she reminds us that memory isn’t passive but an active, daily practice. And in a place like Miami Beach, that kind of remembering feels both urgent and deeply human.

When we arrived most of the museum was closed to the public, its galleries in transition as the Parrish Art Museum (Water Mill, NY) prepared for upcoming exhibitions. Like many seasonal places, there was a quiet hum of activity—just enough to suggest that the season was about to begin. Still, several galleries at the east end were open, celebrating Shirin Neshat’s thirty-year career, “dedicated to examining contrasts between East and West,” as the exhibition materials put it.

Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire brings together four major bodies of work that span different periods of the artist’s practice. Women of Allah (1993–97) introduces her use of black-and-white photography layered with Persian calligraphy to question the mindset of women who chose to become militants—standing at the threshold of faith, sacrifice, violence, and death. The Book of Kings (2012) draws on Persian epic poetry to reflect on protest and political struggle. Land of Dreams(2019) shifts the focus to the United States, blending photography and film to examine identity and surveillance. Most recently, The Fury (2022–23) offers a visceral portrayal of female political prisoners, using a two-channel video installation to explore trauma, vulnerability, and control.

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There’s something revealing about seeing an artist’s work unfold across time. While a single exhibition can offer intensity or focus, a survey offers a broader language of an artist’s practice, revealing how themes—like exile, resistance, and the written word, in Neshat’s case—gain depth through shifts, returns, and dialogue over time.

Land of Dreams is the first time Neshat turns her lens to the United States, where she has lived since her college years. Unable to return to Iran since 1996, she felt increasingly distant from its everyday realities and turned instead to American culture. Filmed in the deserts of New Mexico—a landscape she chose for its visual echo of Iran—the work includes still photography, video, and a feature-length film. Unlike her earlier portraits of friends as mythical figures, here she photographed over 100 strangers and transcribed their dreams into Farsi, with the calligraphy integrated into the background rather than layered over their faces. The result is both intimate and estranged, opening questions about belonging: Are we always connected to where we come from? What shapes our vision? For Neshat, even in America, the world remains refracted through the lens of exile.

The Fury (2022–23), a two-channel video installation, was sparked by the arrest of an Iranian officer in Sweden accused of sexually exploiting female political prisoners. In this work, Neshat explores the lingering trauma of such violence—how, for many women, the aftermath is inescapable, sometimes leading to suicide.

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Neshat’s work is deeply personal and shaped by the melancholy of always being an outsider, and the persistent desire to belong somewhere. “The women in my work are all me,” she has said, describing a state of nostalgia that runs through much of her practice. Her images are not drawn from a fresh wound, but from one that continues to shape her vision—a quiet, enduring presence. “As far as I am Iranian, the world will be Iranian,” she once remarked, capturing the emotional gravity of origin and the way exile alters one’s relationship to place. And yet, within that dislocation, her work also gestures toward connection: a belief that memory, language, and art can form another kind of belonging—one not bound by geography, but sustained through expression.

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In my recently published article at toomuchlovemagazine.com, Love Beyond Borders: Glenda León’s ‘Only Lovers’ as a Vision for a Compassionate World I explore her background and some of the works in that exhibition. While researching and interviewing her for that piece, I gathered a wealth of insights that couldn’t all fit into the article. Here’s the entire conversation we had.

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Carmen de Terenzio: How do you approach the concept of interconnectedness in your work, central to the theme of Only Lovers, and what role do you think love plays as a force for dismantling divisions?

Glenda León: I believe that love is a way to arrive at compassion, and compassion is what we desperately need to make this a better world. It is because of the lack of these feelings that wars start (both small and big), that the overexploitation of the Earth happens, and that intolerance takes place. Becoming aware of and experiencing the interconnectedness of all living creatures is the key to respecting others and refraining from harming a single living being. This awareness can also lead us to realize how absurd it is to divide the Earth for political reasons—it’s like dividing the air or the water.

CT: Your exploration of the imagined Havana in Miami highlights the duality of being in two places at once. How do you think this duality shapes the identities and emotions of Cuban immigrants?

GL: As someone who has lived in different places around the world, I learned early on that only by loving the new place you move to and being open to it can you create a better, happier, and more harmonious life. Of course, this doesn’t mean erasing the past or forgetting your beautiful memories. However, constantly longing for the past prevents you from living in the present and, as a result, fully embracing the future.

I’ve met many Cubans living outside the island who remain deeply attached to their cultural habits, often comparing their new surroundings to what they left behind. Unfortunately, this attachment can cause them to miss the opportunity to discover and experience the rich diversity of other cultures—through food, art, and so much more—that their new home has to offer.

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CT: Borders—whether physical, emotional, or conceptual—are a recurring theme in your work. How do you envision art as a tool to challenge or dissolve these boundaries.

GL: When I created the architectural model of a pool between Miami and Havana (Summer Dream, 2005), I intended to make an ironic comment on the political relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. Like a game of actions and reactions—common in many tense relationships—it has become a perpetual chain.

In 2012, I brought this idea to life on a larger scale by intervening in a pool in Havana. I placed photographic enlargements of the Miami and Havana coastlines on opposite sides of the pool. By drawing a connection between the sea and a pool, we altered the swimmers' perception and projection of the space. Swimming, then, transcends its usual meaning of entertainment or sport, becoming an act of re-encounter and a symbolic breaking of invisible, imposed barriers. After all, the horizon is an illusion.

Through the maps, even the simple act of sitting and having a drink took on a new meaning, as though one were sitting on a street corner in either city. Works like this, which address these themes, also act as a form of healing—a way to mend the wounds caused by the absurd situation between two countries so geographically close yet so divided.

CT: I read in an interview that someone defined you not as conceptualist artist but as a lyrical conceptualist artist. I thought it was a perfect definition. What do you think of it? How would you define yourself of your practice?

GL: I believe we need poetry more than ever—not to escape from reality, but to face it, especially in the times we are living in. We need hope now more than ever. I often say that if the news is so disappointing and negative, should we, as creators, contribute yet another negative thing to this world? Our social role should be to uplift and inspire, and to add, even if only with a small grain of sand, to the spiritual evolution that I believe is what will ultimately save humanity. I am certain Félix Gonzalez-Torres would feel the same.

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CT: In one of your interviews, you speak about sound, silence and on how being close to nature helps dissolve the ego. Could you elaborate on this idea and how it shapes your artistic practice and spiritual perspective?

GL: Through long-term practice and under certain circumstances, I have experienced a dissolution of the ego—transmutations, synchronicity, compassion, and other profound events. These experiences became the source of inspiration for many of my early works, such as the video series Every Breath (2003–2018). They also deepened my understanding of how essential it is for humanity to undergo such experiences. While this shift is already happening, and many people are becoming aware of it, there are still not enough to drive a radical change in how we care for the Earth and perceive it as a living entity. Breaking the natural balance can trigger a chain of irreparable damage, and we must recognize this urgently.

Perhaps the word “nature” itself created this division; we think of it as an “it” rather than as “us.” For example, the Japanese language didn’t historically have a word for “nature” because there was no separation between the outside world and the self.

I explored this concept further in my installation Mundo Interpretado (2009), where the names of five gods were translated into Braille and then into musical notation, played by five music boxes. The aim was to focus on the spiritual essence shared by these deities rather than the differences religions have created—differences that have led to wars and countless injustices. A recent version of this work is now installed at OK in Linz, Austria. In this iteration, an automatic piano plays the names of 214 gods who, according to various cultures, are credited with creating the world.

CT: Tiempo Perdido II that greets us at the entrance of the show seems to be the only “pessimistic” piece in the exhibition. Could you please expand on this work and its origins?

GL: This work dates back to 2003, when I began creating a series of objects embedded in the wall, such as a book (Secret Words) or a butterfly (Longing). These works were a commentary on the lack of freedom I was experiencing at the time, which felt suffocating. They were deeply autobiographical (though I believe all works are, in a way), but these pieces were a bit more direct.

Then I thought of embedding a clock, which led me to replace the cement with sand. As with most of my works, this one also aims to make us pause: to stop, be silent, and reflect. It is only with awareness that one can evolve. This work invites us to contemplate the concept of wasted time. What does wasted time look like in our personal lives? And what does it mean at a bigger dimension, at a national level? Can we change our behavior in the future and avoid repeating the same mistakes?

As I’ve shown this piece in different venues and heard feedback from various people, I’ve realized it can be painful to revisit the idea of lost time. While it’s true that wasted time cannot be recovered, we can always make a turn, reshape the present, and create a different future, once we recognize the source of this lost time

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1 Individual differences in valence bias: fMRI evidence of the initial negativity hypothesis, by Nathan M Petro, Tien T Tong, Daniel J Henley, Maital Neta | Social Cognitive and affective neuroscience. Oxford Academic. (n.d.). https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/7/687/5042248?login=false

The exhibition, Infinite Forme e Bellissime—curated by Stéphane Verger and Sergio Risaliti—presents 18 of Cragg’s sculptures from the past two decades, set against the stunning backdrop of the Great Halls of the Baths of Diocletian. His fluid, organic forms echo natural patterns—ocean waves, plant structures, or spiraling shells—while their varied materials, from bronze and wood to fiberglass and steel, engage in a tactile dialogue with the brick walls and black-and-white mosaic floors, weaving past and present together.

The exhibition’s title, Infinite Forme e Bellissime, takes inspiration from Charles Darwin’s closing words in On the Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

This idea is at the heart of the show. It reflects Cragg’s deep fascination with the endless variety of forms found in nature—from the tiniest microorganisms to vast cosmic structures. He sees manmade objects as “fossilized keys to a past time which is our present,” suggesting that even the most ordinary things we create will one day become relics, carrying traces of our existence into the future. It also speaks to that feeling of wonder when we stop to truly observe the world around us. The exhibition invites us into this space of creativity, where nature and art, organic and digital, ancient and modern, all blend together. Whether drawn from the crystalline structures of minerals, the patterns of living organisms, or even the possibilities of digital design, Cragg’s work bridges disciplines—archaeology, geology, art history, and biology—showing how interconnected they really are.

All Photos: Carmen F. de Terenzio

The focus on lines and shapes in the drawings drew us in, inviting close and intimate engagement. Historically, drawings have been exhibited as works that foster a unique connection between the viewer and the artist's process. Their raw, unfinished quality—a glimpse into the act of creation—often highlights the intimacy of the gestures, encouraging us to perceive them as moments of becoming rather than completed statements. Delicate and intriguing, these gestures provoke curiosity and reflection.

In my research into the medium, I came across MoMA's 2010 exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, organized by Connie Butler(1). This show explored the transformation of drawing in the 20th century, as artists critically redefined traditional concepts of the medium. They moved beyond paper extending the line into real space, challenging the relationship between art and the world including performances and films.

Fiber art and various forms of markings stood out this year. With roots in the 1960s and 1970s, textiles have long challenged the boundaries between craft and fine art and are now regarded as more than just a trend(2). This era also marked a significant shift, legitimizing the association of an artist's practice with their personal life and memories. Feminist movements further expanded these boundaries by reinterpreting domestic crafts as art. Today, fiber art remains a powerful medium for personal and political expression for all genders. Some of what we saw includes: Lee Shinja’s 1980’s tapestries that attempt to catch changing light; Jordan Nassar’s embroidered fictional landscapes; Adolfo Riestra’s drawings addressing human connectedness; Robert Longo’s charcoal depiction of an iceberg; Amy Cutler mysterious, surreal worlds; Madalena Reinbolt’s highly pictorial and dramatic wool paintings, as she called them, sometimes done in the evening, after retiring from her domestic work.

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Here is some of what we saw at Design Miami and NADA:

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For the latest iteration of the Miami Beach’s public art initiative Elevate Española, Miami-born and Los Angeles-based artist Jen Stark debuted Sundial Spectrum, her first public installation in her hometown. More on that can be found at the article written by yours truly for The Art Newspaper.

