WOOLF AND SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER

Ever since I first read A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s story of Judith, William Shakespeare’s fictional sister, has haunted me.

Judith’s tragic story, her suicide, and the death of her unborn child remind us that even today, a woman writer or artist in many parts of the world may face literal or metaphorical suicide, dying without creating her work or receiving recognition for it.

I came to know Judith’s courageous story even better through theatre director Sylvie Mongin-Algan, who asked me to design the set for a play based on A Room of One’s Own.

One day during rehearsal for that play, I borrowed the ruff that the actress playing Judith was wearing. I photographed myself wearing the ruff, thinking of Judith and the fact that she never had a burial.

On my next trip to London, I visited the Elephant and Castle tube station, where Judith died. I started filming and photographing there—contemplating how I might offer her a memorial or burial.

That memorial has now been realized in my exhibition “Shakespeare’s Sister.”

The ceramic sculptures in my memorial tribute to Woolf’s fictional character are in the form of the 17th-century ruffs. They were installed in a dark room alongside self-portraits wearing this garment.

Unlike the fabric ruffs of the time, the sculptures are rigid yet fragile. This vulnerability reflects the turmoil of our world today, where violence continues to erupt across many parts of our shared planet.

I dedicate this work to Virginia Woolf for giving us Judith, and to all the Judith Shakespeares, past and present.

I wrote this text for the book “Salon for a Speculative Future” Eds: Monika Oechsler and Sharon Kivland, Ma Bibliotheque, London, París, 2020.

For Carmen Mariscal, according to the artist's account, the losses came to her unexpectedly, one after another. "I felt like I was swimming between waves; every time I got out of the water, another wave would plunge me back into the deep blue ocean."

She was in shock and dazed with pain, unable to work on her PhD. "I asked for a leave of absence."

In ten drawings on cotton paper, dyed in indigo, she played with the words leave and absence, written in white wax crayon: "Leave of absence / Left by absence / In absence / Leave, live / Living in absence / Living with absence / Living absent / Absence of living / Absence is leaving / Leave the absence."

Indigo, the artist continues in her text, is the colour of the ocean, of its sorrows and of cyanotypes where "the deep blue surrounds the white traces left by absent objects". She read Rebecca Solnit's essay on blue, wrote the last sentence and left "in search of light". 

Erika P. Bucio

They capture what was lost and what was found after the pandemic, Culture, Periódico Reforma, Mexico City, 8 August 2023

Laodamie by Catherine Bernard (1698)

Directed by: Aurore Evain

Set Design: Carmen Mariscal

Light Design by Jean-Michel Warther.

Costumes: Tanya Artioli.

Actors: Nathalie Bourg, Catherine Piffaretti, Mona El Yafi, Matila Malliarakis, Nathan Gabily and Amal Allaoui. Assistant to director: Elise Provost.

Prèmiere 27th February 2024, Theatre de Guyancourt, France.

Thank you always Marcel Montes de Oca for your help in the construction of the set!

This is the first time that the play was performed since the time of its creation in 1689.

About the play and the set design:

The play is a tragedy written in Alexandrine (a verse form in French poetry used mainly from the 16th Century; it consists of a line of 12 syllables with emphasis on the 6th with a pause and at the end).

It recounts the story of Queen Laodomie, who inherits the throne but cannot reign unless she marries; she is virtually chained to her throne. The queen has strong feelings for a man she cannot marry and who is in love with the princess (Laodomie’s sister). It is a play of intrigue, war, and many passions.

I decided to create a throne made of chains; the throne eventually turned into a heavy dress -reminiscent of my previous body of work, La Esposa Esposada (2018) and another throne, a simple one without chains, which turns into a dress structure and a sort of space control centre.

In the beginning, Queen Laodomie sits on her chained throne; next to her is an empty throne. This one does not have chains; it is waiting to be occupied by the future king. However, the story does not develop as expected, and the throne risks being occupied by a person with other interests, a Machiavellian character. The king’s throne turns into a dress structure and then a space control centre, where he and his colleagues manipulate the situation to gain power. Throughout the play, Queen Laodomie shifts from her feelings of duty to rein her country and her commitment to its people and, at the same time, her desire for love and the life of a woman that she burns to be, which is constantly hidden under her crown and in her throne.

Cylinders of different sizes represent Diana’s temple; these objects recall Roman ruins in Macedonia, where the play took place.

About the author:

“Born around 1663, Catherine Bernard is the most ghostly of the authors of the end of the 17th century. It is time to bring her out of her ditch of oblivion. Her work, which began at age of 17, covers the following genres: five novels and short stories, two fairy tales, two tragedies (which were among the greatest successes of the Comédie Française at the end of the 17th century), fables and a plethora of poems. Catherine Bernard won the most prestigious literary prizes in her time. Her consecration during her lifetime earned her after her death, the opportunity to join the club of plucked from literature. Voltaire was the first to take the shovel to bury it, plagiarizing along the way lines from her tragedy Brutus...After him, she continued to be placed in history under the tutelage of great men, becoming the niece, the mistress, the pale imitator of a Corneille, a Fontenelle or Perrault, nothing allows us today to support these assertions. On the other hand, it is certain that her Riquet with the Tuft appeared a year before that of Perrault’s” Aurore Evain, 2023

Skin-Site[1] is a sculptural and moving image installation that records the process of peeling off the layers of wallpaper in my grandparent’s house[2] prior to its demolition.

The skin is a place[3]; it is our first means to communicate with others, a site to establish meaningful relationships, and a surface where the traces of these relationships are inscribed[4]. In our skin-site dwells the memory of our lives. Likewise, wallpaper bears the marks of people and time, such as scratches, spills and the effects of sunlight on its surface in the same manner that our skin carries its scars and wrinkles.

By ripping off the wallpaper and touching it, my skin carries out one of its phenomenological functions: to record[5].

Throughout my embodied actions here and in other architectural sites, I touch and feel with my skin and limbs to recall and think through and with[6] the skin.

Footnotes:

[1] The title is taken from: Ahmed, S. and Stacey, J. eds., 2001. Thinking through the skin. London: Routledge. p. 175.

[2] This house known in our family as the Pascal House, its name alludes the street where it stood which was named after the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal. The Pascal House is the main subject of my PhD research, it was built in Mexico City in 1957 by my grandfather, the architect Nicolas Mariscal Barroso, who designed the house for him and his family; the house was demolished almost 60 years later.

[3] Didier Anzieu in Le moi-peau (1995) uses the French word lieu, which can be translated as place but also as site.

[4] Anzieu, D. and Séchaud, E., 1995. Le moi-peau. Paris: Dunod. p. 62.

[5] Prosser, J. 2001. Skin Memories in Ahmed, S. and Stacey, J. eds. Thinking through the skin. London: Routledge, p.52.

[6] Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, p.1.

This work takes place in the ruins of the Novopan factory in Oaxaca, Mexico. The factory, which produced particle wood boards, was built around 1966 and was the first of its kind in the region. My father, a young civil engineer at the time, oversaw the supervision of its construction. This industrial unit has been abandoned since 2001. In February 2023, I walked around this 11.8-hectare land where the factory, now in ruins, stands. I engaged physically by touching the earth under my feet and holding and caressing some of the building's remains. This performative action was recorded and exhibited as a two-channel video installation, at the Copeland Gallery, London, June 2023. This work is part of my PhD research project at the Royal College of Art.

(Re)membering the ruins of Novopan 2023

“[M]emory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.), makes sheets of the past and reality correspond.”[1]

In my imaginary, the name Novopan[2] belonged to a litany of sorts associated with Mexico's archaeological sites: Monte Albán[3], Teotihuacán, Mayapán and Tenochtitlán[4].

There has been a continuous fascination with Mexican ruins. From the paintings and drawings of 19th-century European travel artists[5] to the visits to pre-Hispanic sites by millions of tourists today.

My first encounter with the Novopan factory was during a family trip to Oaxaca in the late 1980s. After visiting the pre-Hispanic city of Monte Albán, my father took us to Novopan, where he worked as a young civil engineer during its construction.

