When I met María Magdalena Campos-Pons in her Boston studio, she was gestating ideas for Documenta 14, thinking about installations in both Athens and Kassel. Her thoughts, figuratively and literally, germinated in a corner, where a branch of spindly potato plant—an invasive species that takes over everything—drew an awkward but tenacious line up the wall. “It’s a totally discardable plant, but with inner strength,” She explained. “Like me, it’s something that arrived as an alien and had to adapt to a new environment.”1 She pointed out objects that serve as Afro-Cuban metaphors—ritual benches for holding sacred herbs during Santería religious rituals, blown glass symbolizing human frailty, a table made from car scrap of the kind common to the now pricey antique American cars zooming along El Malecon, Havana’s seaside drive. “I also want textures from ancient Cuban walls and from videos and music composed by my husband, Neil Leonard,” she said.
Campos-Pons is hard to catch as she ricochets from Boston to her extended family home in Cuba and to the multiple international venues where she exhibits and performs. Her work unfolds like a cat’s cradle, a tangle of personal memories and epic tales told and retold by kindred generations of African souls whose traditions and beliefs were subsumed by the cultural compromises they were forced to make. Like the string game’s looping patterns, Campos-Pons’s work creates shifting intersections—in her case, derived from the changes that occur when ancestral roots survive repeated cultural dislocations. The orishas of Santería, a syncretic religion that merges Yoruba and Christian beliefs, provide the spiritual glue for her intersecting worlds, and they were indeed present in this corner of her studio: Ogun, god of metal; Yemaya, goddess of the sea and protector of women and children; and Shango, god of thunder. In one way or another, they are all drawn to—or carried by—water, cresting along the great wave of the Afro-Cuban diaspora, an exodus that Campos-Pons joined when she left Cuba in 1990.
One image from “When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá” (1994), a series of posed photographs, encapsulates her journey. It portrays Campos-Pons as Yemaya, her nude body painted with blue and white waves, her head cropped from the picture. Two plastic baby bottles draped about her neck rest on her breasts and drip milk into a primitive carved boat held on her lap. By eliminating her face, Campos-Pons translates personal history into a powerful visual narrative about the pull of Afro-Cuban culture over the course of an oppressive yet transformative passage that continues into this millennium.
Born in Matanzas in 1959, the year that the Cuban revolution brought Fidel Castro to power, she is the great-granddaughter of a Nigerian-born slave, (re)named Gabriel by his captors. Before the revolution, her family built and owned a house in the city of Colón while maintaining a farm in La Vega on the grounds of an old sugar plantation where her great-grandfather had labored. These assets were lost when Castro banned private ownership. Strangers seized the house and farm, forcing the Campos-Pons family to move into former slave barracks converted into public apartments by the new government. How does a child fed on the rhetoric of a “liberating” revolution reconcile such displacement as she eats, plays, and sleeps in her grandfather’s slave quarters? History of a People Who Were Not Heroes: A Town Portrait (1994) bears witness to this paradox. The documentary installation includes a doorframe set with glass that encases archival photographs, including one of Gabriel and another of the original battered barracks door—an ancestral threshold of sorts traversing the disheartening eras of slavery and misbegotten revolutionary dreams.
Cuba is a land of contradiction and irony. Castro ruled the country with an iron fist, it’s true, but he was also a staunch supporter of the arts who initially granted a relatively free hand to artists—so long as they did not overtly criticize his regime. In 1976, he established the highly competitive Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), where select students received a broad-based interdisciplinary arts education. Meanwhile, an international contingent of artists and scholars flocked to Cuba’s avant-garde biennials, which created opportunities for the country’s most gifted artists to show and sell their works abroad. By the time Campos-Pons left Cuba in 1990, she had studied, then taught at ISA, and had exhibited in venues throughout the world, including galleries and museums in London, New York, Mexico, Australia, and Germany.
It’s hard to square all this with the racial and gender discrimination that plagued her throughout her formal art education: “I was the one black person in my class, the one black teacher in my school, the only black female among the six or seven elite students in the [Cuban] art world. I noticed the larger disparity—that the majority of people in jail are black. For me, this was very important.” Cuba’s minorities and women never realized equality-for-all as mandated in the Cuban Republic’s 1976 constitution. In María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water, curator and scholar Lisa D. Freiman contends that the reforms in education, health, and employment initiated in the ’70s—”the Afro-Cuban decade”—were in response to the problem of “institutionalized racism.” These reforms “helped blacks disproportionately because they were poor (not black)…those in power are still white.”2
Campos-Pons’s exploration of ethnic, gender, and social identities emerges from these complicated social and political realities. Though her exposure to feminist and civil rights art movements in the United States reinforced her subject choices, her work differs from the more contemporaries. Herein lies a cautionary tale: attributing New York art world rationales and forms to parallel social and political events taking place outside the U.S. often obscures the context in which that art was produced and blurs our understanding of significant cultural differences.