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At the main show Art Basel Conversations offered an engaging series of discussions featuring artists Shirin Neshat, Harmony Korine, Paul McCarthy, and Jill Mulleady, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist among others. A standout session for us was What can public art do? a conversation between Kate Gilbert, Executive Director of the Boston Public Art Triennial and Dr. Deborah Willis, artist, curator, and historian, moderated by Kimberly Bradley, Conversations Curator at Art Basel. Seeding the environment, staying local, and remaining true to specific contexts, they discussed how public art also serves as a platform for activism with the capability of retelling stories, fostering deeper engagement with the community. All sessions are available on the Art Basel’s YouTube channel. Below, some of the what we saw at the main show:

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We had the opportunity to attend William Kentridge’s musical theater performance, The Great Yes, The Great No, which was the highlight of our week. Set aboard a ship sailing from Marseille to Martinique in 1941, the production fictionalizes the historic wartime escape from Vichy, France by prominent artists and thinkers of that time, including André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wifredo Lam, Anna Seghers, and Victor Serge. Space and time are fluidly rearranged and additional characters, like Frantz Fanon and Suzanne Césaire, are invited aboard this symbolic ark, transforming it into an allegory of displacement as well as a vivid portrayal of humanity’s desires and disasters. The actors use cardboard photographic masks, which they shift throughout the play, creating a fluidity of identity among the characters. Kentridge explains that the work also serves as a historical reflection on Europe’s transition from rationalism to surrealism and its evolving ways of understanding the world. He further notes that the destination is an imagined Martinique, taken from writings and perspectives of various individuals. Watch here to an interview with Kentridge.

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1. This exhibition was organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, and Catherine de Zegher, former director, The Drawing Center, New York.

2. Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

Art as creation is, at its core, an act of “doing”. Opposed to nature, which also produces things, the artistic creation is not the result of a “cause” or a “reaction” but an intended action fueled by a free intention to “do”, for something to exist. This intention behind any artistic creation, is what distinguishes it from any other form of existence and grants the work of art a status beyond its own materiality. Abstract art is a good example of this. It is not by its material look that an abstract work of art can be seen as such, especially since it also lacks any figurative reference, but because this very same tangible non figurative object refers itself towards something beyond its material existence, that is, to an intention of creation. This intention can only come from the freedom and consciousness of the artist, his or her desire to create, and whose creation is always a search for that absence of reference, that realm beyond sheer matter, beyond technique and beyond the literal.

Helen Frankenthaler’s intention is, as she famously said herself, to go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about. Recognized nowadays as one of the most important post war American artists, Frankenthaler artistic career is one I would define as a becoming, an example of constant transformation and hence, a constant search for what lays beyond the predefined, the expected, the rules, the cause. For this reason, as she perfected her very personal soak-stain technique,  she managed to give an instance of existence to the ungraspable character of Beauty.

The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, Italy, shows very clearly how this search for beauty became clearer to Frankenthaler and little by little took shape in her increasingly shapeless canvases. I believe this monographic exhibition that shows her transformation journey has a more meaningful raison d’être in such a museum, this being one without a permanent collection and, so, always transformed according to the exhibition it holds inside its walls.

Helen Frankenthaler, Painting without rules is an exhibition that takes us spectators through the personal and artistic life of the artist, a woman very much of her time but who knew how, from her ephemeral human condition, paint the unfathomable, the eternal. Through the exhibition we discover how she began as an artist, the works of art and fellow artists that influenced her, the personal relationships that contributed to her artistic becoming and how all these elements, apparent circumstantial details, led her intuitively to become a pivotal figure in the emergence of Color Field painting.

Starting With A Flashforward

The exhibition is the most extensive retrospective ever done in Italy on Helen Frankenthaler. Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné, it presents the artist’s large scale canvases, some of her sculptures as well as works on paper, all in dialogue with other artists' works, contemporaries of Frankenthaler herself. This comparative dynamic between works allows the exhibition to explore more in depth Frankenthaler’s world as well as her evolution as an artist. 

Each room walks you through the most important periods of Frankenthaler’s life and career, from her early years when she was greatly influenced by Jackson Pollock and Rothko, up until the early 2000’s paintings where her artistic language, as we know it today, had very much sinked in. Despite being curated in a chronological order, the exhibition begins with a flash forward that takes us to the middle of Frankenthaler’s career in the 70’s. Perhaps this was a curatorial decision designed to introduce the essentials of her artistic language to the general public, whether knowledgeable or not about her work.

In the first room are displayed paintings, on canvas and paper, as well as a sculpture but without a doubt, the room is largely dominated by Moveable Blue (1973). The large blue and yellow canvas already announces to whomever walks in what their experience will be all through the show, namely a journey towards unbound color. My first impression as I stood in front of this abstract and colorful work, was of being involuntarily swallowed by it. The closer I got, the more engrossed I was in its vibrant colors that seemed to still be dripping in an eternal slow motion. Hypnotizing and calming, Frankenthaler’s color-soaked canvases effortlessly embrace their spectators in light and visual bliss. From then on, I was bewitched, body and soul, and made my way to the next room, the room of the beginning.

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Beginnings and Parallelisms 

The canvases in this room were all brought together by the very strong presence of Number 14 (1956) by Jackson Pollock. As I stood in the middle of this smaller area, I wondered what Frankenthaler’s experience was like when she saw Pollock’s work for the first time. His black and white composition contrasts with her colorful ones, yes but it does not clash with them. This is particularly evident in Western Dream (1957) with which I would go further as to say that it is an appropriation of the inspiration and lessons she learned from the father of Action Painting.  That is, you can see more of what she was to become as an artist than the traces of Pollock's teaching. 

The third room is one of the best curated ones in the exhibition. Here, the dialogue between Frankenthaler's paintings and her artist’s friends' work become evident. In the composition of her Tutti-Frutti (1966) you can see reflected the structure of David Smith’s sculpture Untitled (Zig VI) (1965). Or vice versa, in Anne Truitt’s all too white Seed (1969), that blends and almost disappears against the white walls of the gallery, you can distinguish Hellen’s Cape (Provincetown) (1964) where the multilayered and wobbly verticality of her composition unveils the same intention of ambiguity as Anne’s almost invisible column. This intense dialogue between masterpieces prepares the visitor to the upcoming three rooms which only display works by other artists. The internal narrative rhythm is suddenly but subtly interrupted and a distracted visitor might only notice this change only half way through. But despite presenting other artist’s work, they are all still talking about Frankenthaler. These works are either dedicated to her, were part of her personal collection, or were even created in her company, such as Summertime in Italy (1960) by her first husband Rober Motherwell. This cut in the rhythm of the exhibition can be interpreted as a parallelism between the cut that occurred in Frankenthaler’s life, that is, her divorce from Motherwell. After dwelling in these dimly lit rooms, immersed in the works of others that spoke deeply to Frankenthaler, we are led into a room full of light and color, full of new life. After her divorce, she spent less time in New York and bought a home in Shippan Point from where she had a view of Long Island Sound. This serene and tranquil seascape, where she could see and hear the calm movements of nature, became her most faithful companion. The new color scapes she painted during this period, reflect how the changes in her life affected directly her artistic language. Her compositions are less fragmented, the colors, such as in Ocean Drive (1974), more solid, less fluid. They form, in my opinion, already part of the new genre she contributed to create: the Color Field paintings.

Traversing The Threshold Towards Masterful Artistry

As I approached the end of the exhibition, I could feel I was maturing alongside Frankenthaler herself and this feeling reached its peak in my favorite room of the show. I believe the previous canvases were of genius exploration, but the ones in this room are those where Helen painted that something she found during her artistic exploration. Throughout this period, she was influenced by her admiration, not so much of her contemporary fellow artists but mostly by the great masters such as Velazquéz, Rembrandt and Titian. She was an artist that had been perfecting the technique of layering colors, and she achieved unprecedented profundity during this period. I have to admit my opinion on this room is not completely objective, since here are my favorite paintings, but I can without a doubt say that Star Gazing (1989) and Eastern Light (1982) are achievements without precedents in her career. 

There is a new depth in her art and it is, in my opinion, achieved through the study of the methods of the great artists, more specifically the glazing technique¹. This provided Frankenthaler with the techné² she needed to step beyond a technical threshold only great artists manage to cross. The deep blues and the almost smokey whites of Star Gazing (1989), or her pinkish black and coppery light orange in Eastern Light (1982) are no longer watery colors dripping one unto the other, blending with masterful control. No, these colors are more than colors, they are veils, veils of time, diaphanous layers of whispers that left their traces in the canvases. These colors are what the great masters whispered to Frankenthaler, they are representations of the sedimentation of prefigurations that transformed Frankenthaler’s initial artistic intention into innovation. When, through these colorful veils, she steps through the threshold of masterful artistry, the initial free intention that pushed her young self to create is transformed into innovation or, as the great Paul Ricœur³ would say, into productive imagination. From this moment on, Helen’s works are no longer only ambiguous, they are no longer only the result of unruled experimentation, they are reconfigurations of this world. However, let's not forget that the world is at the same time reconfiguring Frankenthaler and in this circular motion where she now finds herself,  she will begin a search for beauty only perceivable from this dialectic sway of the veils of sedimentation and innovation.

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An Endless End

As I left this room, I soon entered what seemed to be a new dimension. During the 90’s Frankenthaler developed two different ways of painting: one, a mighty session where she finished a painting in one go and only added small details later, and the other, slower method where she “worked more” the painting and the results were more “dense”. These two techniques are shown in this room by displaying the different works facing each other. But what truly transforms this section is the sound coming from the room next door. The voice of Frankenthaler, like a siren’s song, draws everyone to the darker room behind a two and a half meters black and white photograph of the artist that decorates this section. Behind the photo, a video of a series of interviews with the artist is playing in loop. As I sat down I truly saw her, for the first time. Her voice played over videos of her painting. The dim lights and closeness of this room made the watching of the video an intimate experience. As Frankenthaler was on the floor, pouring a thin and watery paint substance on her large canvases, we all were there with her as well. She spreaded the paint with a sponge and I suddenly realized she did not use a brush as I was expecting. She achieved the lighter colors not by adding lighter color paint but by absorbing the excess of paint. For the first time I realized that, when she talked about painting with “no rules”, she meant it. Not only did her conception of composition not follow the standards, but also she had “no rules” when it came to the method itself. Everything you would expect her to do to paint, she did the opposite. At this point, it’s safe to say that when she kneeled in front or over her canvas, she did not only pour paint onto it, she poured herself into it.

After the video finished, I stepped once more into the light of the final room of the exhibition. This one is dedicated to the final years of her artistic journey. The paintings here embody the depth she discovered in the innovation of her great masters period, as well as the two different techniques she used in the 90’s. Both are strong and ambiguous characteristics of this final period. With this truth assimilated, she embarked on an introspective and perhaps lonely search for beauty. Younger artists, despite acknowledging her importance in the art world, criticized her for not having “evolved”. They qualified her art as “obsolete and meaningless” while they deemed it more relevant and important an art that was politically and socially involved. I believe Frankenthaler was not oblivious to what was happening during the first years of the new millennium. On the contrary, I believe she was so conscious of the changes and tragedies of these years, and the years to come, that she decided the best way to reflect on them, to bestow something meaningful among the chaos, was through beauty.

The reconfiguration—not a political commentary—of the world through beauty is what Frankenthaler chose to paint during her final active years. In Borrowed Dream (1992) she leaves a turquoise seemingly empty space that is surrounded by this dark, thick red that spreads across the rest of the canvas. And beneath this dark red some scratches let us see an almost pastel yellow hiding beneath it. These whispers of yellow and the turquoise emptiness in the middle leave space for imagination among the red storm that threatens to take over the canvas at any moment. We are unsure if the turquoise is slowly pushing the red away or if the red is bit by bit taking over the turquoise. Frankenthaler does not give us a hint of what is actually happening, she simply paints a moment, an eternal moment of ambiguity. This happens again in Driving East (2002) only this painting is, in my opinion, the most poetic of them all. 