This industrial building, always related to Monte Albán, has dwelt in my affective memory.

In 2016, we returned to the factory, and surprisingly we discovered an abandoned site.

The building, a discarded carcass like an animal's left over in the desert, dispossessed of its most precious parts by predators.

The ovens, silos, pipes and chimneys had gone. A factory stripped of its members: all holes and cavities.

A site remembered now (de)membered.

A member is a limb, a body part.

In February 2023, I revisited the deserted industrial site.

I collected sheds of the factory's corpse to activate the space through (re) memebering: joining its parts, layering rubble onto my limbs, the membranes of the building caressing my flesh.

A membrane is a skin, a layer, a parchment.

A double sensation: That of my body touching itself whilst touching the remains of Novopan, exercising thus a “knowledge function”.[6]

It was by feeling the dermis of the building onto mine that I (re)membered Novopan.

Skins and ruins: palimpsests of personal and collective histories.

Carmen Mariscal, London June 2023

Footnotes:

[1] Deluze, G., 1985. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta Galeta, 1989. University of Minneapolis Press. p. 207.

[2] The Novopan factory in Oaxaca, Mexico, takes its name from the eponymous German technique. The wooden particle board plant was built in 1966 and abandoned in 2000.

[3] Monte Albán is a pre-hispanic settlement in southeastern Mexico. It was founded in 500 BC and remained active for over one thousand years. Winter, M. 2011. Social Memory and the Origins of Monte Albán Ancient Mesoamerica, 22(2), pp.393–409.[4]Teotihuacán, Mayapán and Tenochtitlán are also pre-hispanic sites. The ending derives from the Náhuatl language acán, meaning place.

[5] Scientist Alexander von Humboldt's writings in American Journey (1799-1804) inspired European artists to travel to Mexico. These painters' work registered pre-Hispanic sites and landscapes. In addition, they aimed to interest the European population in the country's natural history and archaeological discoveries. Diener, P., 2012. “Traveling Artists in America: Visions and Views”. Culture & History Digital Journal 1(2): m106.

[6] Merleau-Pony, M., 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald, A. Landes, 2012. London and New York: Routledge. p 95.

Their sweet-sweat Breath (2023) is a soundscape and installation created for the Material Engagement Research Group Project for the Earthwise exhibition organised by the SoAH postgraduate research groups, Royal College of Art at the Beaconsfield Gallery, London, 2023.

The space that houses Beaconsfield Gallery today was previously the Lambeth Ragged School. The school, which was founded in 1851 by Henry Beaufoy taught approximately 400 children. Ragged schools were free schools created in Britain to teach the poorest children; they offered classes in reading, writing, mathematics, and Bible study. After the raids in 1942, the central and left sides of the building were destroyed.

Today, The Beaconsfield Gallery is composed of an upper and a lower gallery, which used to be the girls' school, and “The Arch,” which occupies the area under an arch beneath the bridge that supports a train rail that still runs today.

In the nineteenth century, before the Lambeth Ragged School was built, Henry Beaufort’s wife taught unprivileged children from the area under the bridge in what today is “The Arch”.

This dark, long-bricked vault is now covered in saltpetre, its walls drip unevenly, and a train runs rapidly above it. When I visited it for the first time, I felt the strong presence of its evolving materiality and the echoes of history embedded within its walls. I wanted to look closer into the vault’s surface, hear deeper into its walls and seek to evoke its past.

Your sweet-sweat breath incorporates two pre-existing elements: the walls and the sound of the train that runs every 4 minutes above the Arch and two new elements that I brought into dialogue: magnifying glasses and a sound recording of children’s voices from a London school from 1978. The wall piece consists of 8 magnifying glasses of different sizes, which hang on the walls of the Arch at the Gallery, the texture of the walls can be seen as though we were looking at them through a microscope. The sound piece consists of the passing of the train, and in the intervals of silence, the voices of children playing and singing can be heard. Walls and voices, all palimpsests; new histories trying to erase the old; nonetheless, their ghostly traces reappear2.

Soundscape Their sweet-sweat breath (children’s voices):

This piece uses fragments of: “Recording of children's games and songs made by Peter Charlton in November 1978 at Burbage Junior and Infants School. Hoxton, London. Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs.” Used with permission, British Library Archive, 2023.

Click on the left to listen to this fragment of the soundscape:

Their sweet-sweat breath (2023) by Carmen Mariscal

Wall piece: 4 magnifying glasses 220 mm each, 1 magnifying glass 600 mm and 3 magnifying glasses 125mm each

Voices of children and the sound of a train.

Sound editing: Chloé Catoire.

Tláloc, Contadero

Works by Carmen Mariscal

My work has addressed the question of memory through the concept of habitat (or dwelling) for the past two decades. The first habitat of human beings is our body, followed by the clothes we wear and the homes, cities, and public spaces that contain us. I explore the presence of traces of memory in these human habitats.

For the project Tláloc, Contadero, I presented films and photographs of my encounter with the last destruction process of my childhood home in Mexico City. In this embodied experience, which is filmed, I found myself confronted by an excavator (or power shovel) and started digging next to it. As an archaeologist, I re-arranged the last remains of what used to be the house where I grew up in. I used my hands and water to reveal the underlying matter. In the film, I also walked barefoot between the intact garden and the ruins of the house; I constantly stared at the excavated land where my house once stood, engaging and disengaging with it. What has been extracted? What remains?

The project takes its name from the street Tláloc and the neighbourhood Contadero where the house was located. Tláloc was the Aztec god of the rain; its name derives from the Náhuatl language and can be translated as “that which lies upon the surface of the earth”, meaning that this project suggests the debris that was leftover on the surface after excavation. The other word used in the project´s title Contadero means “That which can or should be counted, such as days, months, and years” in Spanish. I use this word to allude to the fragments of the house that I collected and the flow of memories that marched past my psyche as I quartered the area during the documentation process of the last demolition of my family house.

Carmen Mariscal PhD Candidate, SoAH, Royal College of Art.

*Tláloc, Contadero was first shown at the exhibition Notes on a Journey. On Extractivism, Matter and Displacement by artist Marisa Ferreira. Guest artist: Carmen Mariscal, Galeria Presença, Porto, Portugal, March 2022. It was exhibited again at (Re)generating narratives and imaginaries. Women in dialogue at Museo Kaluz, Mexico City from October 2022 to May 2023, again at the exhibition (Re)generating narratives and imaginaries. Women in dialogue, Museo de Arte de Sonora (MUSAS), Hermosillo, Mexico, 13 November, 2023 to 31 March, 2024, Loop Video Art Festival, Ana Mas Projects Gallery, Barcelona, Spain, 14-24 November, 2023 and at the Festival Image Ouverte, The Window, Paris 16-31 March 2024.

“Tláloc/Contadero (2022), a series by Carmen Mariscal, focuses on the topic of the destruction of the human habitat brought about by the so-called “progress" while also alluding -again from a subjective perspective- both to the passage of time and to the role played by memory for human beings, thus continuing the thematic approach that the artist has been working on for several years. Mariscal, in tune with the exhibition here presented, considers the body as human beings´ first habitat, followed by the clothing they wear, as well as their houses, cities, and public spaces that contain them.

Mariscal´s Tláloc/Contadero project is made up of videos and photographs regarding her personal encounter with the process of destruction suffered by her family´s house during her childhood in Mexico City. It shows her confrontation with a bulldozer, as well as her digging in the remaining debris by hand, which results in tremendously moving reflection on the passing of time that is related precisely to the city´s habitat.”

