miércoles, 20 de febrero de 2008

AN  EXPLORING  LOOK
Yolanda salas *

The work of María Cristina Carbonell baffled me for the subtlety of its humor. However, I felt that something more profound was hidden behind that paradoxical reality that was a contradiction between the serious and the ironic, the sober and the overdone, the classic and the kitsch, the mimicking of reality or the recreation of the familiar. The disconcerting, in her work, directs the gaze toward the revelation of a new knowledge through an irreverent, witty sensibility and a profound femininity.

Desecration, irreverence, creation of new contexts and transformation of old meanings are resources to which the artist appeals to make knowledge more dense, to make possible the aperture to meanings.

In her work, nature is not seen as a wonderful miracle or as a result of scientific discourse. María Cristina Carbonell establishes a link between nature, cosmos and science, in which inquiry and imagination prevail over creation as a divine question. She is more interested in those forms of void and chaos than in the aesthetic reproduction of the splendor of form and the sensory beauty of harmony. The bridges that the artist builds between a divine vision and a scientific vision of nature surpass the sacred or rational discourses of science.

Experimentation and investigation are essential features in her creative search, from which derives a versatile, dynamic artistic production, rich in new proposals. Three themes run through her work: memory, nature and science. Her main resource consists in the reconstruction of paradigms with the purpose of dislocating the senses and re-creating over those fragments a meta-reality, the purpose of which is to liberate the vision and the representations, in order to explore other alternative possibilities of significance.

*Mg in Contemporary Latin-American Literature. Have published subjects related to cultural studies, oral traditions and popular culture.

YS What is the relationship of nature with your artistic creation? It seems like you approach it from a critical distance.

MCC In the early 90’s, I was mainly interested in biodiversity, species in extinction, the intrepid travels of Humboldt and Bonpland in the 19th century, the scientific studies made in these expeditions and the brilliant description of a lush and magnificent nature; But never with an ecologically minded approach. My relation with nature has been poetic; I prefer to experience it from a distance and to imagine it without human beings present in it: simply nature interacting with itself.

On my first trip to the Amazon forest, I had the impression of being before an imposing nature, where everything was green and blue. I saw huge walls made of trees, reflecting on the river and further away the blue sky. While the days passed by, my senses sharpened and I discovered a different world, where reality and illusion converge. There was the native, with his magical-religious beliefs coexisting in the biodiversity of the jungle. In that same jungle I experienced the essence of civilization as a society dedicated to the cultivation of created tools and stimuli, as well as to the exercise of internal struggles over the control of time and space. That distancing from my reality allowed me to discover that I am part of a civilization concentrated on developing new memories that gradually separate us more from that magical world, latent since our birth. Civilization separated from nature transforms into synthetic spaces, where most minds wander aimlessly as if asleep, turning their own spirits into empty spaces, filled with fear.

In the forest, when I witnessed a shamanistic healing or navigated on the river in the rain, I felt the same emotion that I feel when I see a work by Canova or Bernini. The forest got confused in my mind and formed columns. Suddenly I was flowing through wonderful rooms of forest transformed into a fabulous space, into a grand imaginary museum. From the rocks emerged sculptures by Isamu Noguchi. I could feel, for an instant, that transformation of the environment. The freedom of illusion is also to live the landscape as different spaces, thanks to a transforming, nostalgic vision. Life is a lot richer than what can be observed. We see what is the closest. To penetrate nature, however, is an exercise that sharpens the senses in order to see beyond appearance.

YS Landscape of a Landscape (1997) is inspired in the work Polar Ocean, by Caspar Friedrich, made in 1824, which in turn is inspired in the shipwreck of the Arctic expedition of William Parry. My question is: how do you re-elaborate the memory and how do you construct a re-interpretation from the memory?

MCC When I made that work, I had only seen the painting that inspired me in an art book. It was a black-and-white reproduction. I preferred not to inquire too much about it and to hold on to the amazement that it produced on me. I perceived it as an abstract work made of triangles in constant tension.

The ship, almost imperceptible in the photographic reproduction, wrecks against pieces of ice, creating huge megalithic monuments. The perception of the work, mediated through the reproduction of a photograph, allowed me to reinterpret it as a mural, on which dry squid cartilage fly as fragments dragged by the wind, suspended in space. Following the same direction of the chunks of ice, I attempt to reproduce, in the context of a kinetic work; the same exaltation and acute emotional tension that such a dramatic landscape can produce.

