INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI AS PART OF THE PRESSAGIO EXHIBITION AT FONDAZIONE MEMMO
AA You said that each new body of work or exhibition starts with a proclamation. With this exhibition titled Presagio (Omen) you seem to go even further: you seem to be expressing a wish and you are taking us on a journey.
WM This exhibition has been particularly emotional for me as it came immediately after finding out about my chronic illness and its acceptance was my declaration, followed by questions like, How do I handle this situation? How do other people handle it and how do people that care for those with a chronic illness deal with it?
The question stands, if a person who has an illness will be represented, how will these representations be? Do I have to show the body of the person directly? or do I have to talk about it from a different perspective, beyond the body?
For me, Presagio is the door, the entry point for a journey that starts with the emotional response to the news and then evolves into acceptance.
The journey I propose is a creative door, it offers an alternative to pharmacological and therapeutical solutions. In the exhibition, I open myself to a creative universe to show that we have other ways to conceive and represent illness in terms of spirituality, connection and beauty.
AA In this personal and spiritual journey, you have chosen to use the language of drawing, painting and installation, and you seem to have taken inspiration from your time in Rome while preparing the exhibition. How has Rome added to your journey as an artist, and more specifically to the journey that led to Presagio?
WM Rome can be interpreted through so many metaphors. Of course, its beauty hits you immediately. Walking around the city, you see markers of its glorious past, of an empire that reached its apex but then fell. In Rome you see how even the highest quest for power has its limits.
I see this as a metaphor for humanity and its desire to hold power and control over everything, but the reality is that everything eventually dissolves. It’s the same for a sick body: we strive to restore it back to health, to a state before it was touched by the illness, but that’s an impossible endeavour and the acknowledgement of such limitation interests me.
When you first enter churches in Rome you are overwhelmed by the immense beauty and the enormous talent of the artists who created them, but on the other hand, you realise that this is the same religion that castigates the body and its desires, using guilt and blame as a form of control.
Painting is somehow complicit in this. Those of us who have been trained in European classical painting had to unpack the symbolism and strategies that made painting an indoctrinating tool for the Church’s disciples. In Latin America, we tend to be very religious as a result of the Spanish conquest and this is something I grew up with. This is why it’s important for me to understand these strategies and histories so that I can then reconfigure them for my own narratives.
AA As much as your work is informed by your life and experiences, the time and process of making the work is also the moment when it seems to reveal itself to you. This was particularly apparent when I visited your studio and saw you were surrounded by books, images, quotes, sketchbooks. How do you take all the material and transform it into the work?
WM There’s a rhythm to my process but it’s not necessarily linear. First I try to identify where my discomfort, pain or trauma is so that I can start tackling it. Here I ask myself why I feel this pain, although I know the answers are very complex. Then I start to pick out various elements, which I weave together to form a new story that manifests my research and my point of view. This narrative makes the pain or the wound disappear. It’s a way for me to start believing in other paradigms in order to free myself from the Christian guilt imposed by the dominant ideology.
This process of fiction-building is no different from other types of stories that we create to make sense of life and death, to make the pain of it more bearable, and I am using art to find and articulate my side of the story.
AA Although painting remains central to your practice, you seem to say there are limitations as well as potentials in the media. Is this why the paintings in the exhibitions are bookended by charcoal and glass?
WM Yes, painting is my main medium, I have been painting for a long time and I know its advantages but also its limitations. For instance, one of its shortfalls is that it is seen as a medium that shows reality, but that’s not true. Painting creates a representation of reality, with specific meanings, which implies that others are lost. This is why I looked beyond painting for this exhibition. Charcoal, for example, is exciting because it comes from ashes and doesn’t allow for correction. Unlike painting, you can’t retouch it so you have to fully commit to the mark you made. I thought it was important to use the quality of charcoal to express all-consuming emotions like anguish, something that makes a mark and leaves a permanent trace on you, it overwhelms you and creates an instinctive reaction.
On the other hand, I used glass to bring audiences into the reality of the present, not only its metaphors. Glass is fragile, it can break and cut you, and this is why it’s both beautiful and dangerous. This is why I made glass sculptures that function as vessels for my blood, the same blood that gives life to the ill but also, that is a source of contagion. Blood can be present in the exhibition when I am not there, as is part of me and my body. I feel this allows me a direct contact with visitors to the exhibition.
AA You have woven together different theories and reflections around illness and the way it forces us to reconsider our lives and our surroundings. Starting with Susan Sontag, who said in her essay Illness as a Metaphor: “As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have. The solution is hardly to stop telling cancer patients the truth, but to rectify the conception of the disease, to de-mythicize it”. This needs to abandon the binary between health and illness and must turn a ‘fight’ into a process of becoming one with the illness.