Dina Comisarenco Mirkin

Text from the catalogue (Re) Generando Narrativas e Imaginarios Curated by Karen Cordero Museo Kaluz

October 2022-April 2023

Excavations and (re)collections

“Like a vihuela, the Mexican guitar, Carmen’s works offer a convex approach here: they elevate our eyes and thoughts to circular notions. Correspondingly to two arms raised upwards, they are ready to assemble fragments of the artist’s pondering on the theme of memory here. This is a highly personal, yet universal, topic, as her childhood home in Mexico was sold, and the new owners had said they would make a few changes yet ended up tearing down the whole house. The images and videos are inspired from the street Tláloc and the neighbourhood Contadero; the noun Tláloc derives from the Náhuatl language and can be interpreted as « that which lies upon the surface of the earth ». Tláloc was also the Aztec god of rain and Contadero is an allusion to “that which can or should be counted”.

The melancholy of giving up on memories is intertwined with the physicality of those memories, which one can keep in their mind, soul, and heart, once again an homage to the three-dimensionality of the exhibition. Like Carmen, we stand at the edge of the cliff, and can use those physical and psychological remains to either destruct or construct monuments.”

Alice Motte Muñoz, 2022

Tláloc, Contadero was first shown at the exhibition Notes on a Journey. On Extractivism, Matter and Displacement by artist Marisa Ferreira. Guest artist: Carmen Mariscal, Galeria Presença, Porto, Portugal, March 2022.

Set designs by Carmen Mariscal for the play ‘Mary Sidney Aka Shakespeare’.

« Did a woman write Shakespeare? » the play is centered around this question and is based on the study by Robin Williams. Directed, adapted translated and played by Aurore Evain with actress Fanny Zeller.

“Having established the two sides of the equation, Aurore Evain demonstrates the hypothesis: what if Mary Sydney was Shakespeare?

Piece by piece, researcher Robin P. Williams argues in favour of a revolutionary thesis: a woman, Mary Sidney, is the true author of Shakespeare's works. There is as yet no tangible proof for this claim, but this mathematical demonstration, a veritable mental construction game, lends credibility to the hypothesis that Shakespeare's works were written by a female literary genius, a powerful woman of incomparable erudition, such as the Renaissance was able to produce” From the presentation by Aurore Evain.

The conference/play was presented at the Theatre L’Epée du Bois, Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris in September 2022 during the journées du matrimoine. It has been fascinating to create the set designs and videos and be part of this project! I followed Mary Sidney’s and William Shakespeare’s footsteps with my camera: their homes, their workplaces and the churches where they are buried. I have read, researched, drawn and have had long and passionate conversations with Aurore. The origin of this questioning came to Aurore via Virginia Woolf’s text “A Room of One’s Own”, I met Aurore when I created the set designs for a play based on this same text by Woolf, which was adapted and directed by Sylvie Mongin Algan with actress Anne de Boissy at the same theatre that this play was first created. What a beautiful journey it has been! The play “Mary Sidney Aka Shakespeare“ is based on a study by Robin Williams and it is part of the project edifier tre matrimoine.

For many years, the work of Mexican artist Carmen Mariscal (1968) has s witnessed the concerns of a woman artist engaged in multiple ple paths of feminist causes which she approaches with a gentle radicalism. Memory, personal life, social conscience-resulting from a reflection in direct contact with current events, are part of the many sources that nourish her work and determine the foundations of its narrative. Her installations, linked to her photographic work, combine small or large format photographs mainly in black and white, diverse objects made by herself or sold commercially.

The artist did not only use handcuffs for her wedding drese La esposa esposada (The Handcuffed Wife, Maison de Amérique Latine, Paris 2018), she also worked for this exhibition with another symbol of oppression ant, the padlock. In the Middle and confinement, Ages a legend or a fact, the metal "chastity belt was used to lock women there where they would be tempted to sin in the absence of their husbands. Today the padlock, hung on the gates gates of bridges or other supports, has paradoxically become the symbol of eternal love, that is when it is not used in sadomasochistic situations

The installation Chez Nous (Padlock-house) explores the theme of the house as a space of meaning and questions the nature of romantic meaning relationships. The prison-gown will be joined by the prison-house, announcing the symbolic materialization of conjugal and domestic traps. In 2014, when a gate from the Pont des Arts was detached, the Paris City Hall decided to dismantle all of the gates, the 93 tons were threatening the foundations of the bridge.

Carmen Mariscal filmed and photographed the process and it was from these gates of the Pont des Arts and of the Pont de l'Archevêché that the project for a large padlock-house was born.

Chez Nous does not have doors, windows nor a fireplace. It is at the same time solid and fragile, dark and luminous. For the artist it is san archetypal spe ace which should invite the passer-by to reflect upon love and its permanence through the vagaries of everyday life. Is love a link or a chain? Is the house a refuge or a prison? Is the padlock a symbol of attachment or imprisonment? By installing her padlock/house in the public space, the artist hopes to raise questions about these contradictions which conjugate indefinitely in the present and in the past and often converge for better or worse.

Text: Christine Frérot

THE CEMENTERY OF LOVE.

Video installation at the Beffroi of the 1st District City Hall, Place du Louvre

The three parts of this video installation correspond to the three phases of a love cycle.

On the left is the time of illusion. It shines, we hang a new lock on the bridge, it’s beautiful, attractive; we might engrave our names on it.

In the center, the end of that love is shown. It’s the testimony, like an archaeologist who has discovered objects in a grave, has unearthed them, taken them out one by one, and now presents them as a vanished specimen. He discovers and presents them to the public as if showing objects from an extinct culture. As the video progresses, the hands of the “archaeologist” become increasingly dirty.

On the third screen, we find what I call “the cemetery of love.” It is the place where the locks were placed when the railings were removed from the bridges; many locks were cut because the enormous weight of the railings caused many to deteriorate. You can see the accumulation. There are three types of piles of locks; several railings are all straight, resembling aligned sarcophagi, they are the railings from the Archbishop's Bridge. Other railings are bent, they are larger, but their structure is fragile and they look like a building after an earthquake. The rest are in large bags, cut, piled up, like a kind of mass grave.

I discovered this cemetery in winter, without colors. Everything was opaque and silent; only the sound of the train passing by could be heard. I returned several times, in spring and summer; the birds sang, flowers grew between the shining locks that were beginning to rust. And always that train passing by. You could only hear the birds singing, the wind, the train. I ran my hands between the locks in the terrifying silence of that place. You could hear the metal.

We went to film this place; I think it is not understood who they are. I think we put it, I went with Caroline Emmet Bourgeois to film, gathering images and sounds taken on site, and I was lent some locks. I then recorded the voice of a man and a woman reading the names inscribed on each of the locks in the same way that names of the dead are read in an accident or a war. I chose to create a sound for this piece that would include the city where the locks were originally placed, the field where they were stored and later abandoned, and the voices that refer to the lovers and the locks themselves.

Carmen Mariscal.

Works on paper:

For this project I asked eighty woman to wear their favourite lipstick and make an imprint of their lips on a piece of paper, these are “portraits” of each women but we can only see the lip marks-which are as personal as our finger prints, none are the same. I then stitched each of the lip marks, to “close” them. These sewn lips are reminders of how society has wanted to shut up women’s voices, women’s opinions and women’s feelings for centuries and across cultures.

Each woman wrote her name and the name of her lipstick behind each piece of paper, some also wrote in a separate piece of paper a phrase of what they were told as girls or as women that they couldn´t say, all of their voices were recorded to create a sound installation with these testimonies.

Some of these lip imprints were photographed in film, printed out, scanned and printed on a large photographic fine art cotton paper. I then stitched the lip marks. The large format prints are a reminder of the silence imposed on girls and women by society that can be overwhelming, a big presence that may unconsciously determinate their behaviour throughout life.

The lipstick marks are from women from the US, Mexico, France, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the UK, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and others.

Works on steel:

The 12 works on steel are imprints of lips of women of different ages and origins that were done on paper, then scanned, printed with the silk screen technique on to metal and etched with acid.

They are mounted as books that can be opened.

