sara ramo
lindalocaviejabruja 24 July 2019 – 2 March 2020 Sabatini Building. Espacio 1, Protocol Room Fisuras Program
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una y otra vez (once and again), 2019. (detail) HD video, 10 min.
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Spanish-Brazilian artist Sara Ramo (b. 1975, Madrid) presents lindalocaviejabruja, a project made expressly for the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fisuras program. In a world that is ideologically oriented toward obtaining economic benefit at any cost, Ramo’s work ventures into regions closer to the unconscious, fiction, magic and mythology in order to create narrative resistances that allow her to establish new spaces and temporalities with which to invite viewers to question previously acquired values. Articulated in different formats—primarily video, installation, sculpture, and collage—her work begins by appropriating elements, scenes and spaces from daily life that she reshapes with the goal of removing them from their original context and integrating them into her pieces. Specifically, Ramo explores the moment at which objects cease to have meaning in people’s lives and at which situations of change and loss in their natural order are created, not only in terms of form but also appreciation and significance. lindalocaviejabruja occupies two spaces in the Sabatini Building, Espacio 1 and the Protocol Room, which Ramo connects with a proposal centered on what she perceives as the implications and difficulties of being a woman. Through spatial interventions, installations, and a video, the artist alludes to the domestic, everyday, autobiographical and popular theatre spheres as well as puzzling and absurd elements that suggest unexpected and open forms of relation with seemingly familiar objects and environments. Sara Ramo lives in São Paulo, Brazil, and is one of her generation’s most internationally recognized artists. Her work has been shown at a broad range of artistic settings, including the biennials in Venice and São Paulo.
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Pano de fundo (Backdrop), 2012 Installation at Galpão Fortes Vilaça
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lindalocaviejabruja Júlia Rebouças
lindalocaviejabruja, the title of this exhibition, comes from an agglomeration of words/attributes associated with the feminine. Although referring to distinct qualities, these words are not in opposition: they complement each other indefinitely within a condition that does not allow itself to be contained by even the longest sequence of adjectives. Being a woman gives rise to a condition that is fragmentary due to the impossibility of knowing the totality, not because of incompleteness. This artistic project, devised by Sara Ramo, follows a trajectory through various environments that are connected conceptually in a way that is neither linear nor narrative, despite potential for both the diegetic and the mysterious in the elements that make up the installation. The museum’s institutional spaces are transmuted into quasi-domestic environments, like wandering through the rooms of a house when you don’t know who lives there. There are various visible traces of life and of the passage of time, there is organic residue and the remnants of memory, but we find little indication of the objective presence of a body other than material fragments of a subjective existential condition. The room called Espacio 1 is lined with wallpaper, the harmonious pattern of which does not derive from the repetition of floral patterns, as might appear at first glance, but rather limbs of human bodies. This is interrupted by a yellowish stain, of indefinite shape, which, despite its faintness, is the result of urine, mold, and time. The odors that encroach from an event beyond our comprehension are already announcing the importance of mystery, in its capacity to mask causalities and affirm the secret.
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It is 2001 when Sara Ramo, still a student at the Escola de Belas Artes in Belo Horizonte, joins a group of artists occupying an abandoned warehouse in the center of the city for three weeks. She chooses to set her work in a corner where two walls meet. With a piece of chalk, she draws the outline on the ground of an area corresponding to a room, as if it were a floor plan. She continues to construct this scene over the duration of the exhibition, eventually applying wallpaper, on top of which liquids such as urine, tea, and arnica tincture are applied, adding a yellowish stain. On the final day, she scrawls the work’s title—Anunciação (The Annunciation)— on the ground, in reference to the painting by Fra Angelico, dated 1425–26, in the collection of the Museo del Prado. At the project’s conclusion the next morning, a hole is found in the middle of the wall, opened from the outside. There is speculation that someone tried to break into the warehouse, though nothing has been stolen. Almost two decades later, that memory has transmuted into lindalocaviejabruja. Something like a tail-tentacle-limb emerges through the wall of the room, like a thing or the mimetic representation of a thing, though what that thing is we cannot know. During our conversation, the artist referred to the work of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), the American artist and writer who has been restrictively pigeonholed by history as a Surrealist painter. Over her lengthy career, Tanning found numerous ways of representing the female body, making use of both figurative and more abstract forms of expression. Delirious and oneiric environments permeated her compositions, which were also concerned with female sexuality. From the 1960s, Tanning began developing a group of sculptures that, by means of textiles and stuffing, modeled the allusive forms of the female body, its nakedness, and its pleasure, despite the figures never losing their amorphous character. Often these structures were fused together or leapt out from rooms, walls, and household objects. Like evocations, associations with Tanning’s work merge with
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Anunciação (Annunciation), 2001 Installation at Galpão Guaicurus, Centro Cultural da UFMG Hansel and Gretel’s house, 2009
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the reclamations of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in A Room of One’s Own (1929), as Sara Ramo explained. It may also be an autobiographical work, she added, invoking the spaces where the unconscious acts.
