Ways of saying I

Woman, immigrant and Latin American. Ana Mendieta (La Havana, 1948-New York, 1985) is a mythical name in 1970s feminism. During her brief artistic career (only thirteen years before she was killed), she opted for land art, body art and performance. She spoke of the “earth/body” to describe her approach to art, in which her figure or her footprint “became one with the earth”. With magnificent lyricism and a surprising communicative simplicity, her drawings on leaves connect us silently and directly with the first self-portraits of a prelinguistic humanity.

Trini Sotos (Sabadell, 1927) was nineteen when she portrayed herself. At the age of twelve she won the Sabadell Fine Arts Academy Children’s Prize and her family sent her for art classes with Antoni Vila Arrufat until she was nineteen, when she enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona. Her self-portrait is from that time. Why did she erase the lines and choose sfumato, a pictorial effect that distances the figure? What does that darkness tell us?

Ana Sánchez (Salamanca, 1964) works with her hands. Her proposals are highly lyrical, taking fabrics, books and printed materials to build objects that favour the idea of texture and tactile sensoriality. The hand is thus a central element in her idea and practice of art. It is how this photographic composition constructed as a mosaic of hands takes on a fully self-representational meaning. Seen from a distance, the assemblage of hands acquires the appearance of snake skin and sketches a clearly organic movement. Hands? Animal skin? Tectonic movement?

Between 1966 and 1967, Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) recorded the months of her pregnancy with her daughter Àngela, who came along quite unexpectedly as she was studying art. She pioneered the way for other artists on the international scene who subsequently did the same. Paula Modersohn-Becker portrayed herself naked and pregnant in 1906, even though she wasn’t. In neither case are they portraits, but affirmations. Mari Chordà’s small gouaches (corresponding to the first, seventh and ninth month), with their pop art-like organic shapes and irreverent colours from the classical portrait palette, contain a matrix diary of the gestation.

Andrea Lería (Barcelona, 1980) composes biographical narratives with family photographs, texts, paintings, drawings and videos. Ash Garden won the Tapiró Prize at the 2017 Tarragona Provincial Government Art Biennial. It is composition that incorporates photographs and childhood drawings of the artist with the mother, and a dialogue on the paternal-filial love between the artist and her father. Although it contains a marked autobiographical element, Lería insists on the public dimension of her narrative: “The intimate experiences become flexible instruments that cross the dividing line between the public and the private.” She herself categorises her work a “a biographical way of looking at the world.”

The title is not deceptive, it is a return. After thirty years without actions interacting with nature, in 2012 Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950) undertook this immersion in water at the source of the Caula, a gorge in the municipality of Les Escaules in Alt Empordà county. She thus retuned to the actionism for which she had become known in the early nineteen-seventies. To commemorate Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s visit to this town in the Empordà region, an annual performance art festival has been held for the past fifteen years. Photographed by Joan Casellas, the heart and soul of the festival, Miralles’ “Duchampian” swim in the Caula –the swim as a return– was the image used on the poster for the 2012 edition of the festival.

Apron, bowl, chopper, dish, etc. A young Martha Rosler (New York, 1945) shows and enumerates objects in her kitchen. In alphabetic order, her gestures evolve from the descriptive to the increasingly threatening. The video is constructed as a parody of a TV cooking programme. Rosler presents herself as an “anti-Julia Child”, referring to a popular nineteen-sixties TV presenter who brought French cooking to a wider American audience. What is most significant, however, is the vocabulary of frustration she manages to create with her gestures and the I as a prisoner of the domestic space. As the artist herself explained, “When the woman speaks, she gives a name to her own oppression”.

For her self-portrait in the studio, Núria Batlle (Barcelona, 1958) constructs an impossible space. Accustomed to working with fragmented images of women’s bodies that blend in with elements of nature, when approaching her own representation, she places herself in front of a marine background that literally invades the workspace. Through the superposition of images, we see the artist pottering about among heterogeneous objects in a place that looks like a domestic garage, with the up and over door raised and seawater flowing in. Proposed as a palimpsest of visual elements, her photographic work has a marked pictorial effect.

Who takes the photo and who poses as the model? Who is the subject and who is the object? An emblematic name in feminism, Jo Spence (London, 1934-1992) collaborated extensively with Terry Dennet (London, 1938-2018) on social photography and political action projects. In Remodelling Photo History (The History Lesson) they question the dominant models of visual representation through what they called “phototheatre”. These are staged images that, through the photographic practice itself, question the Western use of the photograph. In addition to simultaneously acting as both models and photographers, this scene has a powerful semiotic charge that revokes like few others the long visual imaginary of maternity.

“This action can be carried out by one person on their own or by many people at the same time, without regard for sex, age or condition. It can also be carried out by some people on others, in couples or in a line; the first person is measured by the second, who in turn is measured by the third, etc. They can be naked or clothed, standing or lying down, in any position and situation; in front of a large audience or in the most absolute solitude.”

Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) wrote instructions for carrying out this action in 1971. She performed it herself in 1977 and has repeated it several times since. That such intimate and personal elements as the different parts of a naked body can be turned into simple objects to be measured is the politic statement of Ferrer’s action. Reduced to a pure statistic, where is the myth of nudity? Is intimacy no more than quantitative data? Ferrer ends the text with a dose of irony, “If the result has fully satisfied you, begin again as many times as you like.”

For almost two months in the autumn of 2016 and the winter of 2017, Itzair Okariz (San Sebastián, 1965) recorded his nocturnal dreams. He sent them to the museum every day, where they were pinned on the wall. He tried to remain faithful to the dreams, with gaps in the discourse and repeated words, and accompanied them with drawings. In a second action, Okariz went to the exhibition space and, sitting in front of an audience, read his dreams in two voices, thus increasing their intelligibility. It was an oneiric autobiography or the record of that other nocturnal I that also makes up our identity.

“Many of my pieces are linked to the relationship between my height, the sun and my shadow; or my I between two points and a ribbon and my height and all the infinite triangles that can take place”, Àngels Ribé (Barcelona, 1943) explained in a 2012 interview. This pioneer of action art in Catalonia uses her body as an element for investigating the geometric state of the space. In the series entitled 3 Points, undertaken between 1970 and 1973, she experiments with the notion of the triangle. “The sensation of being immersed in unknown structures. We are so surrounded by geometry. [...] There is a connection with the sun and, therefore, with the universe.”

Designated as Translations and Relations, the actions carried out in nature by Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950) insert the body of the artist into a natural context to the point that it disappears. In Woman-Tree, performed in November 1973 in the woods of Sant Llorenç del Munt, the artist “planted” her legs vertically in the ground. In Relation of the body with straw, performed in Sabadell in January 1975, she completely covered her body with straw. Whereas in the artistic tradition we find numerous works that depict the woman as a natural element permanently available to another, male of course, Fina Miralles decides that she is the subject of nature, perhaps to remind us of our arboreal or vegetal condition.