The idea came from the voice of a young Syrian woman that participated in the project, she said “Being a girl means that I am an open book, everyone is free to judge my life and what I do, they say : Don’t be loud. You have to stay nice and calm, never answer back. Act like a girl ”

Each one has a lip mark of a woman engraved on the outside and a stainless steel reflective surface inside that works as a mirror, when the « books” are opened the viewer can see her or his reflection and the reflection of a phrase that was engraved “hidden” on the back of the steel plate, like secrets that can only be perceived only if the book is opened. The phrases are transcriptions of the voices that I recorded of the women saying what they can´t talk about.

The viewer can see him or herself in the middle of this “silenced voices”.

The lip marks are of women from the US , Mexico, France, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the UK, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and others.

Texts: Carmen Mariscal

It is by working from the individual towards the collective that Carmen Mariscal lays out her concern on women’s condition in marriage, which is at the same time intimate and social. The Spanish words esposa (wife), esposas (handcuffs) and esposada (handcuffed), a linguistic coincidence used here as a feminist intellectual intention, are at the origin of the installation La esposa esposada (the handcuffed wife). Carmen photographed twenty women "wearing" a wedding dress made up of more than a thousand small steel handcuffs in a shape reminiscent of the 19th century crinolines - real shackles for the body trapped in steel hoops – to do this, she called upon associations who host women suffering from difficult marital situations or forced exile. To the handcuffs of the wedding dress are added the locks of the house sculptures, confirming the symbolization of the conjugal and domestic traps.

Text: Christine Frérot

La Esposa Esposada, is a photography, sculptural, sound-based installation.

The sound was created by Chloé Catoire, with the voices of the 23 women that participated in this project, in collaboration with Carmen Mariscal and Miguel Muzquiz. 30’, 2018

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOG

In the photographic series Coiffes (2013), Carmen Mariscal uses her own body as an instrument to talk, through its conjunction with objects and the documentation of private performances, about the complex emotions and the conflicts that are hidden behind archetypes of social identity and symbols of female power... In Coiffes, originally produced as part of a creative dialogue with two other women artists, Mariscal fashions a variety of headgear out of barbed wire, a material that, as she puts it, “represents for me the border between countries, between people, between the interior of the body and the exterior, between the myths we believe in and the reality we live”. She is photographed putting them on and taking them off, making evident again through her gestures, the pain and suffering these dichotomies produce and reproduce”.

Text: Karen Cordero

The photographs for the series Coiffes were taken in 2013 as a record of a private performance. They were created for the book, Autoritratto Coiffe/Kwaf/Féminin by artists Eleonora Aguiari, Carmen Mariscal and Rebecca Dolinsky, published by Book Machine and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

The title of the book Autoritratto Coiffe/Kwaf/Féminin (Self-portrait, headdress/Fémenin) is a reference to feminist art critic Carla Lonzi´s 1969 book Autoritratto which was presented for the first time in its French version in 2012 at a lecture at the Maison Rouge, a contemporary art Collection in Paris (now closed). The lecture took place in the “Salle de Coiffes” (Headdress Room) which displays the Maison Rouge’s founder Antonie de Galbert’s vast collection of headdresses.

For hours Eleonora, Rebecca and I sat in the Headdress Room and started thinking about working as a collective of women artists inspired by Carla Lonzi’s work in Rivolta Femminile a female artist group created sometime after Autorittrato.

We decided that each one of us would do self-portraits wearing headdresses of our choice to be published by Book Machine at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I created six different headdresses made out of barbed wire for the series of photographs Coiffes.

Although they were created in 2013, the Coiffes series was printed out between 2018 and 2019. These photographs question the symbols of domination through headdresses. When making crowns, tufts, bridal veils and other headdresses in barbed wire their symbolism changes. Through these photographs I seek to question the limits between fairy tales, the symbols of power and the divisions that these hierarchies provoke. I have used barbed wire in my work since 1999 and it represents for me the frontier, the border, between countries, between people, between the inside of the body and the outside, between the myths we believe and the reality we live.

Text: Carmen Mariscal

Coiffes series

Twelve black and white photographs taken during the private performance created for the publication of the book Autoritratto by artists Eleonora Aguiari, Carmen Mariscal and Rebecca Dolinsky. 40 x 30 cm each
© Carmen Mariscal 2013, printed in 2018 and 2019

In June 2015, while I was walking in woods surrounding a semi abandoned 19th Century castle in the North of France I stopped to watch the leaves on the trees, they were a deep fresh green. They must have looked similar when German soldiers walked on the same property in June 1940. The sun must have touched the tops of the leaves as they shadowed the earth, moistening the soil. Rediscovering cyanotypes inspired me to take growing plants from these woods exactly 75 years to the day from the assault that occurred there in 1940 on June 5th to the 8th. I wanted to imagine how the woods were during those times. I took lush June leaves from the grounds of the castle and placed them onto a piece of paper covered with acids, the same acids that British botanist Anna Atkins used in the early 1840s. I then allowed the summer sun of the Somme to bathe them and thus “develop” the photographs. This technique is one of the oldest forms of photography; it was a discovery through which photographs are "born" from an experience. Through this process I was, in some way, tracing unspoken memories. I was tracing memories of plants and trees who in their silence witnessed a massacre, an invasion, injustice and suffering. These silent witnesses are reminders of the past, similar to objects inside of a house. It's like the old saying goes, "If walls could talk." However inanimate things cannot share their observations; they are simple objects that can be easily discarded. But in the case of the leaves - they are alive, they die and they are never the same. The leaves that I collected did not witness the massacre in the fields of the castle but their ancestors did, just as our ancestors witnessed events that we may or may not be aware of. The trees that held the leaves, however, are still standing. As life was cut and changed during the occupation and post-war, the trees continued to grow and give new leaves every spring. They are silent witnesses, and they must have suffered also.Around 30 years ago a German bullet was found inside the trunk of one of these trees. In the 1980s the trees were cut down for firewood, but when the wood was put up for sale buyers refused; there was too much lead inside the wood from German bullets. I decided to take the same leaves that I had used for the cyanotypes to make traces of them on to clay. I created over 100 leaves made in white ceramics- a delicate and fragile material-and then divided them by groups of one, three, fives, eight leaves and poured lead on to them. My intent was to juxtapose materials that were at first sight opposite, a very fragile one, ceramics, that alludes to plates and china in the old house, that can be broken and another one that it is solid, hard and that can remind us of war.

Text: Carmen Mariscal

Sculptures
18 sculptures in lead and ceramics, 2018
Different sizes: between 25 cm high x 68 cm diameter and 12 cm high x 22 cm
Photos ©Claude Gaspari

Cyanotypes
16 cyanotypes, 2015-2018
Different sizes: 6 of 10 x 10 cm, 4 of 30 x 20.2 cm, 6 of 30 x 22.7 cm

Mural Installation
64 leaves made in steel with photogravures, 2015-2018
Different sizes: between 42 x 16 x 2 cm and 6.5 x 3.5 x 1 cm

VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOG

The installation The Beautiful Place includes various multisensory elements through the transposition of materials, in a complex setting allusive to the processes of memory, oblivion and repression, and their traces in objects and spaces, it is one of the main themes of Carmen Mariscal’s recent work, and it develops from a practice that is linked to her experience in recent years creating theater set designs. This work was born as a symbolic evocation of a piece of land in the north of France that was attacked by the German army in 1940, and where a sort of castle, a nineteenth-century house with a tower, stands on the edge of a dense forest of tall and ancient trees evoking the imaginary of fairy tales. Mariscal uses elements found in situ -sheets, leaves, liquor bottle stoppers, etc.- to allude to the experiences of war imprinted in the spatial memory and the material culture of the place, experiences that have been repressed by the current inhabitants of area. For example, she uses the old sheets found in the house to make a tower, embroidered with semi-legible phrases that refer to the secrets and contradictions that characterize the history of the place. The trees, made of barbed wire, embody the sensation of threat and violence that has been wrapped in silence, and the leaves produced in white ceramics and bathed in lead evoke at the same time the fragility of memory and the hardness of the experiences lived in this "beautiful" environment, meanwhile the sound installation echoes the phrases that allude to the fragmented memory that this piece makes present.