YS If, on the one hand, you marvel at nature and, in Epicedio, we could say that you even elevate it to a divine plane, on the other, you degrade the sacred. In the treatment that you personally give to the divine relic there is a very subtle, yet revealing irony. There is a kind of profanation of the sacred in the associations that your memory establishes with nature in its state of extinction.

MCC In order to reach the realization of Epicedio, there were a series of associations with other events in my life that occurred. Since 1992, on a trip to the Orinoco river and the Amazon, I photographed animal tracks in the sand and on the riverbanks.

A year before, in spring 1991, walking by some wheat fields in the Via Antica, in Rome; I entered into a small chapel. The floor was made of stone and, inlaid in a certain place in that space; there was an ancient white marble block, protected by a fence of rusted chain. There were two small feet carved into that square of 45 x 45cm., together with an inscription in Latin. I looked to the sides, took off my shoe and squeezed my foot as I could through the fence to see how it fit with the size. Just at that moment a monk appeared, who quite unperturbed explained that those were the footprints of Christ. After further inquiries I learned that it was a replica, because the original was in the Vatican. According to the legend, Jesus had stood there and had left his footprints impressed on the marble.

The image of the sacred footprints stamped on the marble remained in my mind for a long time. In the forest I associated the footprints of Christ with the animal tracks. Back in Caracas, together with a Paleo-biologer of the Universidad Simón Bolívar, I identified each print. I chose 12 imprints of animals that were in a critical danger of extinction. The number was chosen symbolically for its association to the twelve apostles of The Last Supper. This phase over, I carved the imprints in marble with their Latin nomenclature at a scale larger than their original size, turning them almost into abstract forms.

Epicedio are the imprints of animals carved in marble, each one with their scientific nomenclature, common name and degree of critical extinction, where I give away the vulnerability of any species on the face of the earth. By being enlarged, the imprints become abstract forms that, carved on white, immortal marble blocks, devoid of any color, refer to abandonment.

YS In your work there is a kind of melancholy for the specimens of the cabinets of natural science collectors. It is a kind of redemption and recovery of that memory, but re-signified. In Urumaco (1997), you reconstruct sceneries using real fossils. Memory transforms organic matter, the past takes on new life and the moldy smell of the cabinet of the Natural History Museum transforms into possible imagination of new realities. Thus, it seems like you are deconstructing the modernist tradition and its rational logic of organizing art, nature science.

MCC In conjuring the studios and cabinets of the Natural History museums, I feel a special attraction for the physical spaces of the labs of scientific taxonomy. In these strange atmospheres, smelling of formaldehyde and alcohol, there are hundreds of specimens trapped inside glass bottles. In contrast to the natural space where they once lived, these animals now reside in a microcosm, frozen in time, which is the opposite face of the immensity where each one of these beings once moved. Many are the sensations that these spaces produce in me.

In Au Revoir Les Enfants (1995) I was interested in expressing the loneliness and silence of these labs, in addition to the paradox that arises when you take a lab out of its original context and place it in a museum space, where the public does not perceive or consider the authenticity of each one of the fossils, as it happens with Urumaco (1998), for it appreciates them as well achieved imitations by the artist.

I am impressed also by the concentration of those 19th century scientists, in European attire, bustling about like that in the difficult tropics. Nothing distracted them from their studies or from the search for results. Their happiness was exploration and they had all the time available to observe and enjoy nature turned into knowledge. In short, I feel thrilled to transit imaginarily through the adventure of these explorers, marveled before nature, dedicating all the time necessary to penetrate with their vision into the depths and trifles of their objects of knowledge. I like to recreate those timeframes, to revive the naturalist and his world.

YS There is something about your artistic creation that especially attracts me, it is your way of intervening realities and transforming them into different sceneries, as it happens with Rocket Nature, Chalice, Girl… These original landscapes end up as meta-realities that liberate the vision from that magical and wonderful amazement with which urban mentality approaches untouched nature.

MCC In the area of perception, I am drawn to the idea of baffling the senses. I am inspired in the technique of the experiments of psychological evaluation of Hermann Rorschach, where he tries to discover in depth the personality of the patient through the reading that he does, from different angles, of ink stains on paper. I also propose to dislocate photographic images of landscapes reflected on water, rotating them 90° and therefore turning them into monumental sculptures, as in Rocket Nature, Bird in Space, Girl and Chalice. The landscape transforms into an ambiguous stimulus and I believe it is definitely a response to the fact that we are, most of the time, connected and responding to a reality of associations.