This is one of her last paintings on canvas and, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful. The far away horizon, placed at the bottom of the painting, seems to be slowly fading away. The stormy sky above it is heavily pressing down on it and the green mountains below it are unwavering, solid. But behind these mountains, a faint light rears in and some slightly blue clouds appear towards the left, as if challenging the gray above it. This soft light is the element of imaginative ambiguity, not the lack of figurative elements, not the blurry abstract colors, but the dim light that opens up the composition and cuts deep into our interpretation. Thus the horizon unveiled itself as more than an element of a landscape, it reveals itself as an endless end. A horizon is forever unreachable, and Frankenthaler’s painting captures this since, despite the title suggesting movement (“driving”), we are not sure if we are moving towards the horizon or driving away from it. And that is beauty for an artist, an unreachable horizon, ever present in their creations but ungraspable in its entirety, always fleeting, always changing and unruled. Despite our desperate intention to reach those mountains, behind which I’m sure is the answer to the eternal questions “What is beauty?”, neither us nor Frankenthaler can reach it. But it’s only the true artists who can reconfigure the world, the esplanades of our experiences and the self, to unveil the light that enlightens human experience and render possible the knowledge of the unfathomable through the sensible incompleteness of the innovative act of creation.

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Notes:

1 Glazing is a standard technique in painting, whereby a thin layer of paint is applied on top of the main colour, resulting in rich, iridescent colours. The glaze technique requires special semi-transparent paints. During the Renaissance, many artists used glazing as a way of mixing paints.

2 Techné is a Greek word that means art, skill, or craft, and can also refer to the methods or principles used to make something. In ancient Greek philosophy, it was a concept that described the ability to make things and the practical knowledge and expertise needed to do so.

3 Paul Ricoeur (1913—2005) was the John Nuveen Professor in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His theory suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world. He argued that imagination is a powerful force that can break through social, political, and scientific structures.

Salvadoran-born and based in Copenhagen, Denmark since 1989, Paredes was diagnosed with leukemia at an early age, a disease he has battled ever since. A longing for a sense of wonder that began in his childhood, when he was mesmerized by math and physics, seeing them as a mysterious language sending messages that needed to be decoded, combined with his experience of illness, has deeply informed both his life and his work.

On a sweltering July day, as I walked into a gallery, I had the uncanny feeling that the pages of the book I had been reading had come to life. My summer reading, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a “nonfiction” novel that explores the moral crises of science, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. The images, much like the novel, were haunting yet poetic: a sepia-toned forest with the letters "R," "K," and "F" subtly marked, hinting at hidden narratives within the natural world; a pink-hued sky looming over a glowing, distorted cityscape, punctuated by a floating letter "X" and a silhouetted spear-like object, suggesting a mythic or otherworldly moment suspended in time.

It was during the pandemic and its abundance of stillness that Paredes, like so many, found himself with time to fill. Returning to the fragments of his charred negatives—especially those he calls "photos of horizons"—he noticed something unsettling: their fractured lines mirrored the broken landscape of our present. Inspired, he "wrote" a visual novel, weaving together a series of “short stories”, each tethered by the delicate thread of time, and named them Anthropocene Archives.

Though absent of human figures, the images are imbued with the human gaze, reflecting our curiosity, and perhaps vulnerability. They invite us to wonder: What does photography truly capture—memory, imagination, or the fleeting essence of a moment? Can a photograph, fractured and remade, speak truths its original form could not? To better understand the mind behind these evocative works, I spoke with Luis Paredes.

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Carmen: Anthropocene Archives is the title of your latest photo exhibition, which you describe in the accompanying text as 'part of a collection of visual essays exploring themes of the future.' The images are at once striking, incredibly poetic, and sometimes disturbing. Could you tell us how this project came to be and share insights into your process?

Luis: It was a combination of things. I see this series as a collection of short stories with a shared DNA. Each story stands on its own, but together they reveal a common origin.

When I was finishing the series, I started noticing recurring patterns and concepts that connected the photos, even if certain elements were absent in some and present in others. Initially, I was confused about why these kids didn’t look alike, but later, I realized the deeper connections between the images.

The project began during COVID-19, a time that felt like living in a science fiction reality. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced, even after battling leukemia and navigating medical and psychological challenges. This was the first time I questioned whether what I was living through was real. It felt surreal, with echoes of 1984—a strange coexistence of contradictions.

There was a deadly virus, yet there was also rapid scientific progress, like the development of vaccines. I had to get vaccinated early due to my weak immune system. The situation was both protective and unsettling—leaving me feeling cheated and cared for at the same time. It was a schizophrenic reality, confined to my house, with the world outside polluted by this new and unknown virus.

Ten years earlier, there was a fire in my apartment building. My family and I fled without taking anything. Although the firemen stopped the flames, the heat destroyed much of our belongings, including many negatives and my archive. The negatives of horizons I had used for eight years—including at the Venice Biennale—were ruined. It was devastating. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, even though they were no longer usable, as they held so much of my past.

I kept the damaged negatives and moved them with me over the years. During COVID, like many others, I was spending a lot of time at home and started doing things I usually didn’t have time for. I opened the boxes and found many negatives melted, distorted, or destroyed. I couldn’t recreate my past work, but I noticed some were landscapes. It struck me that these landscapes, captured as they were 10 years ago, had been transformed by heat and catastrophe.

I realized that’s what’s happening in the world constantly: landscapes are always changing—whether due to catastrophes, human development, or other forces. In case of COVID, I saw it as a catastrophe. It also made me think of global warming and the rapidly changing landscapes of the North Pole. In a way, my negatives had undergone their own small Anthropocene-like experience.

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This made me wonder what information remained in those negatives. When I scanned them, I found them beautiful, but also sad—they no longer looked as they once did. I had to accept them as they were now. I even tried to fix them, but I quickly realized it was futile. Restoring them to their original state would have taken ages—it was impossible to bring them back to the past.

I then thought, why not take advantage of the damage and use it to create a new world from what was once in these negatives? That’s when I began adding circles, trying to patch some of the scratches, or using the scratches themselves as a form of expression. When the negatives were bent, I bent them even more.

I started experimenting, and realized that by embracing the damage and even intensifying it, something really interesting emerged. It was a new world—one I couldn’t quite recognize yet, but sensed it could be a glimpse of the future: mathematics, technology, DNA processes, biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, space exploration.

I began to see these images as if they were documents created by archaeologists from the year 3000, examining the remnants of a past civilization—or an extraterrestrial observing Earth, trying to piece together what had happened. As in archaeology, you can never tell the full story, you only have fragments and references. I liked that about these photos, such as the one with the red forest and the RKF letters. The letters reference something, but they don’t explain it. You sense something significant happened there, something ominous, but the mystery remains.

It was as if this archive had been uncovered, leaving you with the question, "What does it reveal?” I kept that ambiguity because I believe it sparks the imagination and allows the work to keep evolving.

CT: When I first visited your exhibition, I was reading Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (1) and had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing visual evidence of what the book described. In one passage, it states: '...it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare, or our climate Armageddon—that was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply no longer grasp what being human really meant.' (p.187) In another passage, the German astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Karl Schwarzschild (of the Schwarzschild singularity, an early name for what we now know as a black hole) wrote to a friend: 'We have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.' Works like The RKF Case, Cosmos, and 100.098.463.387.139.121.2021 especially come to mind as settings for this world described. Could you please comment on these statements.

LP: That’s when I realized you had captured some of the references I wanted to awaken in people—and in myself—through this work and its outcomes. I do believe the work reflects the collapse of a civilization. At the same time, there’s a trace of that civilization in the images, though they’re difficult to understand. There are elements you don’t fully comprehend, yet they still hold a sense of meaning or authority. In the photos, you see letters, circles, and other symbols that might have some logic, but their meaning remains unclear because they’re from a post-apocalyptic world.

I do feel that in those pictures, I’m expressing pivotal moments during or after the collapse—like this one with the long number 100 (100.098.463.387.139.121). You don’t know if it refers to the time of the explosion, or if it’s just a measurement of acidity in the atmosphere. But because it’s recorded, it must be important. It must reference some consequence that followed. The same with The RKF Case: those letters in that part of the landscape tell you that something happened there. And it must be important otherwise why would they be registered?

In a way, I feel the entire series speaks to pivotal moments in history that changed the world. But I see them as if they were discovered in a distant future, like an archaeological find. Imagine someone saying, "We found this document with an image of a red forest and three numbers. What happened there?" Then, as an ecologist or scientist, you’d try to piece it together—maybe it was when oxygen was scarce and everything began to disappear.

CT: There are no human forms. Was that intentional?

LP: Yes it was. I believe it leaves room for imagination because a face—whether familiar or not—becomes a story, even if it’s just a shadow. When I see people in pictures, they seem to land in human narratives, becoming documents of space and time. But you also sense that this world, the one portrayed in the work, is now empty of human life. My imagination placed me between catastrophe and the future, where these remnants existed. Maybe other civilizations tried to make sense of it, or the few survivors used technology to maintain a false reality. Or maybe it’s just the remnants I transformed from my negatives.

I have always been fascinated by the unknown. I prefer mystery over facts. Growing up, I often struggled to understand concepts like square roots and how atoms worked, which led me to believe I was bad at school. I would zone out in class, and when asked to explain something, I’d admit I didn’t know what to do. Though I was distracted, my classmates loved me for entertaining them. I remember seeing a beautiful drawing of atoms and orbits on the board, thinking it held some magical secret, but when the teacher explained it, the magic disappeared—it was just facts and formulas. Once I understood the explanations, I found them easy, even boring, and I realized that while symbols were puzzling, once decoded, everything seemed too simple. I longed for that sense of wonder and mystery, wishing things could be more surprising—like how I once imagined math could have different answers every day: two plus two was four today but maybe seven tomorrow.

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This feeling came into focus much later when I visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw Mesopotamian tablets with cuneiform writing. They transported me back to my school years. I found them beautiful—like messages from outer space telling the story of the universe’s creation. But then I read the translation: it was something mundane like “Joe sold three kilos of tomatoes or apples.” The magic of the tablet vanished. That was the moment I understood my childhood trauma and realized what had troubled me.

When creating this series, I wanted to evoke that same sense of wonder and mystery— let people question what the images meant, even if hints of meaning were scattered throughout. For example, in Landscape with Oxygen, the numbers might suggest oxygen levels. They hint that oxygen was scarce, and this landscape is one of the few places on the planet where it still exists. These references to tragedy were deliberate. My goal was to make viewers feel the same fascination I felt as a child when I couldn’t decode the symbols before me.

CT: Your work contrasts with the current drive for immediacy and the demand for the ‘now.’ Your photos aren’t a 'neat slice of time' but rather seem to lay claim to another reality, another meaning arises from them and the passage of time, almost accidentally, becomes layered. Could we say that, in this series, you’ve given form to the passage of time?

LP: Yes, at least to a moment after some time has passed. That question intrigues me because one of my goals is to push photography beyond its usual boundaries. A key limitation of photography is that it captures a moment but immediately turns it into the past.

I think that's rooted in the old school of analog photography, which captures a moment and freezes it, turning it into the past just seconds after the photo is taken. Photography has long been described as the moment of death because it preserves the past for us to revisit. It was once believed that photography couldn't lie, but we've since learned that it often deceives more than anything else.

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In my work, I aim to create images of the future, not just of the present. These pictures suggest what life could look like in the future—perhaps as a consequence of our actions today. Another aspect I find fascinating in this process is how I constantly push the boundaries of photography for myself, experimenting with scratched negatives and testing the limits of the medium.