Text: Karen Cordero

Tower 2015

Tower made with old bedsheets, embroidered, and 90 resin sculptures inside | 180 cm high x 60 cm diameter

Forest 2018

5 trees made with 500 resin branches, 3200m barbed wire ,5 steel tubes, and ceramics and lead sculptures.

Sound 2018

Sound design by Chloé Catoire, with the voices of Camille Japy and Alexander Blackburn, and the music Speculum Veneris by Gerhart Muench from the album Ramas by Mercedes Gómez Benet (harp), with permission of Mercedes Gómez Benet and José Luis Rivera, director of Quindecim Recordings.

Photo© Claude Gaspari 

VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOG

My first ideas for the play Grito/Je Crie:

At first I thought of using a very large canvas that would represent the sky, I wanted it to be silver so that it would function as a mirror and be able to reproduce the images of the two characters, as the work talks about two women who exchange roles, transform themselves through time and alludes to all the women that there have been in the past of each one of them, like "ants". The reflections would make this illusion. It is a nocturnal work, almost everything had to happen between darkness and points of light and reflection. I had in mind the representation of light and shadows in Rembrandt's work.

Then I thought of including circular shapes that the actresses could go up and down from the "sky". These shapes would make reference to the stars and the circular shapes, having neither beginning nor end, seemed to me indispensable in this scenography as throughout the play the characters go through different times. It is not a linear time, it is a time of comings and goings to the future, to the more distant future, to the past, to end at a point where the play could begin again.

I transformed these circles into ovals so that they would not only allude to the stars but also to the family portraits and thus recall those women who preceded them. The surface was translucent and reflective in some and reflective and transparent in others, creating spaces for performance that included reflections, abysses and veils.

I created 12 ovals as the piece is made up of 12 scenes, but also refers to the 12 signs of the zodiac. They are like the lenses of a microscope to see the tiny and the present and like a telescope to see the distant and the past.

I worked very closely with Yoann Tivoli who created the lighting, he used lights to create shadows of these ovals on the floor, they look like eclipses. They are like two stars, facing each other: light and shadow, day and night, the matter we have now and the ephemeral.

Finally the big canvas became not the sky but the territory that the two women share and over which they fight. This fabric is like a part of the body, which starts as a kind of giant entity that breathes on the actress, becomes a cape, a dress, a sheet, a placenta, a monster. During rehearsals we used a parachute that Yoann lent us while Clara Ognibene (costumes) and I were choosing the big fabric, but in the end we were fascinated by the versatility of the parachute and what it means: it is between heaven and earth and allows us to descend gently, it protects.

I used a single element that functions as a "piece of furniture" in the form of an oval. It is sometimes a podium, sometimes a table, sometimes a bed, sometimes a container.

This "piece of furniture" can contain the 12 ovals or the fabric and part of it can be disassembled, it has wheels at the bottom, its dimensions are exact so that it can travel as a suitcase on the plane.

Carmen Mariscal. 2016

Fragment of interview by Elisa Massardo, Arte al Límite magazine, November 2016.

Play: Grito by Ximena Escalante

Staging: Sylvie Mongin-Algan With: Anne de Boissy & Alizée Bingöllü

Set design: Carmen Mariscal

Lighting: Yoann Tivoli

Sound: Clément Vercelletto

Costumes: Clara Ognibene

Translation: Adeline Isabel-Mignot

Production company: Les Trois-Huit, Theatre Company t NTH8/Nouveau Théâtre du Huitième - Lyon, France

2016-2017 © Carmen Mariscal Photos by Carmen Mariscal and Yoann Tivoli

AU FIL DE L’EAU/AL FILO DEL AGUA (Molitor) 2014-15

I chose this title because in French Fil means thread and Au fil de l´eau means that things go smoothly from one to the other. However, by juxtaposing the French and Spanish translations, the meaning changes. Filo in Spanish is not thread as it is in French, but is the sharp side of a knife.

When one says “Al Filo del Agua,” it means that something dramatic is imminent; something is just on the brink or is perhaps abysmal. This definition lends itself to the meaning of this piece. 

When fully installed, Al Filo del Agua is composed of seven black and white photographs taken at the Piscine Molitor in 1932, and thirteen color photographs of women swimming underwater at the same location in 2014. The women’s faces in each photograph have been removed and replaced with mirrors. These reflective “faces” were punctured with eight holes where transparent strings were then attached. The strings connect the 1932 women with the contemporary ones. 

The Piscine Molitor was built in 1928. The bikini was born here in the 1950’s and it was the Parisian “place to be.” By the 1980s, however, the pool was abandoned and turned into a squat. Graffiti covered the walls and the once thriving space became dilapidated. In 2014, there was an arrangement between the government of the City of Paris and AccorHotels to restore the pool and give it new life. It was rebuilt in the style of its former Art Deco design and now contains a 4-star hotel, health center, medical center, retail shops and restaurants. 

I wanted to work with the memory of this site, so I chose photographs from its early days in 1932. I obtained the permission to use the photographs from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

In the early stages of this project, I planned to use photographs of men and women inside the changing stalls. Ultimately I used just women because their poses and relationships to their bodies interested me. I left only one double photograph that connects men from the past and present; the rest are women. The old photos were taken in 1932, fourteen years after WWI ended and eight years before WWII started.

It was during this time between WWI and WWII where everything was calm, or at least seemed so from the outside. I would describe it with Matisse’s phrase, Luxe, Calme et Volupte. The women posing seem happy and comfortable in their lives and bodies. I would be critical because there are many men watching them as if they were objects, but still they seem at ease. Life then, as it is now, was fragile. 

I view these two seemingly peaceful periods of history and life as hopeful and playful, but with the knowledge that peace is fragile. By connecting the photographs with a thin, transparent string, I am reminding us of the fragility of this peace and how outside influences, such as world politics, can shatter this feeling at any moment. 

Text: Carmen Mariscal

Ilusiones PENDIENTES (Pending Illusions)

Carmen Mariscal

Ilusiones Pendientes is an installation composed of photographs and sounds that evokes the " French dream" present in a Mexican family for a century, from 1899 to 1999.

Memory and identity are central themes of this piece.

The viewer enters an hexagonal space, representing France, to find 80 photographs inside. These photographs were found in from family albums, testimonies of trips to France over four generations . The photographs were printed, mounted on mirrors and the faces of the characters were cut out. The faceless people represented cease to be themselves, they become absent beings, and invite visitors to look at themselves and thus participate in this collective dream that is the dream of living in France. The mirrors refer also to illusions, they give vertigo, like dreams .

Travel journals and articles written by members of this family were read and recorded and can be heard inside the installation. The time in the voices and photographs blend. Distant and recent past are found in the same level.

My great- grandfather, Nicolás Mariscal y Piña, who was an architect, professor and art historian , founded in January 1899 in the journal El Arte y la Ciencia in Mexico . In April of the same year he wrote the article "The 1900 Paris Exposition. General Plan" where he described what was to be presented . Mariscal was a lover of French culture, he visited Paris several times and passed this passion to his descendants.

On my mother's side , the taste for France came later , my great grandparents were Spanish peasants who migrated to Mexico. My great-grandfather, after many years of hard work, had the life that he dreamed of and one of his dreams was to go to France . He spent long periods in Paris with his wife . My mother was taken to France by them when she was a child . If she could not visit everything and she complained her grand-father would tell her : " You must have pending illusions, that way you will come back." Ever since she always dreamed of living in Paris.

I grew up in Mexico and at the age of six, my parents decided to make a family trip to France, this trip marked me forever. As a young adult I lived in Paris and made several trips between Mexico and France before finally settling myself in France in 1999, one hundred years after my great-grandfather wrote in his article on Paris.

In novels, films and conversations we often hear : "My dream is to live in France." Many people have this dream : France, the Hexagone (as the French call their country) is a dream. But once made our lives and settle in the country, we ask ourselves: What remains of our dream for those of us who have migrated ? What is our reality ? And finally where are we from?

Carmen Mariscal, Paris, January 2014

When I first read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, I had a sense of suffocation, of confinement and then of the possibility of liberation.