localindaviejabruja In this respect, it is worth remembering that it was precisely women who provided access to the unconscious in the early days of psychoanalysis, at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the treatment of hysteria. At the time, this was believed to be an exclusively female condition (from the Greek hystéra, meaning “uterus”) and it was in the process of searching for a cure for his patients that Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) developed the psychoanalytic method as a result of listening to reports of dreams, memories, and the elaboration of traumatic experiences. Later, Freud would say that “women enter into opposition with civilization,” in the sense that paternal masculinity is what establishes language, norms, and the contours of reason, while femininity is pure enigma. What is intimated in Espacio 1, as a prologue, is echoed throughout the other constructed spaces of this exhibition. Although composed of various domestic environments, it is not possible to extract any order or logical sense from the experiences presented. The familiarity of the elements is consistently disturbed by forms that are supernatural, though tangible; apparitions that are surprising, though recurrent. At other moments in the installation we may find ourselves encountering different manifestations of that tail-tentaclelimb. It is important to notice how these apparitions are presented as the resumption of an idea or the reiteration of its material existence. They are fragments of other artworks, accumulating remnants, diverging ideas. It is as though we were dealing with momentary works, unable to lay claim
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Como aprender o que acontece na normalidade das coisas (How to Learn What Happens During the Normality of Things), 2002–05 C-prints
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to the autonomy of objects that may be removed from their context, refusing to become anodyne, and yet requiring the narrative force that establishes them, for example, within this time and space. In the future, it is possible they will be transmuted into new arrangements. There are forms and textures that give rise to actions and presences, that appear to take shape amid layers underground, hidden, far from the scrutiny of that which is all-seeing, allknowing. A shirtsleeve hangs from a surface. Lipsticks cover the inside of a wardrobe, vibrant under an intense red light, while a clump of dark earth is revealed within another one. Wads of hair escape from underneath a door. Through a glass surface, you can see clothes piling up inside a piece of furniture. Sweets and candies break out through a half-opened door, contaminating the other environments like fungus or a pernicious weed. The relationship between what is contained within the walls, in the interior spaces, and what is revealed, denotes the existence of a series of elements from which we are distanced or that simply exist far from our consciousness. As if this were the territory of extraordinary events, from the corners, the angles, the gaps, the interstitial places, emerge elements that, though alien to that environment, appear to have inhabited it always. Perspectives that are repeated at different scales, mirrorings, inaccessible gaps, all alter the perception of the visitor to the space, leaving any attempt to establish sense or find your bearings entirely down to chance. The experience there is one of immersion, where artistic installations fuse with the building itself, although the building in question—today a museum, formerly a hospital— resists this mimesis.