At the same time, I've spent 30 years working with photography—exhibiting, studying, and reading extensively about it. This long engagement shapes how I approach and interpret it.

I see some of my work as crossing boundaries because I no longer limit myself to analog photography. While my practice originates from analog processes—just as we originate from our biology and are now evolving with the help of technology and artificial intelligence—I’ve expanded beyond those roots.

For years, photographers of my generation felt digital work had to mimic analog rules to maintain legitimacy. Any clear manipulation was frowned upon, as if cheating. But one day, I embraced the so-called “cheating” and found immense freedom—similar to the liberation I felt when I first scratched a negative. It was like the freedom of a painter: I could place a tree anywhere in the frame, change its color, stretch or distort it, or make it hyper-realistic.

Digital photography unlocked a new universe for me while preserving the photographic quality tied to reality. It also enhanced my ability to explore the subjective nature of memory, where perception is influenced by our chemistry. Photoshop became a powerful tool to work on this idea, giving me more ways to convey the intricate link between photography and the way we remember.

I think I’ve pushed boundaries further by incorporating digital techniques into my work while still using analog negatives. It’s like going back to the origins of photography, almost a "paleolithic" approach, and then advancing it into a new realm. In my process, it’s not just Photoshop—it’s also numbers, letters, circles, and graphic elements that I combine with photography. These elements are recognizable: numbers, dots, and even mythological references.

This merging of mediums and languages feels akin to how Latin evolved into Spanish. Photography, in this sense, evolves as it meets other languages, allowing for greater specificity and expression. For me, this blending of languages within photography enables a new kind of accuracy—a way to articulate ideas more fully. 

Over generations, this layering of techniques and culture has created something undeniably photographic, even as it incorporates references beyond traditional photography. Some purists might argue, “That’s not photography anymore.” And my response is: I don’t care. Labels shouldn’t restrict us. Instead, we need to embrace the vastness of what art—and photography—can encompass.

This ties to the broader idea of discourse. Sometimes, we lack the words to describe the complexities of the world we live in—its beauty, its horrors, its enormity. Similarly, language often falls short when describing evolving concepts, like the role of women in society. Historically, women’s experiences were largely defined by men, but now, women are redefining themselves. This shift, while varied, is revolutionary. Some women feel comfortable within traditional notions of femininity, while others reject them entirely, pushing toward radical or even masculine expressions.

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It’s a fascinating revolution for women, but also for men. As societal expectations shift, men too are liberated from the rigid roles assigned to them in the past. The evolving relationship between men and women creates space for new roles and perspectives. These changes impact everything, even photography.

Photography, after all, was born out of technology and science—light, time, and mathematics. But today, it’s evolving alongside advances like artificial intelligence. While painting may always rely on pigments and remain relatively static, photography is fluid. It no longer holds the same value it once did as a document of reality. There was a time when photographs were trusted as unaltered captures of truth. Now, when we see an image online or in the news, our first question is often, “Is it real?”

Photography, in this way, mirrors human evolution. Its transformation reflects our changing relationship with reality, memory, and truth. It’s no longer just about capturing the past—it’s about questioning and reimagining it in the present and for the future.

CT: In Camera Lucida,(2) which I explored as part of my research for this conversation, Roland Barthes argues that each click of the shutter is a reminder of our transient existence. The book invites us to view photography not just as a mechanical capture of light, but as a poignant exploration of humanity, memory and mortality. You have been diagnosed with leukemia at a young age, and have been battling it ever since. Do you think it has influenced your choice of medium? In what ways has it influenced your work?

LP: Photography wasn’t a rational choice for me—it was fascination from a young age. When I was eight, my father gave me a Polaroid camera. Watching the image develop before my eyes felt magical. That sense of wonder is still with me, especially in the darkroom, where the process of an image revealing itself feels almost divine. It’s an experience you miss with digital photography, where everything is immediate.

Over time, my work with photography became about exploring transformation—how I see, remember, and reinterpret experiences. Memory reshapes reality; I often think of moments with my parents that I understand differently now with the perspective life has given me.

As for leukemia, it has influenced not just my work but every aspect of my life. Facing mortality shifts your priorities. It teaches you that fame and status are fleeting. What matters is living authentically and contributing meaningfully. I see humans as scouts for the universe, each of us offering unique experiences that enrich a vast, collective intelligence.

This realization guides my art. I no longer limit myself by others’ judgments. My role is to create honestly, to discover and share, hoping my work resonates with others. Even if someone dislikes it, they’ve had an experience, and that’s what matters. The worst outcome would be indifference.

CT: Recurring themes in your work include memory, identity, colonialism, and the environment, often reconstructing realities from the fragmentation of previous ones. You describe Anthropocene Archives as 'jargons pretending to be records of posterity, fragments or archaeological findings.' Susan Sontag, in her anthology On Photography, (3) argues that it is in the nature of photography that it cannot transcend its subject. Yet, your work seems to transcend the medium, seamlessly conveying your concern with the future. Could you speak about how you blend analog and digital techniques so harmoniously, transcending the traditional boundaries of photography?

LP: Yes, exactly. The analog negative is a profoundly organic medium—made from animal gelatin derived from bone marrow, mixed with silver halides, which are sensitive to light. When light strikes the silver halides, they undergo a transformation, turning into metallic silver. That reaction is what creates the image. It’s an incredibly physical, almost magical process because it’s literally formed by light.

What I do is take this tangible object—the negative—and scan it, converting it into digital information: binary code, ones and zeros. At that moment, it transforms into something intangible, visible only on a screen. In the digital realm, it becomes fluid, almost like a new kind of magic. I can manipulate it endlessly, reshape it, and create entirely new realities from the same starting point.

This is where Susan Sontag’s argument about photography being bound to its subject starts to dissolve. Once the analog image enters the digital space, it is no longer tied to the single moment it recorded. I can revisit and reprocess it endlessly, creating infinite possibilities, each one transcending the original photograph.

This version keeps the technical explanation clear while emphasizing the poetic aspects of his process. It also ties neatly into the idea of transcending traditional photography.

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Notes:

1 Labatut, Benjamín. 2021. When we Cease to Understand the World. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. New York Review of Books.

2 Barthes, Roland. 1993. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London, England: Vintage Classics.

3 Sontag, Susan. 2008. On Photography. London, England: Penguin Classics.

Tania Candiani, a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, works with an expanded idea of translation across visual, textual, sound, and symbolic forms. She uses it to uncover new perspectives, often drawing on archives and historical narratives for inspiration. She believes art should amplify collective voices rather than individual ones, and her work often addresses communal issues like labor and the feminine condition.

Candiani describes her pieces as translations of the sounds she hears and interprets them across various mediums and languages. This process embodies the idea of faith as a bell that has not yet been rung—a quiet potential reflecting the deep listening central to her work. For Candiani, listening is an act of generosity, allowing for connection and understanding.

Shortly after our conversation, I came across a quote by Cuban artist Glenda León while visiting a local museum:

True listening, that in which we empty ourselves of thought and ego, to let in the words, the presence of the other, is something bizarre nowadays. In a world of so much hurry, so much stress, so much disconnection of man within himself, there is an increasing blindness, and also deafness.

By making us more aware of the sounds around us, Candiani reminds us of the importance of listening as an active, conscious choice. This choice fosters connection and understanding in a world increasingly characterized by noise and distraction. Let’s listen to her!

Carmen: One of the central interests of your work is the expanded idea of translation, extended to the experimental field through the use of visual, sound, textual and symbolical languages. Could we say you translate the present?

Tania: I never thought about that, but it sounds beautiful. It's like a line from a poem: 'translating the present.' But I'm more of an interpreter. I love language, just like you do. I enjoy finding ways to read stories from different points of view. This idea of something that can be understood from multiple perspectives is the kind of translation I'm always thinking about and practicing.

For example, with different technologies or devices invented to help us understand things, I believe that looking at the same technology from a different perspective could lead to new discoveries connected to it. That question fascinates me. I'm using translation to uncover something new, but not about the present—because the present is here and now, and there isn't enough distance. That's probably why I always hold on to archives or stories from the past

CT: Suzanne Lacy provides a framework for conceptualizing feminist activist art in a letter to Patricia Hills, editor of the anthology Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century. Lacy asks, “How can we work as artists on a broader scale, to create change that will penetrate and affect the institutions, public spaces, and political processes that make up our public culture”?

A fundamental part of your work is related to feminist policies and practices, understanding them as a communal, affective and ritual experience. Lacy’s question places a tall order on artists, however I believe your practice bridges theory and practice and addresses her question. Works like Manifestantes (2019) or Gordas (2002), being but a few examples. Could you comment on Lacy's statement? Could we identify a feminist thread running throughout your work?

TC: I know Suzanne Lacy’s work and think what she says is really important: it’s not just about creating from an individual perspective; you need to consider how your work can touch others collectively. When you work with others, you have to expand your voice into a shared voice, one that needs to be heard. If you install your work in museums, for example, that community voice will be amplified. It's not about your voice alone, but about all of our voices. We are speaking as 'we,' not 'I.' From that perspective, we need to be heard through these works. It's a way to bring forward what must be discussed within institutions or in the broader context of society.

I am not a politician; I am a storyteller. I like to tell the stories of others, not my own. There are many words woven into this idea of 'we': how we think, how we feel, our bodies, especially our bodies as women.

We are also 'we' in the subway, feeling uncomfortable because there are only two cars on each train dedicated to women passengers, a policy put in place because women have been harassed in the past. Instead of changing policies and educating the public to be respectful, we have policies that are offensive and ineffective.

So, there are many areas where Suzanne Lacy's statement is significant: being part of a collective is a political way of living.

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CT: I admire your work so much because you choose stories that show political awareness of where you are. You are making a lot of noise with the drums in Pulse (1), for example. It’s very powerful, like a wake up call. Your work with sound rose to a crescendo.

TC: Yes. I would like to talk about the connection that exists between Manifestantes, Gordas and Pulse, the three pieces you named. 

Gordas, an exhibition in Tijuana (2002), was my first big project as an artist. I had read a story in the San Diego newspaper about a new illness, Vigorexia, where people were so obsessed with their body image that they spent long hours at the gym to the point where they were losing their jobs and families. I was just so shocked.

I was also researching magazines dedicated to women. In the US during the war these magazines pushed women outside the house: “You have power, you can work, you are a force of labor”. When the war ended and women needed to come back home, the image of the ideal housewife was put on an altar: there were illustrations of women by laundry machines and in kitchens. Contemporary magazines, on the other hand, told stories of models suffering from eating disorders. 

But It was also about myself. I'm always on a diet, it was part of my education. I remember my mom, my aunt and my friends being on a diet all the time. It was under that lens that I started working on the series of Gordas: the body of all of us women

Manifestantes was a series that began in 2019. There was a particularly intense episode in Mexico City, where a group of policemen raped a very young girl. We all took to the streets in protest. During one of these protests, a young woman at the front of the march threw purple glitter on a police officer's face. That image was incredibly powerful. We all rushed out to buy as much purple glitter as we could find. Those protests became known as the 'Glitter Revolution.'

That's when I began working on this series. I felt frustrated, but also empowered by marching alongside all the other women. We were all so angry because the police are supposed to protect us, not violate us. What I like about the process of Manifestantes is that the images come from the press, like a living graphic archive. The poses are strong—stills taken from press coverage and Instagram. Each piece includes the date and location of the march in its title, which is crucial for keeping the moment alive.

When Manifestantes was installed at MUAC - Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (2022) the room was silent, but the images seemed to be shouting. In a way, they were actually louder than any other words I could have used.

CT: Your work frequently engages with themes of labor, examining its cultural and social implications through various crafts and industrial processes. How do you approach the relationship between labor and art, and what insights do you hope to convey about the nature and significance of work in your practice?