Campos-Pons confronted this conundrum when she met the art historian Lucy Lippard during the 1984 Havana Biennial: “She said I was a feminist and told me my work was important to the movement, but I didn’t think of my work as ‘feminist’—wasn’t even certain what that really meant at the time.” Lippard was responding to the unapologetically strong statement about female subjugation in Cinturón de Castidad (Chastity Belt) (1984–85)—a seven-foot-high, vulva-shape sculpture, bisected by a vertical band and flanked by two phallic-shaped African ceremonial staffs. “I created such work at a time when many were talking about the government’s support for birth control, and many women were using intrauterine devices. I was exploring ideas of sexuality as I was also thinking about the subjugation of Afro-Cuban women. All these issues awakened me to what it meant to be making art as a woman.”
These ideas, while similar to Lippard’s message of feminism as an American social-political movement, were, for Campos-Pons, related to a sense of women’s rights as she experienced them at home, in the presence of strong female role models: “They ruled the house, were community leaders, and my grandmother, Amparo Campos, was a Santería priestess.” This empowerment emerging from within the family underscores a major difference between “Feminism” as a U.S. movement in the ’60s and ’70s, and the Cuban “women’s movement,” an ongoing phenomenon that began in the 1920s when women sought to use their prominent roles as wives and mothers to provide a rational voice in a pervasively corrupt country. Cuban feminist and Yoruba identities are in Campos-Pons’s DNA, and they wrapped tightly about her life and work when she, like many others, left the island nation.
Things quickly turned toxic when the Soviet Union began to unravel in the late ’80s—its ultimate withdrawal from Cuba, coupled with an ongoing U.S. trade embargo, left the country economically bereft. The ensuing, euphemistically labeled “special period” defined a time of severe hardship accompanied by brutal restraints on personal freedoms. “You had to be in Cuba to know what was going on. Those I trusted, said ‘Go!'” says Campos-Pons, who eventually settled with her husband in Boston, asking herself, “How do we carry all this stuff with us?”
That question of essential aspects of heritage serves as the subject of Rite of Initiation: Sacred Bath (1991), a video performance that chronicles her spiritual odyssey through the Afro-Cuban diaspora. The video opens with a barefoot Campos-Pons circling a tree in the forest, then cuts to her shod feet walking along a tarred road. She later mixes herbs in ritual glasses and douses her nude body with this sanctified water. After bathing in a tub with tropical fish, she walks with a man (Neil Leonard) on a spiral grid of painted earth. In subsequent scenes, she appears painted like the bark of a tree, her face streaked with the colors of forest spirits. Projected images of water appear on her body, and then the imagery becomes statically digitized, with animated spirit-like creatures fluttering about her seemingly electrified dance movements. Absorbing her past through this mythic journey transformed her and readied her for the hard part—the trek through life to places she never knew. Leonard’s musical score provides a compelling accompaniment. Its electronic effects, synchronized to natural sounds and the beat of tribal drums, bridge archaic worlds with Campos-Pons’s personal passage expressed through the formal vernacular of contemporary art. In Rite of Initiation, Campos-Pons symbolically comes to terms with a culture not her own and reconciles herself with the Santería traditions that she often rejected when she was young. And through Santería—which evolved with the Spanish slave trade and the ensuing diaspora—she transcends the personal in her work and begins to dig deep into the cultural soul of her past.
The Seven Powers Come by the Sea (1992) offers a dense, poignant mix of conflicted, symbiotic, and synthesized perceptions of gender, ethnicity, spirituality, and political history. With its fluid merging of personal and ancestral memories, this signature multimedia work orchestrates a richly layered narrative. Conceived as an altarpiece, it consists of seven carved, boat-shaped planks of wood—each one depicting a body-map diagram used by slave-ship companies to calculate the “most efficient” physical placement of human cargo. Campos-Pons explains her discovery of this chilling first phase of Yoruba exile: “When I did this work, I found an illustration of the bottom of slave ships…there is such beauty in that awful thing…outlines of babies, girls, boys, adult females, males.”3 To acknowledge how faith in Yoruba gods was likely the only means of psychic survival during this inhumane voyage and subsequent bondage, each of the installation’s seven planks bears the name of a Santería orisha. Interspersed among them are carved, painted figures, personifications of the deities. Framed photographs of Afro-Cubans, many of them the descendants of slaves, are arranged like metaphoric headstones on the floor.