viejalindalocabruja In the second room of Espacio 1, the video una y otra vez (once and again, 2019) presents a theatrical event. If the
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frame around the stage is the same as that of the camera, then the viewer is denied a complete understanding because the curtain remains half-raised, allowing you to see only what goes on from the waist down. A woman walks in red shoes. Long skirts—potentially feminine garments—correlate in their patterns to the curtain, which for its part is made up of old pieces of fabric, stained and worn, a patchwork of discarded clothing that has nothing in common with the portentous aura of traditional stage velvets. If the precarious familiarity of the textiles removes the sense of a merely illusory game, the economy of movement and the unpredictability of the onstage action restore the fantasy. Some scenes begin to unfold. In one, a puppet repeats the gesture of hitting his wife with a wooden bat, as so often occurs in the “classic” Punch and Judy show, whose origins go back to the Italian commedia dell’arte of the sixteenth century. Later, the artist appears in the film and deconstructs a bat just like the one used by the puppets, pulling from inside it bits of paper, beads, necklaces, ribbons, and strips of fabric, along with pieces of meat and animal entrails. In another scene, there is the intimation of a witch, who conjures up a bonfire only to be consumed by it. Pieces of the set suddenly come to life. Side by side, here we encounter simulation, deceit, representation. The curtain that obscures can also be read as a prop that highlights what cannot be seen. During her career, Sara Ramo has relied upon scenographic features, allowing them to assume prominence and attributing narrative qualities to them, as she did in the installation Pano de fundo (Backdrop, 2012), exhibited at the shed of the Galeria Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo. In it, the artist problematized the political and social potential of the space. Rather than turning to architectural elements, or referencing them, she made use of formal precision in order to project the space, in its condition as shelter and receptacle, into the center of the action. Large panels, built to support artworks, were piled in the center of the exhibition space, in an arrangement that suggested a precarious equilibrium. What should be in the
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background took center stage. On first impression, the work appeared to refer to the collapse of the project of artistic autonomy as represented by “the white cube,” while at the same time reflecting on the precariousness and ephemerality that constitute the structures of the art system, symbolized by those panels. In other works, the scenery takes on a simpler appearance, with installations and sculptures formed from commonplace materials, such as paper, fabric, plastic, pieces of everyday objects, or residues. The sense of the handcrafted that characterizes many of her compositions suggests a playful workmanship, like that of street theater, or of school projects. This spontaneity fuses with the symbolic power of the elements employed and the enigmatic potential that even the most ordinary item may bear. In a corner of the Protocol Room, a long-handled scrubber reclines next to a bucket, almost as if they did not belong to this place. From the bristles of the broom there exudes a kind of human tongue made of soap. The bucket holds a whitish liquid, like milk. From a lamp hangs an object with the characteristics of a snake, made of fabrics. In the mezzanine, a collection of vases, which could be urns, has been carefully arranged. Traversing the walls, and descending the staircase, a thread connects various objects, as if hoping to bring a sense of linearity to something with no representational logic. All of these elements appear to constitute a mutant reality, in which events neither respect temporal succession nor have an incidental relationship to each other. Like a mystical vision— something that is outside history but exists as memory. Within Sara Ramo’s artistic output, she gives great relevance to the idea that inanimate things actively populate our lives and form complex relationships with our bodies and beings. They are redirected from their functionality as if gifted with exceptional qualities. More than self-referential apparitions, these objects point toward the discomfort and inadequacy of the places where they are situated, be these physical,
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fictional, or psychic spaces. At a time when the idea of chaos has become equivalent to fear, framed by propaganda as a threat, recognizing disorder as a creative condition appears a way of collaborating to change the state of things. “Do we really ‘act upon’ things? Or are we, on the contrary, ‘acted upon’ by them?”1 asks Stella Senra (2012) in response to the photographic series Como aprender o que acontece na normalidade das coisas (How to Learn What Happens During the Normality of Things, 2002–05). Here, everyday objects and materials appear extraordinarily to come to life. The magic stems from an understanding that everything could be alive, that there is no inanimate entity that cannot be awakened, that in spite of cycles and patterns the inconstancy of nature and the absolute unpredictability of things are the only rules of this world.
brujalindalocavieja Evoked within the title of this exhibition, there is a recurrent association between the woman and the witch. Within the popular imagination that has proliferated since the beginning of modernity, she would be gifted with destructive magical powers, capable of desiccating crops, killing animals, and driving men mad. She is a lone and insolent woman. Her aged body carries the marks of time, but nevertheless she laughs and fears no one. Although the practicing of magic was not restricted to women, they were always the preferred target of persecution. In her influential book Caliban and the Witch (2004),2 Silvia Federici looks back at the long
1
Stella Senra, “Sara Ramo ou exercício da liberdade,” Stella Senra (personal website), June 7, 2012, https://stellasenra.wordpress. com/2012/06/07/sara-ramo-ou-o-exercicio-da-liberdade/.