I worked with the notion of the bedroom as a place of confinement to create rooms for women's work, creativity and freedom.

I designed a giant playpen for babies, a symbol of the Victorian patriarchy from which Virginia herself wanted to break free. The metal used in its construction is reminiscent of animal cages and prisons. Throughout history, women have been infantilised and imprisoned with few means to express their talents, and this is one of the reasons why there were few women writers before 1928 (when Woolf wrote her text). Women had too many children, they had to look after their parents and siblings, and they had no opportunity to earn their own money, inherit or go to university. The gigantic park makes women small and powerless.

The play begins with Woolf as a lecturer, she is on a podium and then, little by little, the spectator realises that she is in a playpen surrounded by the objects of the Victorian nursery. For Virginia, the teapot had a connotation of servitude; girls of her social background had to learn to serve tea and spend their afternoons this way. The little chair was a reminder of the infantilisation of women, who had to symbolically place themselves in a place that was too small for them. The rocking horse, a game for boys and girls in all Victorian nurseries, is reminiscent of Orlando's rocking horse and thus of a possibility of transformation and liberation. The display case where precious objects were kept contains the result of liberation through work: here Virginia's writings symbolise her own work and the possibility for other women to have a room of their own and the money to be able to create. The books are placed around the park, like buildings, always outside, in order to gain access to knowledge and become part of culture, women have to break away from the structure that has confined them for so long.

At one point in the play, Woolf turns the park into a gate. One of the most vivid memories of Virginia's childhood was the sound of the cottage door opening, a sound she always associated with joy and freedom. For her, as she says in Une Chambre à Soi: "...there is no door, no lock, no bolt that can oppose the freedom of my spirit!

The park, like Virginia's childhood home, is stifling, but by breaking it up and getting out of it she is going to build her own room. She used what she had: the walls and her work. She was going to transform the walls that had imprisoned women for years, but which had also contained all their creative force. Virginia Woolf would use her work to construct Une Chambre à Soi; she would use her manuscripts in which the path of thought is present, thought in development, and thought that moves forward.

"...women have sat inside their houses for millions of years so that now the walls themselves are impregnated with their creative force; and this creative force so overtaxes the capacity of bricks and mortar that now we must find something else, devote ourselves to pens, brushes, business and politics."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.

Carmen Mariscal, Paris, November 2013.

“…The eight photographs in Carmen Mariscal's Celosía Filigrana series continue the work begun with The Bride. This time, the aim is to create a “mise en abyme” of the filigree jewellery from Oaxaca inherited from her grandmother. While the bride's immaculate dress encircles her virginal body until the moment of denudation, the filigree jewellery dresses her nudity. The dress is the attribute of the young girl, the jewels of the woman. There is a fine line between jewellery and eroticism (the hymen is broken; the earring pierces the ear). The shadow of the jewels projected onto the skin dresses and magnifies the body, which seems alternately adorned with a carnival mask or an egret, a ruff, or a torque. Reflected on the hands, the filigree shadows evoke the ochre scrolls traced with henna on the palms of Atlas women. These filigrees cover the body as much as they reveal it, partially hiding it to better suggest it, tracing encrypted messages on the skin.

By interweaving tiny threads of gold or silver, filigree is synonymous with delicacy and lightness. But it's not just light, it's also subtle. Don't we say "filigree" to designate something that we can guess but which is not explicit, and whose perception calls for sensitivity, listening and concentration? The filigree stretches its threads in many directions, weaving a dialogue between tradition and modernity, Old and New Worlds, East and West. Between Oaxaca, Merida, Damascus, and Toledo...”

Stéphanie Robert

Paris, June 2011

« …The paradox of the bigger or smaller Alice could help us draw a conclusion concerning the world of childhood in the work of this Mexican artist. The image in the mirror is not a double, but that which represents what I can never be myself. What I see is always my reverse, but this reverse has no reverse of itself; unless the reverse is me myself while at the same time I am the reverse in the mirror. So I am always my reverse, meaning I only am while I am that which I am not. This is where the story of Alice may come into play and with it the childhood world which, in the end, is always one of paradox; it is precisely in this world that a plate can be the wheel of a car and even the whole car, precisely in this world between bigger and smaller. It is here where Carmen Mariscal engages in some of her artistic inquiries.

Carmen Mariscal's work relates to at least two aspects of Carroll's novels. The first, regarding the story of Alice herself, the way in which the mirror appears as the site of fantasy and a narrative element. The second and more important, the way in which the artist transposes the narrative to the visual and sculptural plane. In the photogravures as well as in the videos and especially in the boxes, the superimposing of figurative elements produces an almost dissolving of the depths of different levels. This is not merely a stylistic technique, but the way in which fantasy comes into play in the poetry of the artist. If ghosts have one visual characteristic, it is transparency; that evanescent consistency that makes it impossible for us to know, as Derrida said, if they are from the past or the future. It is this place of transparency and evasion that comes into play in the world of Carmen's childhood: her own and that of her daughter. There, in the transference of the memory of the adult to the present of the child, childhood is played out as a destination. There Carmen Mariscal finds the place where her body dwells on condition that it is not dwelt in; there certainly between smaller and bigger; there in the here and now of evanescence is the tension of a poesy that does not flee its origins but questions the condition of a body domesticated even unto its rebellion.”

Text: Jose Luis Barrios

« …When talking to Carmen, we immediately position ourselves in a long-gone imaginary world; the houses of grandmothers and old books. There live the fantasies and ghosts of this artist; a constant reference to that way of life, closed-off for ever, whispering through her work. A world of hide-and-seek, the stories and games of a world where we were sheltered, a world that no longer exists or may only exist in the invented fantasy of a memory fashioned by weariness. In any case, in the work of Carmen Mariscal there is a certain nostalgia that seduces us only to, upon closer inspection, terrify us. Is this not the sinister, according to Freud; the everyday that does not appear strange?

Regarding this everyday, the first register we notice about Carmen Mariscal's output has to do with the anguish these works cause her/us, where the decay and cracks scratched into the body induce a fear of time. The cracks in her works are signs of time past, but also of the terror engraved in the body's present by future time. If decay speaks of an abandoned place, when it is engraved into our own surface of present, our faces, then the imprint of time is that of the future. How do we interpret this inscription or fissure on the bloom of a fresh face?

If this occurs to the body itself, there exists another frightening place in this poetics of estrangement, which has to do with the figure of motherhood, here the operation is not the metaphor of the ruin of the future; here it is about the body and the monstrous. Registered as a pure surface in the foreground, maternity, child and the mother's body are displayed in the place of their banishment. The coming together of the womb of the woman or the navel and the mouth of the newborn infant are magnitudes that perform a de-signification of the discourse of motherhood, an operation where the close foreground of the photo, the texture and the sepia impart a kind of porosity which make this type of representation an almost grotesque locus of the body and motherhood itself. Far from engaging in sublimation, here Carmen is approaching the scene of her self-alienation and thus the scene of the discourses that construct us as social and cultural subjects… »

Text: José Luis Barrios

I have the impression that Carmen Mariscal’s photographs belong to a nomadic tribe, or a ghostly flock that end their flight by landing on a wall. Their journey goes from the eye behind the camera, to the houses and streets that form that sentimental archipelago that throbs in Catalonia; her family left there and, decades later, she returns in this flock of photographs to connect with those roots that have always been hers. To recover the past, Carmen Mariscal chooses to stand on it. Looking again and again at her stupendous photographs, a verse, also nomadic and ghostly, of the Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer came to my memory: Tinc el meu passat a les mans cum un cistell de mores i no sé què pensar-ne, I have my past in my hands like a basket of blackberries and I don't know what to think of it. One way to respond to Gimferrer's verse are these images, which are located in the antipode of that ancestral belief that says that when someone takes a photograph, they are actually stealing people’s souls; those of Carmen Mariscal are just the opposite, by being projected they give life to the walls that define her past; as if everything that once was is again, thanks to the miracle of the shadow and the light.