When I was little I looked at the trees and started to tell the girls my age marvelous things about nature. Then I decided to keep quiet because I had no audience for that imaginative look that recreated and transformed things.

In fact, with these dislocations I would like to transform the environment, recreating it. Personally, I like the work of art that makes an impact by dislocating the senses in order to reveal the subtlety that lies within it.

YS Do the Pillows carved in marble also have an implicit intention of dislocating and disconcerting the senses?

MCC In fact, the marble, stucco and bronze pillows are part of a more ambitious, unfinished project, called Beyond the Sunrise, which recalls the beginning of something wonderful The conception of this project is the result of a series of associations that emerged from the movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, specifically from the words of the humanoid in his last moments. This aggressive and violent being, when approaching his end, realizes that life is very valuable and in a desperate desire to continue living, he even kills his creator.

In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott makes evident the briefness of our physical time through the humanoid (Roy), which reflects in his last moments before Deckard, the detective who has to destroy him:

Roy: It is an experience to live with fear –referring to the four years of existence for which he was designed by his creator- that is to be a slave. I have seen things that you humans cannot imagine. I have attacked spaceships with fire in the interplanetary colonies, I have seen stars shine in different colors… all those moments will be lost in time the same as tears in the rain. It is time to die.

Deckard (watching him die): Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than ever. Not only his life, any life, my life. He only wanted the same answers as everyone else. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How much time do I have? The only thing I could do was just sitting there and watch him die.

Beyond Sunrise was conceived as a series of installations, with a passage that leads to a room like those where newborn babies are put, but when you look inside, there are no babies or cribs, but explosions of light that depict sunrises, that is, the beginning of a new life. To the right, one must enter another room and see a baptismal font, with a light above it and two red fishes going around. Then you enter another room where cracks can be seen, which reflect the image of the spectator interacting with his own distorted reflection. The cracks on the wall, the floors, the ceiling, must be concave and made of aluminum, in order to achieve this distortion, so that the images reflected are nothing but the fears of the spectator faced with his own destruction. In the passage that leads to the newborn room, to the baptismal font and to the Apocalypse, there must be, on the sides, a series of pillows that suggest the need to rest in face of so much existential anguish and they are offered as refuge for wonderful dreams. That is where the pillows come from. However, in this unfinished project, the dislocation of the senses is profound and must emerge from the need of a new beginning.

Undoubtedly I am attracted by the idea of puzzling, of fooling the sense of touch through the use of marble and the creation of ambiguous works, in which the appearance seduces for its softness, in contrast to its hard, impenetrable nature. For example, the sensations that occur when observing an image that is not what it seems, once its essence is discovered, the mental disconcert becomes a physical sensation that places the individual who experiences it, for fractions of seconds, in another dimension of the sensory plane, because the right hemisphere or the creative part of the brain inhibits the analytic part of the left side of the brain.

With these dislocations I propose a kind of liberation of the meanings that, tied to a series of stereotyped truths, cannot access to other possible readings. One must demystify ideas and concepts held as truths in order to examine those other realities that lay behind those illusions considered true.

The stele, the books of marble, refers to the exploration of other meanings. The referent can be a book linked to death but with a writing that talks about life… And ultimately, how much do you think you are worth dead?

I like to work on marble because I have learned to listen to the sound of carving, which is musical. Hearing and touching make me discover a series of sensations about the stone.


YS Is the play between space and sound present in another of your works?

MCC Yes, Three-Dimensional Study is a work based on immateriality, which studies the possibility of perceiving space through sound. The force of this installation lies in the displacement of the individual, through the sound of birds singing that come from opposite echoes in the room. Birdsong fills the empty space and the volume of the sound becomes a large mass that compresses the individual and, in consequence, makes possible spatial perception.

Interesting dislocations are those where the intangible, through sound, is capable of making the three-dimensionality of space perceivable. Three- Dimensional Study was created in an abandoned slaughterhouse. This place had huge crumbling spaces, communicated by passages. I painted one of those rooms –located two or three steps below floor level- in aqua green, to recreate a peaceful environment. The space had two natural sources of light, a lateral one and another one through the roof, with tree branches forcing their entrance into the room and giving the space an almost mystical atmosphere.

The reaction of the public to this installation was one of great surprise. The responses of the spectators gave a twist to the original concept of the work. Instead of moving on away from the installation, people stayed and sat on the steps for a long time to listen to the birds singing and to contemplate the space as if they were in a garden. People told what they felt there: the installation conjured up moments of their childhood, a time when they felt protected and in great peace.