2
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
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transition process between feudalism and capitalism, when the concept of private property becomes established and powerful mechanisms for the control of bodies are developed, demobilizing nuclear communities in favor of an order that is individual and atomized. It was necessary to discount the roles that until then had been carried out by women, to dispossess them of their social power and undermine their capacity for insurgency. The long campaign that followed transformed women’s knowledge into a threat against the state, their pleasure became danger, their independence turned into heresy, and freedom was perceived as devotion to the devil, leading women to be persecuted and burned, accused of being witches. If women controlled the means of reproduction, then they had power over production. They had ready access to the land, not just for plantation and construction, but also on the basis of a tradition of knowledge that generated engagement: they cured, blessed, assisted during childbirth, offered hospitality, were in charge of pregnancies, and enjoyed autonomy. Their bodies were the links of social cohesion and carried the communal memory. In order to realize the capitalist project, it was necessary to eradicate this resistance. One element that particularly characterized the campaign against women, and as a consequence against the feminine, relates to the exercising of their sexual desire. In this sense, witches’ sabbaths may be one of the great symbols of the persecutory fury against women. They were widely depicted as rituals based upon a demonic pact, in which animals and children were devoured, women flew on broomsticks, beasts were enchanted, and lasciviousness reigned over every event. When, however, we think of these as times when women could meet during the night, dance around a bonfire, laugh, and above all experience sexual pleasure untethered from its reproductive function, we may understand that in order to implement a program of social segregation, it was necessary
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una y otra vez (once and again), 2019 HD video, 10 min.
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to control these bodies and, most importantly, to reign in the expansive power of these feminine entities, interrupting their pleasure. Given the unpredictable nature of women, the envisioned system required that their existence be domesticated, so that their lives could be locked away inside the environment of the home, making their work invisible, restricting their pleasure and subjugating it to reproduction or masculine desire. This erasure, which is of a social and cultural order, but also an economic and political one, is even reflected in the historical omissions of thinkers like Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, who, as Federici points out, despite associating the rise of capitalism with the control of bodies, make no reference to the hunting of witches and persecution of women, nor do they consider domestic labor a decisive tool for the primitive accumulation of capital, as they do in the cases of the enclosure of the commons and the slave trade. If the basis for this assault on women is at the origin of capitalism, its perpetuation oils the processes by which the female gender continues to be dismissed today. At least five centuries of resilience and struggle were required to make it possible to reintroduce into our tormented and repressed bodies the impulse for unsubmissive desire, alongside important civil conquests, albeit still unequal or insufficient in specific regions of the world. Even if the patriarchy does not cease its enactment of mechanisms for the depreciation of this creative force, it is possible to identify within the fabric of every form of resistance the feminine turn as a condition for the production of the escape routes of creative existence. As an exhibition, lindalocaviejabruja approaches beauty as a force that expands without limits. Forged within the emptiness of one who is always searching, even as others might call this absence, it is in itself pure possibility. Freedom, freedom. Madness was the accusation made
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una y otra vez (once and again), 2019 HD video, 10 min.
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against that unrestrainable excess that was also termed hysteria, the pathology of the uterus. It is an existence that sparkles as a pubescent nymph, but which is regurgitated in its old age of lived wisdom, memory, power; the existence of the witch, the witch, the witch. The punishment for nonconformity, the demonic condition attributed to a body that must be subjugated so that capitalism may advance. lindalocaviejabruja is this and any other woman.
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Exhibition
BROCHURE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
head of exhibitions
text
exhibition coordinator
head of publications
exhibitions manager
editorial coordination
project
translator portuguese-english
María Alzola Marlon de Azambuja Alexis Callado Estafania Juliana Castro Aline de Fátima César Kiraly Cinthia Marcelle Lais Myrrha Ana Ramo Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga
Teresa Velázquez Cortés Rafael García
Natalia Guaza Clarice Cunha Vão
technical direction
Patrick Toosey Seitz assistants to the artist
Blanca Sartorius María Ona
Júlia Rebouças Alicia Pinteño
Mercedes Pineda
Victor Meadowcroft copyediting
Jonathan Fox design and layout
Julio López printing
G92 artes gráficas
Video una y otra vez (once and again) photographic direction
Daniel Ramo editing
Joacélio Batista sound
Berta Alejo assistants
Dandara Catete María Ona Jimena Pérez Miranda Sabato Blanca Sartorius Fernando Sartorius Patrick Toosey Seitz performers
Dandara Catete María Ona Jimena Pérez Sara Ramo María Sabato Blanca Sartorius
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Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĂa Main venue
Nouvel Building Ronda de Atocha s/n 28012 Madrid Tel: (+34) 91 774 10 00
Opening hours Monday to Saturday and public holidays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. the entire Museum is open from 1.30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Collection 1 and one temporary exhibition remain open (check website)
NIPO: 828-19-004-X D. L.: M-24868-2019
Sabatini Building Santa Isabel, 52
Closed on Tuesdays
www.museoreinasofia.es
Exhibition rooms in all venues will be cleared 15 minutes before closing time
Education program developed with the sponsorship of:
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