Text: Jordi Soler

It would be irrelevant to say that Carmen Mariscal photographs the body - or, for that matter, her body - when in fact she multiplies it. Each of her images is a reproduction, in the original sense of the word: an act of creation and unfolding. Like Miss Sagée, Carmen Mariscal - or her body, which is also any body, our body - duplicates itself and in doing so acquires an existence of its own, apart from her own. The images that portray her, or that portray different fragments of her body - feet, hands, torsos, heads - seem to desire an autonomous life apart from her own. They are not mere imitations, products of the old Greek mimesis, but parts of herself that move through the world on their own. Meanwhile we, the spectators of her work, are identical to Julie von Güldenstubbe and the other pupils of the Pensionat von Neuwelcke: astonished observers of the winks and grimaces of her restless doppelgänger.

Carmen Mariscal's pieces are mirrors. Those who look into them think they are looking at someone else's body without knowing that they are glimpsing their own double. Carmen Mariscal confronts us, sweetly and wisely, with our other half, our dark doppelgänger.

A woman's face - but are we sure it is a woman? - with her eyes closed and her hair tied back. Maybe it's an androgynous (the reunited duplicity) or maybe it's us without knowing it. It matters little.

What is relevant is the crack that divides the face into two asymmetrical halves. A broken line coming from the background or the landscape - a peeling wall, her favourite setting - tears the face into two opposing segments. But, as the parted lips and the serenity of the countenance show, there is no horror in this division, not even awe, but a silent, almost pleasurable acceptance. The division of each is inevitable, the artist seems to be telling us. Carmen Mariscal possesses a satisfied doppelgänger.

Two foetuses, almost homunculi, portrayed in their inoffensive nudity, side by side, like the inverted images of a mirror. Which is the obverse and which the reverse, which the negative and which the positive? In Carmen Mariscal's world there are no polarities or value judgements, only the overwhelming ambiguity of each one.

The duplication that duplicates itself. Carmen Mariscal's boxes are reconcentrated mirrors, mirrors to the nth degree, openings that show us hopelessly repeated bodies. Vague shadows, reflections, mirages. It is said that by placing two mirrors face to face it would be possible to contemplate - alas - infinity, the two halves of the cosmos finally intertwined, like the hands of Carmen Mariscal's women who remain trapped inside glass and wood.

Text: Jorge Volpi, San Sebastián, 10 April, 2006

“The installation Umbilicus expresses with all its richness and its complexity the entity of body stories, in plural. Umbilicus, in fact, concentrates and sediments stories and representations of the female body. A woman is standing naked with only her sex covered with a loincloth, she holds her head in her hands, levitating. From her navel come out different cables connecting it to glass babies laying on the ground. The Installation is plurivocal. It operates, as the body does, as an interface between the individual and society, nature and culture, the physiological and the symbolic. Behind this syncretic figure of the mother, amalgamating in a Christic shortcut, the image of Eve and the Virgin, the profane and the sacred, sin and virginity, origin and end, hide both an allegory of Mexico and the self-portrait of the artist. In Náhuatl language, says Carmen Mariscal, the word Mexico means navel. It is a double movement of the strength of the link, of the lineage, of the language, of the power of traditions and the beliefs that glorify the female body and at the same time accuse it.

The artist works on the theme of motherhood and the maternal. Umbillicus opens the cycle of this question, this exploration comparing reproduction and creation. “

Text: Danielle Delouche

Umbilicus 1/1
Installation (digital print, six foetus glass sculptures, electrical cables and light bulbs) 
Photohraph: 195 x 130 cm
Foeuts glass sculptures: 33 cm each 
Glass work: Céline Tilliet 
2003 © Carmen Mariscal

Photo © Stéphane Leduc

From the text of the catalogue of the exhibition Innata

at the Centro Cultural de México, Paris, 2001.

[...] The work of the Mexican artist Carmen Mariscal is situated in this formal spirit of elaborating a personal and cultural imaginary by means of an iconography in the form of an intimate diary. Carmen Mariscal, who has lived in Paris for years, has a close relationship with the body, going back in time to her own pictorial history (painting bodies or fruit cut in two, which she associates with organs), and to her hospital work in Mexico with young bulimic or anorexic girls. Born into a family of Catalan origin where the strong personality of women has weighed on the construction of her personality, where a liberal education (Summerhill) mixed with feminism and associated with a traditional Catholic heritage have shaped the duality of her being; Carmen Mariscal has been able to channel the influences in a work where the self-portrait is omnipresent. It is in this way that she questions, stigmatises or exorcises, with finesse and subtlety, the complexity of her multiple heritages and origins.

Carmen Mariscal speaks of the time of the body (physical, affective, spiritual, mental and cultural), of its fleetingness (the unbearable lightness) as well as its perenniality. But it is not only the body that interests her. It is the body-history entity that she questions by drawing her images from her closest nursery, her family. While she is interested in fragility, it is also the fragility of feelings that she alludes to. The blurring she obtains through the transparency of the glass (on which the image is printed) or the subtle unfolding through the reflection of the image in the mirror are but one aspect of the modesty she claims as a woman. In this staging of portraits or self-portraits, her commitment to the implicit to the detriment of reality corroborates this dissociation between body and spirit which is the essence of her creative quest.

The presentation of the whole body, which she photographs in increasingly large formats, after having for a long time combined hands, feet and facial details, has become the syntactic space, the privileged support of her metaphorical discourse on femininity. The nude is assumed and the question of identity, if it continues to be raised in her work, is no longer a closed conflict but an open proposition, at once personal and universal. In the series of "bellies" called Rota, as well as in the Eggs or the fragments of faces, we always find a desired opacity - textures of cracked walls - as if the artist wanted to create a screen or a filter between the body and the gaze of the other. The palpable immediacy of the flesh or the features of the face (eyes, nose, mouth, lips) lead us to a suggestion rather than a reality, as if the artificial alteration corresponds to that of time and thus allows, in this decalage and this distance, a different knowledge of identity. The artist incorporates various objects, feathers, spoons, branches or fabrics, into her bodies. In her boxes, sort of altars or reliquaries where the enigmas of the feminine are kept and offered, the body, symbolically placed, is both receiver and receptacle.

The body in Carmen Mariscal is a body-pretext, a suggested body, sometimes stolen, but a living body that expresses the depths of being, especially when it is threatened. The artist has chosen a nuanced, poetic and delicate visual vocabulary where eroticism is discreet. With a sensitive formal and conceptual discourse, Carmen Mariscal knows how to speak to us, in an intimate way, about what concerns us most, our body.

Christine Frérot

The time of the body

"…Hunger is not just about food, and yet there is a powerful political component in these works, which in effect make reference to eating disorders, a theme that Mariscal has explored on various occasions, and not only through his plastic proposals. In Voluntary Fasting we find ourselves at a huge table where when we sit down we have suddenly shrunk like Alice, in front of us a plate and cutlery, but in this fantasy they attack us with a bunch of nails instead of teeth or bowls and the plate, instead of food, contains a video in which the artist herself reads fragments from the diary of an anorexic: "Food eats me, food eats me, come, come closer, eat, if you eat me I eat you, I eat your whole body, finger by finger, hand by hand ...", the language of the artist's work is a political one. ...", the language of illness and that of seduction are mixed, the limits between the erotic and the pathological are blurred and we are confronted in a single movement -physical and conceptual- with the complexity of the problematic that it deals with...".

Text : Issa Benítez, Mexico City, 2000

Video installation (video projected on a plate, large plates, cutlery, tablecloths, chairs and lamps).


This work was presented for the first time at the 4th Biennial in Monterrey, Mexico.