YS In Amazilias you experiment an artistic approximation to nature and birds in a very interesting way, for you make contact with some humming birds.

MCC Amazilias, which is the scientific term that identifies a variety of humming birds, is the result of a month and a half of daily wait for two humming birds who were feeding from a watering dish prepared with nectar. This close communication and proximity to them allowed their punctual videotaping. Each time one of the humming birds came, approximately every 25 minutes, whether against the wind, under the rain or the shining sun, the images of smallness, the testimony of lightness, the quick versatility and the amazing precision of movements, were constantly captured by a video camera connected to a large monitor.

In transforming the flight of the humming birds into slow motion I feel that the fluttering becomes a dance and the wing movement (just like that of a helicopter propeller, which cannot be captured in real time by the eye) becomes a delicate veil that turns all this vision into a totally poetic act.

Birds intrigue me for their fragile appearance and their capacity for survival. They are perceived as free beings, but truly they are condemned to eat constantly to compensate the loss of energy required for flying and staying alert from their constant predators. They are prisoners of their freedom. To be “free as a bird” is nothing but an illusion.

YS However, in that kind of feather art that your series of feathers represent, your approach is different, it is the inquisitive look of the artist that predominates. For example, the fascination for the feather of a bird does not reside in its value as a collectible scientific object; on the contrary, you isolate it from its natural environment and transform it into a work of art.

MCC The color of birds is more generous in the plumage and presents an inexhaustible source of color. Yellow, Blue, Rose-Orange, Feather Flower are a series of prints where each feather was carefully observed through a magnifying glass in order to isolate the different hues present in them. Many of the feathers seem at a glance to be of one color. However, when observed with precision, infinite tonalities appear.
The feather as artistic object allows me to explore a microcosm, its details, and its aesthetic beauty. Penetrating that reality is a way of expanding our vision by observing the labyrinths and tangles of small spaces. Looking inside objects of the natural world allows me to undertake the explorer’s journey and travel through the experiences and adventures of the naturalists, who had the time to capture minutiae with their profound look and to get to the bottom of the discovery. I like to recover time in the exile of exploration, as well as the enjoyment of nature in the manner of the naturalists/scientists of the 19th century. The proposal consists in exploring the aesthetic dimension of those spaces and times.

YS In Solar Moon, would you say the subtlety of the intangible is what predominates?

MCC Solar Moon is a series of photographs of a solar eclipse that I observed and photographed in 1998. Nature, heaven and cosmos, together with the phenomena that occur there, have the capacity of transforming into sceneries filled with great beauty and emotions.

The takes of the eclipse are sequential moments of a reality that suggest to me phenomena of great spiritual intensity: the detonation, the explosion and the liberation as expressions of the stripping of any violent meaning and that, on the contrary, they restate an evocation. The subtlety and delicacy, as well as the captured suggestions and the induced atmospheres make the reproduction of something natural become something non-referential and unspeakable, as it occurs in the transformation of the sun on the moon, when it is surrounded by a celestial radiation.

There is also a kind of poetic metamorphosis of the sun into moon. The photograph is a moon in darkness, but it is really a sun in eclipse. The illusion transforms the reality. In the scenery of the eclipse, the sun is seen as another possibility, and darkness becomes radiant, in purplish tones. The experience is that of an exceptionally mystic night.





The union of the artistic imagination with the scientific allows me to invent my own reality and rethink time frozen in a photograph. It also allows me to ponder what is beyond the instant and to recreate that possibility.

Art, together with my interest in scientific advances, give me the possibility of exploring different themes, situations, emotions that appeal to me at a particular moment. I believe that there is an enormous creative potential in the mutual enrichment between art and science.

I like the idea of the work of art not being tangible, but for each one’s perception to construct the work.

YS What does Black Veil represent, is there a lot of the biographic there, for you?

MCC Black Veil represents common images, photographs of a family album, which correspond, in this case, to my mother, my father and myself. Dissecting all the evident readings, I see in them a family in a state of perfect happiness, frozen in time. On the other hand, I know that the real reason of that balance could be due to oxytocin, a chemical in the brain that is related to love and attachment. To be conscious of the existence of oxytocin turns these images related to love into a disturbing situation. Is oxytocin the reason for so much poetry? What would happen if we were lacking oxytocin? Would a mother be capable of ignoring or even killing her infant? Which other chemicals control our feelings?

YS What associations were established between the personal and science?