TC: There’s a beautiful anecdote I always like to share because it marks the moment I began to perceive labor differently. In 2015, I went to Oaxaca (southern Mexico) to work on a project called Chromatica, curated by Blanca de la Torre. We spent a wonderful month there, and I had a few ideas in mind. One was to reenact the process of creating indigo blue within the museum. Another was to create a musical instrument from a manual loom, which required finding a discarded loom.

That’s when I met Fernando, a master weaver. As we toured his workshop and discussed my needs, we discovered our shared interest in sound. He explained that, during the warping process, he works with the lights turned off so if a thread breaks, he can hear it. That moment changed my perception of labor, as I began to see how sound also plays a role in it. He helped me hear the sound of labor. And I found it so beautiful. 

That's when I became interested in bringing the sound of labor into a museum setting. For that exhibition, we had a large loom and a weaver actively working throughout the five-month duration of the show. As visitors entered, they were greeted by several videos depicting the weaving processes, accompanied by the sounds of the weaver at work. You could watch him moving in a dance-like rhythm as he worked. The audience was able to be immersed in the beauty of that labor.

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After that experience, I began working on other labor processes. I recorded video in India, featuring a group of female construction workers, all dressed in traditional Indian attire, passing heavy buckets to one another in a dance-like motion. It was incredibly beautiful to watch. 

In Taller de Confección (Sewing Workshop) two women who are expert balloon makers spend one month creating a balloon at the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City. This concept was inspired by an image I found in an archive showing women making balloons hundreds of years ago.

Sounding Labor, Sounding Bodies was an exhibition I created in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2020. During my initial research visit, I noticed beautiful mosaics at the airport depicting the city’s prosperous industrial past. When I looked at the original photos the artist used to create these murals, I realized that the women workers who appeared in the photos had been removed from the final pieces. There were about 20 murals representing the city’s major industries, all of them featuring only the male workers. The women had been literally erased.

The project became focused on recovering the stories of these important women workers. In the video piece Four Industries, a female choir “sings” the sounds of machines from the early 1900s. In Working Women, ceramic tiles were created to include the women who had been excluded from the original depictions. These tiles were produced at Rookwood Pottery, an internationally recognized local company founded in 1880 by a woman who trained other women. It was wonderful because present-day women workers were able, through their labor, to restore the presence of those women previously excluded.

CT: In a recent interview, you mentioned that ‘listening is an act of generosity' and ‘a tool for expanding and transforming perception in both human and non-human contexts’. Could you share what you have learned by listening? 

TC: An entire world opened up to me, thanks to Mestre Fernando. We are always hearing things, sound waves are physical, they actually touch our bodies. However, there's a difference between hearing randomly and the act of listening: by listening we give our full attention, we are present and recognize the other. And that is generous. I delved deeper into exploring new ways of understanding our capacity to hear and how, through sound, we can communicate and connect with others, even of different species.

In For The Animals, a project that took nearly five years of research, I created experimental sound scores designed as lullabies for the indigenous animals of the Arizona desert. 

It all started with my first visit to Phoenix, Arizona. The curator and my friend Julio Morales picked me up at the airport, and as we were driving to the Arizona State University Museum, we passed an incredible rock formation called Hole in the Rock—a large, beautiful red rock with a hole at the top. To me, it looked like a speaker, and my first thought was: "Let's use that rock as a source for amplifying sound."

When we visited the formation we discovered that below it was an open-air zoo with various species native to the Arizona desert. Arizona is both a region that extends into Mexico, and a border with not one, but two walls. Many animals that once migrated freely across the desert now have their paths blocked by these walls. That was an incredible opportunity to talk about both human and non-human migrations.

The idea was to create a sound composition that the different animals of the region would enjoy. So we installed speakers and night vision cameras with face recognition technology trained by artificial intelligence to recognize, for example, the Mexican wolf. When the camera caught its image, its specific melody would play.

In the process of creating this work, I delved into sound ecology and explored how it moves through geological layers. There was sound long before there were beings to hear it; sound has existed forever.

CT: Wittgenstein has conjectured that the limits of our language are the limits of our knowledge. Text has played a central role in some of your works such as La Marcha (2023), and Mattresses Mantras (2004-2011). Do you agree with Wittgenstein’s statement? What is the importance of words, or text in general, in your practice?

TC: I don't agree with his statement. I love words. I was trained in literature and thought I would become a writer. I write all the time. I write scripts for all my videos. There are always words everywhere in my work. We started this conversation talking about translation, not necessarily translation of words or languages but the concept of translation. 

To that end, there's another anecdote I’d like to share. I was invited to propose a project for a residency in Gdańsk, Poland. I initially imagined a workshop that would involve creating an atlas of the different neighborhoods, reading several books together, and writing down stories about the city's hidden aspects. Then, the curator informed me that none of the 23 people who had signed up for the workshop spoke English. I thought, "How will I conduct a workshop in Polish, a language I don’t speak?" It turned out to be amazing, though. We found a way to communicate without using words. We walked through different neighborhoods and recorded a silent movie featuring the local ghost stories. They dressed up and performed, bringing those stories to life.

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Language as Sound (2015), another project I created there, came to me while riding the tram. The sounds I heard had no meaning to me because I couldn’t understand the language; they were just sounds. I discovered that the Polish language has six sounds that are unique to it. In this piece, six women perform those six distinct sounds, transforming them into a melody without meaning.

The limit of our knowledge isn't defined by our written or spoken language. I’m concerned about the languages that are disappearing. We need to speak those words to keep them alive. In Mexico, there are still 57 languages. Can you believe there's a language in northern Mexico that only three people can speak? So, preserving them is crucial—not in the way he suggested, but because we need to expand our limits and protect what remains.

CT: Your practice is research-based, focusing on the present while also preserving the past, particularly older technologies. Yet, much of art is truly understood in hindsight. In considering how the times we live in might be remembered, how do you think your work will be perceived in the future?

TC: I maintain a well-organized archive for each of my projects. Everything is stored in labeled boxes that provide context for anyone interested in understanding the background of a piece. I have a deep appreciation for archives, and I view them as treasures, especially when they offer insights into the thoughts and intentions of the people I'm researching. In our studio, we have a dedicated room for these archives, and we’re committed to preserving them for the future.

I don’t know how my work will be read in the future. It’s not a reflection of the present and will likely be interpreted in many ways. While I am curious, I don’t really think about this. I’m not an academic or a formally trained artist, and I don’t read art philosophy or art history. Instead, I focus on subjects that interest me, like science. Currently, I’m reading El Clamor de los Bosques (The Overstory) by Richard Powers and Maniac, by Benjamín Labatut.

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Born in Wiltshire, England, and raised in the Welsh countryside, artist Deryn Cowdy recalls that 'there was nothing to do, really.' She spent her time outdoors, observing plants and trees, sometimes lying on her belly to get a closer look. Nature has always been central to her practice, which spans sculpture (she holds a BA in Sculpture from the Bath Academy of Art), set design, mural painting, and photography. It was through photography that the seeds of her current work were first planted.

From Gilded Gardens to Rain, to Trees, and most recently Everglades, her work brings to light and elevates the often invisible, hidden, or out-of-reach elements of nature. The gilded still photographs of reflections captured during long walks in the Everglades allowed her to examine nature closely, revealing the intricate beauty of these fleeting moments contained within the movement.

Energized by her peers and new surroundings, and building on that trajectory, Cowdy now completes a cycle by crowning the rhythm of nature with a close examination of soil. A collage of repurposed burlap bags, natural wool, branches and plants hangs high on a wall. Now, standing upright, we can see some of what she observed while lying on her belly! In the hallway, a reverential canopy of uprooted plants, their beauty enhanced, seem to shelter the ideas and intentions gathered there and offer a space to look within. Smaller pieces hanging on the wall present imagined elements as though soil were viewed under a microscope. Soil Paintings, an experiment that explores the spontaneous use of soil in recognizable art form, and a compost installation created in collaboration with Fertile Earth and Dr. Lanette Sobel, highlights the process of decomposition, illustrating the intersection of art, nature, and ecological renewal.

Cowdy reminds us of the alchemy of nature, where uprooted plants are buried only to burst forth again with new life. This intricate cycle serves as a timely reminder of our evolutionary relationship and interdependence with the natural world—and that the future is collective.

Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), celebrated for his natural farming, recognized that separating nature from humanity is as harmful to us as it is to the planet. He argued that "the only work for people to do... is to gather the seeds and microorganisms nature needs and sow them."

By looking closely at nature, as Cowdy has, we come to understand that every species is a masterpiece.

Who am I? Such puzzling questions have no simple answers. Psychoanalysis, a relatively new set of theories and therapeutic techniques, has delved into the subject and offered tools many, artists included, have embraced. Self-knowledge is something artists are very concerned with and psychoanalysis invites one to work through oneself to try and take charge of one’s own desires. It also encourages individuals to sit with discomfort and embrace messiness. And this messiness can become a condition and source of energy that artists can use.

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Art and psychoanalysis have had a long relationship. The Centre Pompidou-Metz in France recently closed an exhibition called Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis, the first time the links between Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and art are highlighted in a museum space. Before Lacan got his training in psychoanalysis (which wasn’t until his 50s), he had close relationships with André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and many of the Surrealists of the time, that informed his intellectual history. 

Lacan is especially appealing also because, in the words of psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, “he takes psychoanalysis and pushes it in the direction of questions about surface and form and different ways of conceiving space.”(1)

An artwork can be a self-expression and something that transcends the self when it connects with others. Jaffe's exploration and visual vocabulary has opened up ways in which to see ourselves in different perspectives, which connected with both of us. It was in that space between experience and definition that we decided to find out more about her work.

Rina Gitlin:  What is your work concerned with?

Jeanne Jaffe:  My work is concerned with how identity is formed, and how we become who we are. I look at that from many perspectives through time: from when we’re born and our pre-verbal bodily experiences to when we're introduced to culture and language and social conditioning. I think what has been left out in western traditions, because it has been based on acquiring knowledge, is other ways of knowing and being outside of logic, thought, and scientific knowledge. A lot of my work is trying to get people to return inward; it is about preverbal images and how we make sense of the world before we have language and through our senses, intuitions, and nervous systems. Once we have language, we name things; and once we name things we stop experiencing them, they become utilitarian and fixed. So intuition, imagination, metaphor, associations, all of those ways of knowing and experiencing the world get left behind. 

The early work dealt with how a viewer could be reintroduced to their own interior experiences and language through looking at artwork that is hybrid and fluid in terms of definitions. Then I moved on to what happens when we enter language. I'm interested in re-examining the stories we're told so we can regain our own agency, and not be controlled by what culture and others tell us we should feel, think, or be. I'm interested in what is experience, a real experience, not a role we play. And the most immediate form of knowing is through our own senses, through sound and touch nervous systems and intuitions.

Carmen de Terenzio:  In your statement you say that you are, “Inspired by an interest in anthropology, mythology, and psychology, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal bodily experience through the later influences of language and culture. This is undertaken by investigating the use of metaphor and reexamining our cultural myths and stories.” In what ways do you use metaphor and the reexamination of cultural myths and stories to delve into the process of identity formation from pre-verbal experiences to cultural influences?

JJ:  If you think about how we begin to make sense of things, for example,  when you look at your hand as a child, before you know it's a hand, you see it has these five protrusions, that it moves, that it can be held up and down. And you see things in the world that you associate with it, maybe in animals or in objects (gloves). Melanie Klein talks about this in her Object Relations Theory (2). She says that very early on, before we look in a mirror, we sense ourselves in parts. The mirror stage is when you actually come to identify a sense of unity. And before that, what Jacques Lacan describes as the sense of the real, or the real stage (3) is experience that is outside and beyond language, stuff you cannot put into words like your intuition, for example: you sense it, but it's beyond language and too complex to reduce to language.