1999 © Carmen Mariscal

“…Having rejected detailed images in her work – the representation of hands, feet and parts of the face – she has turned to the subject of the whole body. Photographed on an ever larger scale, the body emerges as a syntactical space, the privileged domain for her discourse of the feminine. Nudity and identity are key concerns but although these subjects continue to feature in her work, they are by no means settled, they remain open propositions, at once universal and personal. Whether it is in the series of ‘lungs’ entitled Rota, the ‘eggs’, or fragments of faces, there is always a calculated opacity in the meaning of her work; it is as if the artist wanted to create a screen or a barrier between the body and the spectator. The emphatic immediacy of the flesh or the resonance of parts of the face – eyes, nose, mouth, lips – also suggests a sur-reality; it is as if artificial alterations of the image suggest the passage of time. Here, a concern with distance created by the artist’s intervention implies an apprehension about the nature of identity. Incorporated within the artist’s images of the body are feathers, spoons, branches, woven materials, objects such as pieced heart and a cardboard doll. Displayed in boxes, such objects suggest altars or a type of reliquary in which offerings to some female enigma are preserved; the body, symbolically adorned, is as much a receptacle as a receiver…”

Texte: Christine Frérot

In 1999 the architect Ricardo Legorreta invited me to collaborate on the project for the Mexican Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Hannover, Germany, to be held in 2000.

Legorreta and the organising team asked me to create an installation to show Mexicans in different areas of working life in Mexico. I decided to create an installation based on the the script written by the historian Enrique Krauze, which set out the theoretical concept of the Mexican Pavilion. Together with the architects Ricardo and Victor Legorreta we created a room similar to my previous works - wooden boxes covered with metal, with glass in front and mirrors and small objects inside - but here the large architectural box made out of glass and metal would contain the visitors, and inside there would be other large-scale aluminium and Plexiglas boxes as well.

I travelled through Mexico accompanied by photographer Sebastián Saldívar meeting and photographing Mexican artisans and workers in their homes, factories, and workshops. I created photographs on transparencies and attached them to the front of each box, inside them I placed objects created by the people photographed. On the ceiling I hung a 40m2 photograph which I printed out, the images showed the faces of an older craftswoman and a young man who worked in a factory, both representing two different generations and genders of the creative force of my country. It was important to me that the visitors could make eye contact with all the people photographed in this room to remind them that behind every country’s economy there are women and men with different lives that create what others consume.

Carmen Mariscal, 2000

"Mexico is not only, nor essentially, a country periodically torn apart by chaos, corruption, financial crises, political scandals. It emerged as a nation, with its own identity and destiny, almost two centuries ago. Our country has a good catalogue of characteristics that more developed nations would envy. Among these advantages, three stand out: ethnic and cultural coexistence, religious tolerance and national cohesion. These historical advances were not achieved by a miracle: they were a building process that took centuries. Historian Luis González y González coined the precise concept to describe them. In cultural terms, Mexico is a construction.

.... "Pueblo creador" is the fourth thematic space in the pavilion. Despite the lacerating shortages and inequalities of our economic and social life, industriousness, tenacity, and ingenuity remain substantive traits of the Mexican people. According to Gabriel Zaid's ideas (in his seminal work El progreso improductivo), the progress of traditional Mexico has been frustrated by the cultural blockages of modern Mexico. There has been a lack of a relevant supply of means of production for the poor, especially in the countryside. The potential is there, since the time of Vasco de Quiroga, open to imagination and initiative".

Enrique Krauze, 2000

Krauze, E., 2000. Hannover 2000. Letras Libres. issue 19

https://enriquekrauze.com.mx/hannover-2000/

“The creativity, ingenuity, and productive skill of Mexicans, which reveal themselves in many different ways -from small craft workshops to large companies that today export high-quality technological products all over the world— are the substance of Mexico's future development. The talent and ability of its creative people has placed Mexico's economy among the world's top ones and are the driving force of its industrial growth. Simple, modern museum display using black and white photographs and various real products give a picture of some of the men and women who build infrastructure and provide goods and services in both small-scale concerns and the most modern industry in today's Mexico”.

Manola Rius Caso

Catalogue, Méxican Pavilion, Expo Hannover 2000

in collaboration with artist Eric Ringsby

Video installation (video projected on an old refrigerator
and photographs printed on acetate inside material from a laboratory) 
Various dimensions
*this piece was awarded 1st prize for the 4th National Installation Contest, Mexico

Photo © Carmen Mariscal

".... Our very phenomenological identification with the body of Christ serves both to make us aware of our difference, of our physical and spiritual heaviness, as well as to imagine, to figure transcendence.

The persistence of this perceptual paradigm, reinterpreted from a postmodern mentality, is manifested in Buscando el Paraiso en el Limbo II (1998; fig. 96), a recent installation by Carmen Mariscal in the former church of Santa Teresa, which literally involves the viewer's body in the dynamics of lightness and gravity figured in the previous works. From the floor, we observe male and female nudes: black and white photographs printed on acetate and suspended above us; they in turn direct their arms and muscular energy towards the dome of the church, where divine figures fly effortlessly in a celestial realm. The suspended "souls", mere transitory "impressions", infuse a new tension into the liturgical space, and we participate in this tension by reproducing, in our relationship with them, the distance they feel from the figurative heaven. Moreover, unlike other representations, these "souls" do not have wings, so that physical and spiritual transcendence here remains an aspiration rather than a conviction; longing for the spirit that we feel from our bodies, longing for the body that we feel in the soul, becoming newly aware of the permanent vital dilemma involved in the dialectic of gravity and lightness: "From heaven we must fall, from the grave we must rise/ Where then is the human level? O darkness,/ there is no place for man. "13 (Cordero, K, 1998, pp118-119)".

Karen Cordero

Cordero, K. 1998 De La levedad del Ser en El Cuerpo Aludido, Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.

13 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Ecce Homo (Paris, 1945), quoted by Bachelard, op. cil., p. 431.

Installation (8 photographs printed on acetate hung in the National Art Museum, MUNAL, Mexico City) Various sizes from 400 x 90 cm for each print to 110 x 90 cm 1998 © Carmen Mariscal Photos © Sofía López Mestre

Days before she died, my great-grandmother gave me her wedding dress. The dress stayed in a cardboard box for nine years until it became the inspiration and central element of an artist’s book, a series of photographs and installations. I used the dress to question the traditions passed down from generation to generation, about what it means to be a mother, a daughter and a wife.

Ever since using a dress to inspire my early work, I have used heirlooms and meaningful objects as central elements in almost all my projects.

Text: Carmen Mariscal

At the age of 22, while studying Art History, I was in a serious car accident that left me bed-ridden for months. When able to, I would sit up in bed and paint subjects related to extreme pain, frustration and isolation. I was struck by the fragility of the human body, and by the way it can be broken and mended. Being confined in a hospital bed also made me think about the concept of imprisonment.

Years after I recovered from the accident I photographed my own body, as well as those of my family and friends, in a study of the experience of being trapped. My photographs were influenced by the x-rays I had seen in the hospital – extreme close-ups of fragments of body parts which I printed on a translucent surface.

My work expanded from being two dimensional to three dimensional when I began creating wooden boxes, the size of medicine cabinets, with metal sides, glass fronts and with mirrors inside. I put the semi-transparent photographs on the front and objects inside the boxes. The materials I used evoked the hospital: metal, glass, white walls, veils, and photographs reminiscent of x-rays.

I wanted my boxes to evoke the hospital experience of being trapped in an antiseptic space one cannot escape. But the work was also about the human experience of being trapped inside our own bodies and minds.

These boxes were also reminiscent of vitrines, like the ones used in the 19th Century to contain precious objects. By placing images of the body and objects inside the boxes they become precious but also unreachable. The use of white veiling in my work refers to the hospital but also to the bride who has to be pure, trapped behind her veil, separated from the others.

These boxes are the origin of everything I have made since.

When creating a box I start with an object that has a history or is plucked from nature. This can be an antique book, article of clothing, heirloom, feather, bone or shell found in a special place. The viewer has to peer through the translucent photograph to see the object and then, behind that he sees his own reflection in the mirror.

I wanted the experience of peering inside the box to mimic the layers of emotions that humans experience, emotions that are sometimes hidden, trapped, or veiled by other emotions.

Text: Carmen Mariscal