WM What Susan Sontag says in her book “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”
is very interesting to me because she says that, through the use of militaristic adjectives, we describe an illness as something to attack and fight. This deduces that the sick body is one we need to fight and annihilate in order to be rid of the disease. For instance, the fight against viruses could be won by eliminating the carrier, but these are people we would be eliminating. In my mind the body should not be understood as a unit but as a container for an ecological system. This suggests that a disease is not something separate from our bodies but something that unites internal and external systems, that move from micro to macro, linking our body to something larger, like the universe.
AA It’s so beautiful to think that once we ‘let go of the fight’ new perspectives become visible. You reminded us of the essay by Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, in which she argues that illness, and perhaps more specifically lying in bed, interrupts our mundane lives and lifts our gaze upwards. This takes the body, and the mind, out of social norms and connects it to the natural world. She wrote: “Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different…This has been going on all the time without us knowing it!”
WM It’s all about opening up, widening the perspective that led us to think of everything as singular units. Christianity contributed to making illness a stigma, to create guilt around the individual carrying it. If you fall ill, it is because you betrayed your own body and violated your Christian will, and for that, you must be punished; this is a moralistic and punitive vision. That’s why I am reassured by the writings of Lynn Margulis who argues that we don’t exist as individuals but as cooperative beings, and together we create an immense ecology. It’s through our interdependence that we all provide for each other, so we are in a continuum with what’s inside and outside of our physical bodies, including viruses, bacteria etc.
For me, the concept of looking up has clear religious connotations, but it is also about looking at something that is bigger than us and brings us into dialogue with something that we can’t control, a greater energy that includes the stars, planets and the universe.
AA I suppose this is why the paintings in the ceiling of the second room show outlines of human bodies but also their organs. They are shown in a dynamic movement as they extend and morph into different beings. We see bacteria and viruses coexisting with human forms in an elegant, almost choreographed flux.
WM This is an esoteric room for me, a cosmic room. It’s an idea that developed when I had to undergo medical tests to treat my condition pharmacologically. It got me thinking about how my body functions and I began to look at myself from within. I didn’t want pharmacology to be the only connection to my illness, or for it to be the only healing force. So I thought to create an astrological chart structured around four large circular canvasses to be hung from the ceiling, which would enable me to present the body from within, with each canvass representing three systems of the body including the digestive, respiratory, immunological system and so on. At the same time, I wanted to remap the body into a cosmic plane. Each painting is named after a galaxy or constellation: Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Hydra and Berenice. Around and over these bodies I painted bacteria and viruses as if they were stars that connect and interact with bodies and their systems.
I borrowed this idea from an ancient science called Melothesia, which associates parts of the body with the sun, the moon, planets, and astrological signs in an attempt to find ways to understand and heal the body. I was interested in finding connections between a greater, cosmic power and the power of the body to heal. In Melothesia creates birth charts to understand how susceptible you might be to specific illnesses, and this knowledge would help in finding an adequate cure. I am fascinated with the idea that the macro is always connected to the micro, and that within our bodies we can find ways to heal ourselves. Of course, this was an esoteric theory rather than medical science, but in creating a new astrological chart I wanted to fictionalise another story, imagine another solution and create a visual space where to rethink our bodies and our illnesses.
AA I love this idea of the exhibition as an invitation to take us on your journey as you find an alternative story for interpreting our reality. I guess the room you titled Treasures is where beauty, fragility and danger are in a perfect balance.
WM For the glass sculptures, I was inspired by the organs of the human body but also microscopic images of viruses, plants etc. I fused all these images together, creating sculptures with a material that is difficult to control and its outcome hard to fully predict. I like that they are fragile, they have flaws. They started as sand, a natural material, to then change to a liquid form and then glass. In my fiction, this is the place where everything converges into small treasures. I wanted to subvert the idea that a disease is something visually ugly by always being represented in its state of dehumanization. Instead, I wanted to create beauty from this symbiosis. Susan Sontag mentioned that, historically, tuberculosis was seen as the disease of the poets, as the greater awareness of the body would help them reach into their souls, engendering great creativity and beauty. I am fascinated by how different times in history have interpreted illness and I wanted to offer my vision for it. In this process of consciousness and transformation, I was looking for the beauty that lifts us from the initial anguish and from the fear of seeing blood. That’s why I wanted to end the show with something resplendent like coloured glass; sensuality that would attract and create a link with the viewer where beauty and transformation are in equilibrium.