When The Seven Powers Come by the Sea was exhibited at the ICA Boston in 1992, Campos-Pons included a performance; she stood center stage of the installation wearing a white dress, “the simple attire of slaves and that of an iyawo or bride of the orisha, a newborn Santería Initiate.”4 Her arms and neck were covered with white numbers to recall how slaves were numbered during transport, and she recited stories about the seven Yoruba gods whose perceived oversight transformed misery into resilience and empowerment.
With Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits (2015), an installation organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Campos-Pons further distills Afro-Cuban history to pure abstraction. The work was inspired by the rusted architectural skeletons of Cuba’s defunct sugar factories, the mechanical process that distills raw sugar into rum, and a surreal painting—Creación de las Aves (Creation of the Birds) (1957)—by Remedios Varo, which depicts an artist, part woman and part owl, sitting by a ovoid-like contraption as it funnels liquid through a tube connected to a mysterious outside source.
The liquid turns to pigment that the owl-woman uses to paint birds that fly off the page and into the night. Campos-Pons’s installation covered 2,000 square feet with blown glass forms mimicking this strange contraption. She connected them to one another and grouped them together to suggest the structural supports of abandoned factories and the anatomy of a distillery plant. As rum essence flowed through an intestine-like network of fragile glass tubes, it decomposed, turning the sweet-scented air decidedly rank and rancid. Visitors riding a freight elevator up to the installation were serenaded by Leonard’s interpretations of rumba—a syncretic musical form that, like Santería, merges Yoruba tradition with other elements. A second musical composition playing within the installation space replicated the sounds of fragile glass.
In this remarkably complex work, Campos-Pons merges the bleak lives of slaves with the brute mindlessness of sugar lords, the sweetness of sugar and life with the stench of decay and grim survival, the unfettered dreams of a revolutionary hero with the spurious paranoia of a dictator, the pain of the oppressed with the light of faith and hope. All of which accounts for the sparkle, bristle, and visual intrigue of an oddly joyous work that bites to the bone.
The narrative continued last year at Documenta 14, which was divided between two very different locations—Athens and Kassel. Installing work in cities with divergent cultural, philosophical, and socio-economic identities sensitized many participating artists to an aspect of disengagement and relocation familiar to Campos-Pons, who embraced the Documenta theme, “Learning From Athens,” with particular excitement. Matanzas—her birthplace, and a city known for its splendid architecture and culture—is called the “Athens of Cuba.” But it also carries a heavy heart, for it was a major port-of-call for the slave trade. Matanzas Sound Map (2017), Campos-Pons’s Athens installation, captured these contradictions with an architectural collage highlighting Cuba’s shabbiness and beauty. It included blown glass vessels, metal tubing, and ritual objects similar to those in Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits, along with metal grillwork recalling the balconies of colonial Havana (though, remarkably, Campos-Pons found them in Athens), a wall of old crates, and an audio-visual component. The music scored a lively call and response between art, nature, and life as people live it day by day. To achieve this mix, Neil Leonard traveled across Cuba, recording everything from birdsongs and insect hisses to the ocean’s swish and roar, ambient conversations, vendor shouts, and spiritual chants. His music soared at the intersection of these refrains and the asynchronous motifs of jazz and electronic music.
The Kassel installation conceptually and physically transported a bit of Matanzas heritage via a taste of Afro-Cuban culture. Bar Matanzas (2017) consisted of a real bar, with a bartender serving drinks. Here, the soundtrack became a live performance, with the rhumba group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas and Leonard playing against a nature-inspired stage set designed by Campos-Pons. She also created a performance for the installation in which she dressed as an owl—a symbol of Athens that simultaneously reimagines Creación de las Aves, the surreal inspiration for her earlier work. In this way, Campos-Pons recycles mythical, spiritual, historical, familial, and aesthetic memories into an evolving conversation with time and heritage that grows into the future, wherever that takes her.
Joyce Beckenstein is a writer based in New York.
Notes
1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the artist are from interviews with the author, October 2017.
2 Lisa D. Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water (New Haven and London: Indianapolis Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007), p. 31.
3 Ibid, p. 41.
4 Ibid, p. 42