MCC The work Black Veil is an example of associations to which I resort for the making of my works. Black Veil is the term employed by NASA to describe the instant incineration of a spacecraft when it comes into contact with the atmosphere. Due to this phenomenon, the spacecraft is covered in a black film and immediately goes up in flames, returning to normal while it approaches earth. I associate this phenomenon and its multiple metaphoric possibilities to the photographic negative as the support and veil of a work in which I present the sequence of a couple with their newborn. The way of presenting those portraits as enlargements of their negatives remit to medical x-rays or to conservation processes of paintings. These processes, many times made through x-ray examination, show how a work has been reworked over another one, revealing the existence of hidden layers, paint glazes, which acquire ghostly dimensions.

I am moved by the fragility of our existence within immensity, as well as by the autonomy of the physical body as an independent organism capable of harboring within it a universe filled with vital functions and emotions.

Black Veil is a work codified into several layers of reading. While I analyze the associations that it raises, I move away from certain romantic stereotypes still in vogue about the family, filial love, passions, etc. For me, the body becomes the subtle veiling of that which is imperceptible in human conduct.

YS The theme of the void and its representation, where do you feel it with greater force?

MCC I always return to the themes of nature and the phenomena that occur there. In the works Crown and Fallen Leaves I am interested in reproducing the direction of the wind, capturing the way the leaves fall or the spiral movement with which the wind itself drags the leaves. In these fallen leaves, wind and leaves represent, seconds before, the instant when an individual enters into a state of coma or starts to progressively lose his memory.

It is the intriguing image produced in me by memories that fade away from the mind at the same time that the mind tries to retain them, like a defense mechanism of the human being in order to maintain its integrity. In this space that virtually becomes empty, I have the impression that the mind struggles not to let itself fall into the unconscious, which is the place where there is no longer any grasp of reality.

I am drawn to the border, the limit situation, and the moment of the fall. These situations produce in me a desire to examine what it feels before the loss of memory, of the sense of reality. I want to freeze that precise instant of the void, giving it a temporality and a space in order to be able to capture its dynamism. The limit is not the end but a variant of reality, in the transit to another state, full of sensations, but that it seems to be out of our control. In the moment of the fall, of the void, everything transforms into sensations. I attempt to fill with meaning the briefness of the border.

YS Are you attracted to narration in the making of your video-installations, for example?

MCC The Kingdom of Heaven will not be for the Poor of Spirit is a work inspired in the doctrine of Swedenborg, who proposes God as the creator of man and man as the one who chooses his destiny as an angel or a demon. It is a video installation that presents images of me in a swimming pool, together with other images of the forest, the universe (taken by the Hubble telescope) and an execution. Heaven, limbo and hell are represented there. The video is accompanied by a lighted writing on the wall with the doctrine of Swedenborg, which serves as the screenplay of the video itself:

God gives the free will of condemning oneself to hell or deserving heaven. Each one is happy where they want to be. The reprobate are happy among the feces, the stench, the conspiracy, the hate, the envy…

There is an intermediate zone, where man, it does not matter how long he might stay there, converses with angels and demons in order to decide eventually what he wishes to be.

Heaven is an eminently intellectual heaven.



YS In your most recent work, The Art of Dealing, the subject takes a starring role. It is no more the subject interacting with your work but the subject in the midst of an artistic creation.

MCC The human being moves me because he has a wonderful world, but isolated as he is, does not find anyone to share it with. He is a trapped subject who needs to save himself. In my latest work, The Art of Dealing, the individual is the protagonist. It is a trilogy made in video. In the first part, Flower Collection, there is a geisha displaced among the street vendors in a tropical country. She is disconnected from her environment and its inhabitants. They ignore her, but even though she is forsaken, she is happy. In the second video, Passive Aggressive, the geisha turned ninja comes into an unhinged contact with reality. She throws flowers that hurt like stones. They are flowers/stones. In the third video, The Essence, this woman enters a demolished house; she is absorbed in her own desertion and that of her surroundings. However, she is able to enter into its essence. She has no more need to be accepted by the rest. She runs free in nature, surrounded by (animated) animals. She accepts herself. In each video, from the geisha emerge purses, paperweights, perfumes… which, as everyone in a kind of art will take objects of creation for the consumer.

Taking a retrospect glance at the works that I have made until this moment, I observe that most of them coincide in the treatment of the imperceptible and the inexplicable of life. They are primordial ideas and pulsations that mobilize my artistic creation. I am caught in an incessant questioning about the divine, as well as of the fragility of our existence. These ideas function as unknown quantities that subliminally mobilize my expressive search.

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