Carmela Garcia

On 17 May MUSAC is to unveil Constelación, Carmela García’s most recent project, where she continues her ongoing exploration of gender and identity, moving from her traditional medium of photography into video, drawing, installation and workshops. Produced specifically for the exhibition venue at MUSAC, Constelación addresses the relationships between a group of women who shared a specific place and time: Paris as a city, the rive gauche as a specific location, the years between the wars (the 1920s and 30s) as a timeframe. Working within these parameters, the artist documents and reconstructs the presence of a group of female identities who, through their cultural, artistic and social activities –and indeed their very lifestyle– shaped the debate on the modern woman, defying convention and the dominant hierarchies surrounding the roles of male and female, and modifying sociocultural references and behaviours in a way that remains entirely relevant today.

About Constelación Constelación takes the artist one step further in her inquiry into gender and identity. Here, Carmela García focused her work on a specific place and time: Paris as a city, the rive gauche as a specific location, the years between the wars (the 1920s and 30s) as a timeframe. Within this framework, the artist documented and reconstructed a group of characters, of unique identities, who converged in that place and time and often lived and worked together: women such as Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Stein, Eileen Gray, Suzi Solydor, Janet Flaner, Telma Woods, Marie Laurencin, Claude Cahun, Suzanne Malherbe, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Tamara de Lempicka, Colette, Channa Orloff, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney, amongst others. They make up the Constellation in the title, with the presence shining through the works on show.

Carmela García traced these women’s lives, their work, the image and symbols that each projected, their relationships and the places where they lived. With all this material, she reconstructed the cartography of a collective identity. An exercise in restitution and renewal that poses a range of questions such as the relationship between space, memory and identity; geography and gender; the subject’s representation and self-representation; self-perception as a way of thinking and constructing one’s identity; or the relationship between artistic and sexual identity.

The research and analysis process that underlies the project is presented as the starting point for the exhibition. A huge collage, under the title Constellation, was transferred from the artist’s studio to MUSAC. The panel reveals how the project was structured, the paths that were followed then abandoned –or not even tackled– the connections that were gradually established, the hunches, the locations pinpointed on a map of Paris. From the artist’s notebooks, also unbound and put on display, the viewer can glean an impression of how she drew up a geography and an imaginary realm on the verge between the real and the artistic, between the historical and the merely plausible. From this material, viewers can project and reconstruct the exhibition, embark on a process of their own, establish their own connections.

Starting from this initial piece, the exhibition develops along two lines that are closely connected and often intersect. These lines unravel a dual cartography shaped by a constant flow of documentary and artistic references from the time, reconfigured through the artist’s reconstruction and fictionalisation work. A map that revisits the places where these women lived and made art; a map of the identities conjured up and re-enacted by the symbolic image they developed as their own characters, in a balance between representation and selfrepresentation

The series of portraits I want to be… delves precisely into this play on representation and selfrepresentation. Carmela García reworks Berenice Abbott’s portraits of many of these women, updating them and transferring them to our present day. Abbott’s perception of people from the past switches and overlaps with a contemporary perception of other individuals, thus generating a visual crossover that speaks of the possibilities of constructing a woman’s image through new identities, imagined or represented.

Another of the pieces on display is closely linked to the portrait series. Casting suggest a game based on allocating characters and parts on the basis of an analysis of the conditions that define the production of images. Carmela García draws up a large cast in order to allocate star system celebrities the roles of the different historical personalities she refers to in the project. In contrast with I want to be..., here she chooses to highlight the artifice implicit in creating one’s image, the weight of photogenia and the predominance of convention when it comes to representing the subject.

Both approaches meet in the piece Une fête dans le jardin, a large group of drawings by way of a storyboard that suggests a film very different to that which we would have imagined on the basis of Casting. Here, the past is recreated on the fertile borders of plausibility, through the conversion of historical sources into an alternative yet believable fiction loaded with symbols and meaning. A subjective reconstruction evocative of a broader and more complex identity construction process. A process that puts our group of protagonists at the heart of this plausible scrip.

By way of a conclusion and reflection upon the three works we find Espejo, a mirror on whose surface the artist has written the names of the women approached in the exhibition. The mirror is a key element in and highly representative of the strategy of constructing one’s identity, thanks to its symbolic and disruptive potential: it represents the importance of selfperception and subjectivity; the tension between reflected images and representation, between image and identity. Carmela García references Claude Cahun’s “magic mirror” and “mirror with memory” and in its reflection, sums up the play on identities and underlying subjectivities that inspired the entire project.

The locations mentioned above are mapped out in Escenarios, a large piece made up of thirty photographs in various formats arranged on the wall by way of an imaginary map drawn from memory. Locations are treated within the whole as atmospheres for identity and for exchange, for affirmation and encounters: homes, studios, gardens, streets, bookshops, brasseries and nightclubs. A map where Gracía registers presences and absences with the same upfront honesty, speaking in the plainest possible terms of how Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop “La masion des Amis des Livres” was converted into a hairdresser’s, or how Suzi Solydor’s cabaret became a brothel; in the same way as she photographs Colette’s home or Channa Orloff’s impeccably preserved studio.

The few plaques or texts that commemorate these women’s presence in these places also reveal the selective monumentisation they have suffered. Enduring presences and absences that establish a field of visibility for this close bond between gender and location, between identity and space. These settings trace a route through Paris that automatically becomes a spatial metaphor of identity. The formal strategy that shapes these photographs has a lot to do with the act of re-photographing and re-mapping, of revisiting previously recorded places in order to subvert, re-read or re-map the material elements they are made up of or the symbolic aspects they contain. The women who inhabited and continue to inhabit these settings with their symbolic presence established a close connection between their lives and their creative universes, they weaved a tight bond between the person and the character as a vessel for emancipation and the affirmation of an identity. This connection is translated into images by means of an alternation between indoors and outdoors, public and private spaces, the intimate and the social spheres, two traditionally segregated fields that these women succeeded in reconciling through their choices and their lifestyles. Thus, the empty settings for Carmela García’s characters are a way of stating an absence, an invisible topography that emerges as a recollection and a symbol.

The same issue is dealt with in the video Bord de mer, a journey through the house designed and built by Eileen Gray, which gradually becomes an indoor landscape of considerable poetic and subjective quality, heightened by the constant sound of the sea. The rumbling of waves dragging stones along the shore and the light that floods the house’s interior are a presence unaltered by time, in contrast to the building materials that have aged over the years. The house itself and all its rooms swell with the simultaneous evocation of presence and absence, gradually shifting into a landscape for memories.

Constelación is an exhibition that takes on the form of meta-fiction: characters, places, works and identities overlap and interrelate through a collection of documentary, artistic and fictional material. It traces the course from the person to the character, all the way to the biographical icons that these women represent, as symbols of the broader question of identity. It captures the locations and settings they moved in as landscapes of symbols and memories. It addresses the fictionalisation of those characters and possibly our own fictionalisation as a process loaded with transformative potential. These stages and characters appear as true biographic stylisations, as constantly re-enacted icons of lives and identities.

Constelación. The book On occasion of the exhibition, a large-format artist’s book will be published under the same title. It will cover Carmela García’s project, with a wealth of documentary, fictional and artistic material, as well as Berenice Abbott’s portraits of the women, works by Romaine Brooks, Gisele Freund, Thelma Woods, Marie Laurencin and Claude Cahun-Suzanne Malherbe, amongst others; all tied in with Carmela García’s images reconstructing these identities as contemporary characters or revisiting the settings, both public and private, where they lived their lives.

Carmela Garcia
Constelación (Constellation)

Kurator: Alberto Martín

Ort: Halle 2