In the symbolic stage you come into the use of language and culture that begins to organize and define everything for you. Lacan talks about language as being a double-edged sword: on the one hand it allows us to discuss that, and on the other it alienates us from our own belief in our experiences or even access to them. So, if you follow that logic, the stories that we are told also contribute, after the imaginary stage, to who we think we have to be, whether it be gender, race or even history. 

So by looking at the stories and myths that were told and reexamining and retelling them from  a new perspective gives us agency, because I think one of the things we've been conditioned to lose is agency.

RG:  Psychoanalysis was embraced by the Surrealists and contemporary artists such as, for example, Louis Bourgeois. You mention Jaques Lacan, Carl Jung and Melanie Klein as being influential in your thinking. How has psychoanalysis impacted your practice?

JJ:  I had to go through my own self-examination, trying to understand who I am, how I've become who I've become, which choices I make so that I can choose not just who I've been conditioned to be, but who I wanna be.

RG:  It gave you more options?

Yes. If you look at it from a Freudian point of view then it would be reductionistic. But if you look at it from a Jungian point of view, it's transformational.

So there's all those levels in-between. There's something now called internal family systems where you're looking at the multiple voices that are both personal and cultural, all of which make up the psyche, and which we all battle with. I'm interested in exploring those, and I spend a lot of time doing that.

At a young age a sequence of events led me to a certain sensibility that allowed me to be aware of what was happening inside myself, and I would make drawings which would help me. So the self-examination and studying all of this and understanding how this happens was very helpful. Not just to me, this could be applied to everybody. It made me split from what was expected of me.

CT:  The Theory of the Dérive is a concept developed by the French philosopher and member of the Situationist International, Guy Debord, in the mid-20th century. It is a method for exploring urban environments in a playful and unplanned manner, aiming to break free from the constraints of routine and the predetermined paths dictated by societal norms. His theory is a playful and critical examination of urban life, designed to understand and subvert the psychological impacts of modern environments. It encourages looking beyond the superficial layers of cities to understand deeper societal structures and forces. So it’s interesting because it’s something that occurs outside oneself but similar to what you were saying before. Could we align your investigations and work with his theory?

JJ:  I don't know enough about his work, and I want you to send me that because that is extremely interesting. I've been reading a book called Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, by Graham Harman (Pelican, 2018). It's a new direction in philosophy where it doesn't just give consciousness to humans, it gives consciousness to everything and speaks on how everything is really energy.

CT:  The idea of the Theory of the Dérive is that you interact with your environment, with your city. You go to a park and you don’t do anything, you just stand there and see what happens, how the environment interacts with you.

JJ:  I like that a lot. But to me that’s related to religious practice, to meditation, to stopping the thoughts and just sitting and enhancing the other senses; being not being, being not, being nothing. It's related and that's why I'm interested in it.

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CT:  What kind of impact do you think that can have?

JJ:  It gives you agency and freedom. If you look at what's happening in culture today, it's people endlessly just doing what they think is going to “give them success and meaning”, rather than examining what would actually give them a sense of fullness and meaning in their life. So the only way to get off that track is to stop and to allow other things that aren't already predetermined to come in.

RG:  Your stop-motion film Alice in Dystopia (a favorite of mine) speaks about how Alice confronts who she is and has to adapt to changes that come fast without being sure of their outcome. It speaks of flexibility of identity and of the importance of discomfort, of allowing oneself not to know because that is where change comes from. How important do you think it is for an artist, or anyone else for that matter, to adapt to changes?

JJ:  I think it's super important. It means you think about the consequences of the changes, both positive and negative, which is something our own value system doesn’t encourage. The experience of discomfort is a big part of it. I think we have been conditioned not to want to be uncomfortable. We want things that we're familiar with, we want things that make us feel good. There's nothing wrong with some of that, but it won't create change and growth. I know that the things that have helped me grow have been uncomfortable, and that's the only way real shift happens.

If you look at it historically, it's the same thing. Revolutions occur because people are uncomfortable. Now, if you have a culture that wants to avoid it, then you have the people in power deciding everything and a population that just goes along with it. And that's a problem because to me, it's not a life.

It goes back to the Greeks: The unexamined life is not worth living, and Know thyself, are things that people have thought about forever and ever. And then we became science oriented, which has allowed us to accomplish great things but has done some damage. I mean, just think of nuclear power, and how it could destroy the world!

RG:  Meaning we are exactly where we should be because our trajectory in history has been one of confrontation and dominance. It's very masculine. Perhaps we need a shift?

JJ:  Which is part of what this work is about: going from a masculine to a much more feminine vision and attitude.

CT:  Your participatory works, those sculptures we can look through, invite us to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world as they do and even perhaps to see ourselves through the eyes of others, both related to ideas of vulnerability and empathy. Many believe that if the world will change, empathy will be a big part of it. Could we say that empathy is the lifeblood of creativity?

JJ:  I not only think it's the lifeblood of art, I think it's the lifeblood of being alive. I really feel that's where we've lost. 

CT:  Do you think your trajectory has brought you to a place where you can now share your knowledge and findings?

JJ:  Yes. I was scared to share it before. I feel it's outside of the norm in terms of what people really care about, but I feel that's all I care about. I think about how am I gonna feel about my life on my deathbed? I do not want to have lived a life that I was told I needed to live that wasn't my life because at that point, there’s nothing you can do. It's too late, and that's a lost life. That's the way I make decisions. I make decisions based on how they will feel at the end of life.

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RG:  If you are going to regret it or not?

JJ:  Yes. How am I gonna feel about my life if I do this? I think if you don't do that you really haven't claimed your own life, and that's all we're here for. You just don't get a second chance. What's interesting to me is I feel it as a guide. It allows me to tap into what I really care about. Remember when we were talking about those multiple voices that we all carry? Some are cultural. Some are our own. Frequently we can't even differentiate them. So it allows me to begin to hear what I care about and not what I'm told I should be.

CT:  That's beautiful, Jeanne. Perhaps that should be part of your statement as well.

RG:  Bodies are fragmented in your work. Is it one way of steering away from intellectual and aesthetic ideals of wholeness?

JJ:  That's an interesting question. I've never thought about that. I think it's more about sensation of what it feels like to be in a body. 

Our idea about the whole body is visual. I see a body, so I say that’s a body. And artistically I would do the whole body. But that's not really my experience. My experience might be looking in your eyes or focusing on certain things, and also knowing what's inside my body. What are the things that trigger things in me, like the heart, the lungs, the brain. What do they look like? So that's the body, not the external one. Our vision is a distance sensation. Touch is not distant. Touch is very immediate. It goes right into the body. As does sound. So there are different ways of experiencing things, and to me sight is just related to language. You see kids looking at their feet or hands and they don’t quite know what they are yet. 

RG:  Right, they are exploring. 

JJ:  Exactly, things they can actually see. It takes a while before they realize: that's me. And so that's the beginning of the identity issue that we build over time. It’s massive.

CT:  You just had a wonderful survey of your work exhibited at a local gallery. How was it to have organized and seen 20 years of work together in one space?

JJ:  I was very grateful to have had the opportunity to show all the work together and to see the rich and consistent dialogue. I also was surprised by the imagination and playfulness in much of the work and how it evoked a magical sense of other worlds. I also was able to see my own exploration of an interest in pre-verbal language and into culture, literature, history, and storytelling: from something very internal and private to something more communal. It became clear I was mapping and trying to understand how we develop and create meaning.

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1. Davis, Ben, Art’s New Yen for Psychoanalysis a conversation with Jamieson Webster. The Art Angle. Podcast audio, July 13, 2024.

2. Melanie Klein created the object relations theory that suggested infant relationships to objects, (objects here referring to people and experiences with people) would ultimately dictate future relationships and attachment style. She believed negative relationships at a young age would deeply impact their future lives. Klein's theory emphasizes the importance of early relationships, particularly between the infant and primary caregivers, in the development of the psyche.

3. The three orders—Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real— that describe the structure of human experience and the psyche. (1953)

“In the novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs. And for disenchantment, too, perhaps; for claustrophobia, and boredom; and for a hunger that seemed to gnaw at the very ligaments of my soul, whose cause was as hidden from me as were the means of its satisfaction.” 

Last year I joined a friend in “disappearing off” to Rome to walk, not run; observe, not exhaust. And have a good cup of coffee that traveled to us lid-on, ensuring it retained its perfect temperature.

Here, some of what we saw, an experiment in sharing more images than words.

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In one instance she set a table using metal tv dinner trays, placing silverware in flower-like circles throughout, “inviting a reflection on our current relationship with food in a blend of nostalgia for the simplicity of the past and an acceptance of the fast food culture that defines our time” she explains. The centerpiece was an elaborate arrangement of rustic-looking light gray stone slabs, encircled at their base by twisted beige fabric, with green grape vines and white lilies draped over the table. The scene was delicately lit by white candles, giving it the allure of a surrealist tableau.

Another favorite was a table Natalia set using pink depression glass, a rosy-hued glassware produced during the Great Depression, that could be purchased in dime stores, intended to brighten the lives of families facing difficult economic times. “It was believed that the color pink had the ability to lift spirits, becoming a symbol of beauty in the midst of adversity” she says. In the center, an array of pink tulips in pedestal bowls, flanked by white taper candles, weave and dance in all directions radiating more beauty. The glamorous effect of these pink glasses, when handled by Natalia, is not easily associated with affordable housewares.

The act of breaking bread together creates a sense of connection and belonging. It is a way to build relationships, bridge differences, and strengthen communities. It may be around a table set for dinner that many of us travel back to our origins through aromas and tastes. The table may be a place where strangers become friends, where stories are shared, and where memories are made. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, hospitality was an important virtue associated with morality where you might disadvantage yourself in order to extend hospitality to others.

What if the table is set with intention and the food cooked with love, intensifying all these possibilities?

A couple of weeks before this conversation took place Natalia launched a new project called, Situations, a performance where she experiments with the idea of moving, houses and even countries, and its layered meanings. She uses a table to allude to our concept of home, to the unavoidable inventory of personal possessions made when we move and to the immigrants we become. Over coffee, we spoke about past, present and future.

Please scroll down for Spanish version.

CARMEN: Could you tell us how you started with your tablescapes?

NATALIA: My story with setting tables began when I was very young, thanks to a family tradition. We lived in Bolívar, a province in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and my mom loved setting tables. There was a china cabinet with pieces inherited from her grandparents and great-aunts, and she would set the tables for every festive occasion using them. She was very creative: she would take a plant or some daisies from the garden and create beautiful tables with them. She prepared the table not just for celebrations like Christmas, New Year, or Easter, but also for our birthdays. I was always fascinated by that china cabinet, which was sacred and she kept locked; no one could touch it. Every time she opened it and I saw the colored glasses inside, I loved it. I think that’s what inspired me.

Mom also cooked very well. For Christmas, she usually prepared the 12 dishes, some of which I still cook. We are three sisters and for Christmas, we gather and try to replicate these dishes. It’s a tradition that we like to maintain. Setting the table is something I love very much and have always done with great passion.

When I came to live in Miami and left the fashion world, I started studying floral design and cooking at home for friends, also as a way to socialize and build community. For me, setting a table is a very powerful language that conveys a lot about who we are. I’m a lover of china and objects. I had or bought tableware from Mexico, for example, and I would set a table that honored Mexican culture.

However, I’m not a chef, I cook like my mom cooked.

One day, a client for whom I had done floral arrangements called me. There was a very important chef cooking for them and they asked if I could set the table for the occasion. From there, I thought, “How interesting, something I do at home can be taken to a professional level.” Since then, I have dedicated myself to this activity, which has brought me great satisfaction. I have organized meals and had the opportunity to participate in events where the table was not only important but also told stories.

CT: A table is a place for communal gatherings where shared nostalgia lives in familiar smells and flavors; an invisible workspace; the preservation of traditions and the past. In a time when we gather less in person, getting together around a table to share a meal can be a precious occasion for human interaction. Could we say that cooking and sitting down to eat together makes us more human, now more than ever?

NG: Yes, I not only believe it makes us more human but it’s part of our intrinsic humanity. History has shown how, from the early days with the discovery of fire, humans would sit around it and create community. Over time, as humanity and societies evolved, the table and the act of sitting down to eat also changed and developed alongside the construction of humans in society. Therefore, I believe this is deeply rooted in us and consider it something we must take care of: conserving and preserving.

CT: In Brillat-Savarin’s delightful book, The Physiology of Taste (1825), he famously stated, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Do you agree with him? What do you eat and what does your food reveal about you?

NG: : There is an aphorism “We are what we eat”, and we also live in the age of social media and the culture of looking good. It’s true but also superficial because it only talks about the nutrients of the food and the benefits it brings. What you consume may determine how you will feel, I don’t deny that. However, what interests me is how food speaks about us in terms of culture, religion, social class, values, and ethics. So, we could say that what we are what we eat, how we prepare it, and how we present it. This would be a more complete concept for me because it speaks of what I do. In reality, I don’t just focus on the food, but also on how it’s prepared, how it’s presented, and how we eat it. This can indeed mark our identity.

CT: The ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp inaugurated modernism, paving the way for the conceptual value of an artwork. Food has been a subject and statement for artists for a long time. I have selected four works: a book, an installation, an exhibition, and a film where food and table setting are a manifesto, a feminist statement, a social sculpture, and the act of cooking. Could you comment on them.

CT: The Futurist Cookbook, (1932) by F. T. Marinetti is a recipe book and manifesto that reimagined food preparation and consumption as avant-garde entertainment, prescribing originality, harmony, sculptural form, aroma, inter-course music, and small canapés. It required high-tech equipment, banned political discussion, and designed meals to be eaten without utensils.

NG: I love how they also use food to express their ideas. They were visionaries. These are things that today, with the use of technology, are happening on a culinary level, which is fabulous. But there is a part that doesn’t sit well with me because I like tradition, and the Futurists wanted to break with tradition, not transform it. A chef that comes to mind is Massimo Bottura, who has a lot to do with the futurist manifesto as he transforms Italian food. In his inn in Modena, it took him a long time to be recognized. People didn’t accept him. But he never denied the origins, he elevated them by transforming them and using technology.

For me, yes, a table is a performance. They also challenged flavors: they made a lamb chops with shrimp sauce, for example. It wasn’t very common. The idea seems to me to be of absolute sensitivity, because it’s about feeling the contact of the food, feeling the touch and taking it to the five senses, even with music.

CT: The Dinner Party, (1974-1979). Judy Chicago's installation features a table set for 39 mythical and historical women, addressing their erasure from history through a combined installation and performance.

NG: I had the opportunity to see this work at the Brooklyn Museum and it was a wonderful experience. Sometimes it makes you think about why she did it with a table. I believe the act of setting the table was relegated only to women when she proposed it in the 1970s. So, having chosen the narrative of a table, for me, has to do with that connection between those 39 extraordinary but invisible women in history and the domestic, also invisible, act of setting the table. I am grateful to Judy Chicago and having had the opportunity to see that work, which was one of the great exhibitions I saw.

CT: Untitled (Free), (1992) exhibition. In the 1990s, artists addressed digital isolation with "social sculpture," an art form emphasizing human interaction. Rirkrit Tiravanija exemplified this by cooking for gallery visitors, turning shared meals into participatory art that blurred the lines between artist and audience.

NG: I know him and am very interested in his work. I took philosophy in art classes where I read, among others, the book Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, which describes a set of contemporary art practices that take human relationships and their social context as their theoretical and practical point of departure, rather than an independent and private space. It alludes to Rirkrit Tiravanija and also the work of Félix González-Torres, where you would take a candy: the viewer, by taking something, became part of the work.

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These are very interesting works to me, especially because of what I do: creating a space where people can meet, talk, and share. My new work, Situations, also raises this possibility: through the table, reconstructing situations that reflect experiences many of us have gone through.

When I came to Miami, I started organizing gatherings and meals to socialize and build community, seeking a moment of connection and reflection: what better way to do it than through food?

CT: The Taste of Things (2023). Set in 1889 France the film, directed by Anh Hung Tran, depicts chef Dodin Bouffant, who cooks for the first time for his lover and cook, Eugénie, after she refuses to marry him.

NG: Cooking for me is an act of love. Not just the act of cooking, but from the moment we go to the supermarket, come home with the groceries, arrange them, and prepare the food. In my case, the fact of choosing what to eat and how to take care of my family through food is an act of love and care at the same time. The film is delightful because it’s a declaration of love made through food. I especially loved the part of the film where they asked the girl to describe what was on her plate. I thought about how important it is to take the time to educate through food, through the palate, because you discover a world.

At home, I taught my daughters to eat and love food. I always made sure to offer them a varied diet. For example, growing up in a small town and in another era, I like to respect what nature offers us each season: peaches, apricots, and plums in summer; mandarins and pears in winter. I tried to get them to eat according to the season. I think I opened a world to my daughters’ palate, to the curiosity of eating, and tasting.

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CT: What is your intention when you prepare your tables and serve the food you so carefully and beautifully prepare? What was your intention with your latest project, Situations?

NG: There are certain questions that many people still ask me. Regarding my latest work, Situations, I get asked why and what I did it a for. I believe the table and food are a language that can build wonderful narratives and that connect us even more.

Today, we face a reality where we are drifting away from the habit of gathering, of eating together. This may be due not only to technology but also to the voracious pace of work and the lives we lead. It seems we have lost connection, and I consider it crucial that we strive to gather more and share experiences together. These Situations aim to create moments where I can express or offer something to those who want to participate and receive it, so they can experience it in their own way, even if they don’t like it.

CT: Could we say it’s a community-building exercise?

NG: Yes, this could mainly be a way to build community. It would also serve as a moment to, for example in the first Situation where the subject is moving, allow someone to speak or bring the conversation to an aspect they hadn’t considered before. It may be that the person packed their things and forgot something, or discarded something they later regretted. Moving has many layers: you don’t just move places, you also change relationships and affections; it’s not just about objects. This Situation was also a metaphor to address deeper and unseen aspects of moving.

CT: Could you describe one of your tables?

NG: One of the tables I most enjoyed setting was for Thanksgiving 2023. Although I come from another culture and this holiday has not been part of my tradition, it now has become the celebration that excites me the most and to which I put the most intention. I take the time to reflect on what I want to build and how I want the culture of this holiday to be interpreted, making sure all its symbols and colors are present.

For the last celebration, I decided to reinvent the concept a bit. I’m a very creative person and the idea of doing the same thing over and over doesn’t excite me; I’m always looking to create, research, and form new associations. This time, I changed the traditional color palette and used cabbages instead of pumpkins, giving a twist to the decoration but without losing the essence of what this date means.

CT: Was there a predominant color?

NG: Everything was in different shades of green, a color I love. For the occasion, I selected ceramic plates and hand-blown glasses, all in various shades of green. Instead of using the typical pumpkins or traditional decorative elements, I chose a variety of cabbages, from Brussels sprouts to cauliflowers, creating a vibrant centerpiece in tones of green with some purplish touches. The food, prepared with the help of a friend, included all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes. We cooked all day and served everything on that table, which I truly enjoyed setting up.

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SPANISH

À table!

Natalia Giannangeli construye comunidad y narrativas alrededor de una mesa.

¿Qué almorzaste hoy? ¿Y con quién lo hiciste? ¿Cómo estaba puesta la mesa? ¿De qué hablaron? Uno de mis rituales favoritos es reunirme con amigos alrededor de una mesa: la cercanía física, los aromas, la felicidad de saciar el hambre y la sed juntos transforman una comida en una celebración, así que cuando vi por primera vez las mesas cautivadoras de Natalia Giannangeli, puestas tanto para ocasiones familiares como para encuentros profesionales, quedé encantado por su belleza, originalidad y referencias históricas.

En una ocasión, ella puso una mesa usando bandejas de metal para cenas de televisión, colocando la cubertería en círculos como flores por toda la mesa, “invitando a una reflexión sobre nuestra relación actual con la comida en una mezcla de nostalgia por la simplicidad del pasado y la aceptación de la cultura de la comida rápida que define nuestro tiempo”, explica ella. El centro de mesa era un arreglo elaborado de losas de piedra gris claro de aspecto rústico, rodeadas en su base por tela beige retorcida, con vides verdes y lirios blancos colgando sobre la mesa. La escena estaba delicadamente iluminada por velas blancas, dándole el atractivo de un tableau surrealista.

Otra de mis favoritos fue una mesa que Natalia preparó usando un vidrio de tono rosado producido durante la época de la Gran Depresión, que se podía comprar en las tiendas de diez centavos, destinado a alegrar la vida de las familias que enfrentaban tiempos económicos difíciles. “Se creía que el color rosado tenía la capacidad de levantar el ánimo, convirtiéndose en un símbolo de belleza en medio de la adversidad”, dice ella. En el centro, una serie de tulipanes rosados en cuencos con pedestal, flanqueados por velas blancas altas, tejen y bailan en todas direcciones irradiando más belleza. El efecto glamoroso de estos vidrios rosados, cuando son manejados por Natalia, no se asocia fácilmente con utensilios domésticos asequibles.

El acto de compartir el pan juntos crea un sentido de conexión y pertenencia. Es una forma de construir relaciones, superar diferencias y fortalecer comunidades. Puede ser alrededor de una mesa puesta para la cena que muchos de nosotros viajamos de regreso a nuestros orígenes a través de los aromas y sabores. La mesa puede ser un lugar donde los extraños se convierten en amigos, donde se comparten historias y donde se crean recuerdos. En La Odisea de Homero, por ejemplo, la hospitalidad era una virtud importante asociada con la moralidad, donde uno podía perjudicarse a sí mismo para extender la hospitalidad a otros.

¿Qué pasa si la mesa se pone con intención y la comida se cocina con amor, intensificando todas estas posibilidades?

Un par de semanas antes de que esta conversación tuviera lugar, Natalia lanzó un nuevo proyecto llamado Situaciones, una performance donde experimenta con la idea de mudarse, de casa y de país, y sus significados múltiples. Ella usa una mesa para aludir a nuestro concepto de hogar, al inventario inevitable de posesiones personales que hacemos cuando nos mudamos y a los inmigrantes en los que nos convertimos. Mientras tomábamos un café, hablamos sobre el pasado, el presente y el futuro.

CARMEN: ¿Podrías contarnos la historia de cómo comenzaste con tus tablescapes?

NATALIA: Mi historia con las mesas comenzó desde muy chica, gracias a una tradición familiar. Vivíamos en Bolívar, provincia de Buenos Aires, y a mi mamá le encantaba poner mesas. Había un vajillero con todas las piezas heredadas de sus abuelos y de sus tías abuelas, y en cada momento festivo ella ponía las mesas. Era muy creativa: agarraba una plantita o unas margaritas del jardín y con eso armaba mesas divinas. Nos preparaba la mesa no solo para festejos como Navidad, Año Nuevo o Pascua, sino también para nuestros cumpleaños. Siempre me fascinó ese vajillero que tenía bajo llave y era sagrado; nadie podía tocarlo. Cada vez que ella lo abría y yo veía las copas de colores, me encantaba. Creo que eso fue lo que me inspiró.

Mamá también cocinaba muy rico y muy bien. Era costumbre para Navidad hacer los 12 platos, algunos de los cuales sigo preparando. Somos tres hermanas y para Navidad nos juntamos y tratamos de replicar estos platos. Es una tradición que se va manteniendo entre nosotras. Poner la mesa es algo que me gusta mucho y que siempre he hecho con mucha pasión.

Cuando vine a vivir a Miami, y dejé el mundo de la moda, empecé a estudiar diseño floral y a hacer comidas en casa, también como una manera de socializar y hacer comunidad. Poner una mesa es para mí un lenguaje muy fuerte que transmite mucho de quienes somos. Soy amante de la vajilla, de los objetos. Tenía o compraba una vajilla de México, por ejemplo, y armaba una mesa que honraba la cultura mexicana. 

Pero, no soy chef, cocino como mamá cocinaba.

Un día, me llamaron unos clientes para quienes había hecho arreglos florales. Había un chef muy importante que les cocinaba y me preguntaron si podía ponerles la mesa. A partir de ahí, pensé: "Qué interesante, algo que hago en mi casa lo puedo llevar a nivel profesional." Desde entonces, comencé a dedicarme a esta actividad, que me ha brindado muchísimas satisfacciones. He organizado comidas y he tenido la oportunidad de participar en eventos donde la mesa no solo era importante, sino que también narraba historias.

CT: Una mesa es un lugar de reuniones comunitarias donde vive la nostalgia compartida en olores y sabores familiares; un espacio de trabajo invisible; la preservación de tradiciones y del pasado. En una época en la que nos reunimos menos en persona, juntarse alrededor de una mesa para compartir una comida puede ser una ocasión preciosa de interacción humana. ¿Podríamos decir que cocinar y sentarse a comer juntos nos hace más humanos, ahora más que nunca?

NG: Sí, no solo creo que nos hace más humanos, sino que es parte de nuestra humanidad intrínseca. La historia ha demostrado cómo el hombre, en sus inicios y con el descubrimiento del fuego, se sentaba alrededor de él y creaba comunidad. Con el paso del tiempo, a medida que la humanidad y las sociedades evolucionaron, la mesa y el acto de sentarse a comer también han ido cambiando y desarrollándose junto con la construcción del ser humano en la sociedad. Por lo tanto, creo que esto está profundamente arraigado en nosotros y considero que es algo en lo que debemos ocuparnos: conservar y preservar.

CT: En el delicioso libro de Brillat-Savarin, "La psicología del gusto" (1825), él afirmó famosamente: "Dime lo que comes, y te diré quién eres". ¿Estás de acuerdo con él? ¿Qué comes y qué revela tu comida sobre ti?

NG: Está ese aforismo “Hoy somos lo que comemos” y además vivimos en la era de las redes sociales y de la cultura de vernos bien. Existe, es real, pero para mí es muy superficial porque habla solamente de los nutrientes de la comida y los beneficios que trae. Si consumes eso y cómo te vas a sentir, es una parte también que no debemos negar. Lo que a mí me interesa es cómo la comida habla de nosotros en cuanto a cultura, religión, economía, clase social, valores y ética. O sea, podemos decir que lo que comemos, cómo lo preparamos y cómo lo hacemos sería la frase más completa para mí, porque habla de lo que yo hago. En realidad, no solo me focalizo en lo que comemos, sino en cómo lo preparamos, cómo lo hacemos, cómo lo presentamos y cómo lo comemos. Esto sí puede marcar nuestra identidad.

CT: Los ready-mades de Marcel Duchamp inauguraron el modernismo, abriendo camino al valor conceptual de una obra de arte. La comida ha sido un tema y declaración para los artistas durante mucho tiempo. He seleccionado cuatro obras: un libro, una instalación, una exposición y una película donde la comida y la disposición de la mesa son un manifiesto, una declaración feminista, una escultura social y el gesto de cocinar. ¿Podrías comentar estas declaraciones?

The Futurist Cookbook (1932) de F.T. Marinetti es un libro de recetas y manifiesto que redefinió la comida como entretenimiento de vanguardia, enfatizando la originalidad, la armonía, la forma escultórica, el aroma, la música entre platos y pequeños canapés. Requería equipos de alta tecnología, prohibía las discusiones políticas y diseñaba comidas para ser consumidas sin utensilios.

NG: Me encanta cómo toman la comida también para expresar sus ideas. Fueron muy visionarios. Son cosas que hoy, con el uso de la tecnología, están pasando a nivel culinario, lo cual es fabuloso. Pero hay una parte que no va bien conmigo, porque a mí me gusta la tradición y los futuristas querían romper con la tradición, no transformarla. Se me viene a la cabeza un chef, Massimo Bottura, que tiene mucho que ver con el manifiesto futurista, ya que transforma la comida italiana. En su hostería en Módena, le costó mucho tiempo ser reconocido. La gente no lo aceptaba. Pero él nunca negó los orígenes, los elevó transformándolos y usando la tecnología.

Para mí, sí, una mesa es una puesta en escena. Ellos también desafiaban los sabores: hacían una chuleta de cordero con una salsa de camarones, por ejemplo. No era muy común. La idea me parece de una sensibilidad absoluta, porque es sentir el contacto de la comida, sentir el tacto y llevarlo de sentido a sentido, a los cinco sentidos, incluso con la música.

CT: The Dinner Party, (1974-1979). La instalación de Judy Chicago presenta una mesa puesta para 39 mujeres míticas e históricas, abordando su borrado de la historia a través de una combinación de instalación y performance.

NG: Tuve la oportunidad de ver esta obra en el Brooklyn Museum y fue una experiencia maravillosa. A veces te hace pensar por qué lo hizo con una mesa. Creo que el acto de poner la mesa estaba relegado solamente a las mujeres cuando ella lo planteó en los años 70. Entonces, haber elegido la narrativa de una mesa, para mí, tiene que ver con esa conexión entre esas 39 mujeres extraordinarias pero invisibles en la historia y el acto doméstico, también invisible, de poner la mesa. Agradezco a Judy Chicago y haber tenido la oportunidad de ver esa obra, que fue una de las grandes muestras que vi.

CT: Untitled (Free), (1992). En la década de 1990, los artistas abordaron la aislación digital con la "escultura social," una forma de arte que enfatiza la interacción humana. Rirkrit Tiravanija ejemplificó esto en esta exhibición, cocinando para los visitantes de la galería, convirtiendo las comidas compartidas en arte participativo que difuminaba las líneas entre artista y audiencia.

NG: Lo conozco y me interesa muchísimo su trabajo. Tomé clases de filosofía en arte donde leí, entre otros, el libro Estética Relacional de Nicolas Bourriaud, en el que describe un conjunto de prácticas artísticas contemporáneas que toman como punto de partida teórico y práctico el conjunto de las relaciones humanas y su contexto social, en lugar de un espacio independiente y privado. Hace alusión a Rirkrit Tiravanija y también al trabajo de Félix González-Torres, donde te llevabas el caramelo: el espectador, al llevarse algo, era parte de la obra.

Me parecen trabajos interesantísimos y a mí, en particular, me gustan por lo que hago: crear un espacio en el que la gente pueda encontrarse, hablar y compartir. Mi nuevo trabajo, Situaciones, también plantea un poco esa posibilidad: a través de la mesa, reconstruir situaciones que reflejen experiencias por las que muchos de nosotros hayamos pasado.

Cuando vine a Miami, empecé a organizar reuniones y comidas para socializar y crear comunidad, buscando un momento de conexión y reflexión: ¡qué mejor que a través de la comida!

CT: The Taste of Things, (2023). Ambientada en Francia en 1889, la película dirigida por Anh Hung Tran muestra al chef Dodin Bouffant, quien cocina por primera vez para su amante y cocinera, Eugénie, después de que ella se niega a casarse con él.

NG: Cocinar para mi es un acto de amor. No solo el acto de cocinar, sino desde el momento en que vamos al supermercado, llegamos a casa con la compra, la acomodamos y la disponemos en nuestros espacios de la cocina, y el cuidado con que preparamos la comida. En mi caso, el hecho de elegir qué comer y cómo cuidar a mi familia a través de la comida es un acto de amor y de cuidado al mismo tiempo. La película es deliciosa porque es una declaración de amor que se hace a través de la comida. Me encantó especialmente la parte de la película en la que le pedían a esa niña que describiera lo que tenía en el plato. Pensé en lo importante que es tomarse el tiempo de educar desde la comida, desde el paladar, porque descubres un mundo.

En casa enseñé a mis hijas a comer y a amar la comida. Siempre me preocupé por ofrecerles una dieta variada. Por ejemplo, al vivir en un pueblo y en otra época, me gusta respetar lo que la naturaleza nos ofrece en cada temporada: duraznos, damascos y ciruelas en verano; mandarinas y peras en invierno. Traté de que comieran según la estacionalidad. Creo que abrí un mundo al paladar de mis hijas, a la inquietud de comer, de probar, de degustar.

CT: ¿Cuál es tu intención al preparar tus mesas y servir la comida que preparas con tanto cuidado y belleza? ¿Cuál es tu intención con tu último proyecto, las Situaciones? 

NG: Hay ciertas preguntas que todavía mucha gente me hace. En el caso de lo último que hice, las Situaciones, me preguntan: ¿Por qué lo hago? ¿Para qué lo hago? Creo que mi respuesta a tu pregunta y a toda la gente que esté interesada en saber es que yo creo que la mesa y la comida es un lenguaje que puede construir narrativas divinas y maravillosas y que puede conectarnos aún más. 

Hoy enfrentamos una realidad en la que nos estamos alejando de la costumbre de reunirnos, de juntarnos a comer. Esto puede deberse no solo a la tecnología, sino también al ritmo voraz de trabajo y vida que llevamos. Parece que hemos perdido la conexión, y considero que es crucial que nos esforcemos por reunirnos más y compartir experiencias juntos. Estas Situaciones tratan de crear momentos en los que puedo manifestar o expresar algo y ofrecerlo a quienes deseen participar y recibirlo, para que lo experimenten a su manera, incluso si no es de su agrado.

CT: ¿Podríamos decir que es un ejercicio de construcción de comunidad?

NG: Sí, esto podría ser principalmente una forma de construir comunidad. También serviría como un momento para, por ejemplo, en la situación número uno que planteé sobre la mudanza, permitir que alguien hable o lleve la conversación hacia un aspecto que no había considerado antes. Puede ser que la persona haya empacado sus cosas y olvidado algo, o que haya desechado algo de lo que luego se arrepintió. La mudanza tiene muchos niveles porque no solo te mudas de lugar, también cambias de relaciones y afectos; no es solo sobre los objetos. Esto también fue una metáfora para abordar aspectos más profundos y no visibles.

CT: ¿Podrías describir una de tus mesas?

NG: Una de las mesas que más disfruté preparar fue la de Thanksgiving de 2023. Aunque provengo de otra cultura y esta festividad no formaba parte de mis tradiciones, se ha convertido en la celebración que más me entusiasma y a la que más intención pongo. Me tomo el tiempo para reflexionar sobre lo que quiero construir y cómo quiero que se interprete la cultura de esta festividad, asegurándome de que estén presentes todos sus símbolos y colores.

Para la última celebración, decidí reinventar un poco el concepto. Soy una persona muy creativa y la idea de hacer lo mismo una y otra vez no me excita; siempre estoy buscando crear, investigar y formar nuevas asociaciones. Esta vez, cambié la paleta de colores tradicional y utilicé coles en lugar de calabazas, dándole un giro a la decoración pero sin perder la esencia de lo que significa esta fecha.

CT: ¿Hubo un color predominante?

NG: Todo estaba en diferentes tonos de verde, que es un color que aprecio mucho. Para la ocasión, seleccioné platos de cerámica y copas de vidrio soplado a mano, todos en variadas tonalidades de verde. En lugar de utilizar las típicas calabazas o elementos decorativos habituales para la fecha, opté por utilizar una variedad de coles, desde repollitos de Bruselas hasta coliflores, creando un centro de mesa vibrante en tonos verdes con algunos toques violáceos. La comida, preparada en compañía de una amiga que vino a cocinar conmigo, incluyó todos los platos tradicionales típicos de la ocasión. Cocinamos durante todo el día y lo servimos todo en esa mesa, la cual realmente disfruté armar.

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