It Was a Banquet, But There Weren’t Plates

María Teresa Cano: A Monologue/ Interview with Carmen María Jaramillo

Translated to English from Spanish

Special thanks to Carmen María Jaramillo for authorizing the translation of this interview

The Following is an English translation of a Spanish-language interview by Carmen María Jaramillo with the artist María Teresa Cano, originally published in Issue 17 Feminismos of the Colombian visual art magazine ERRATA#.

I am intrigued by the way that some artists approach topics related to gender, especially when their particular perspective differs from those informed by feminism and the social sciences. María Teresa Cano is one such artist. I have always been seduced by the irony she wields in her work, especially where she points to ideas related to the role of women in society. María Teresa Cano is an artist who avoids clichés and traditional frameworks. Her work, which often draws from autobiographical anecdotes, doesn’t attempt to illustrate a theory of any kind, and instead plays in the ambiguous territory between acidic irony and joy. In this interview, published in monologue format, María Teresa Cano talks about a few works that address gender from her particular lens. 

Yo servida a la mesa

I connect art with everyday experiences, though not because I think of the everyday thematically. Rather, I connect with these experiences by inhabiting myself as an active agent of my being and doing.

Yo servida a la mesa (Me, Served as a Meal, 1981) is a project that arose from a class assignment proposed to us by Beatriz Jaramillo. The assignment was to work with a topic of personal relevance. At the time, I was studying art at the university and I was in my second semester. 

On a table, nearly four meters long, there were several platters that contained my edible face fashioned with natilla (a Colombian-style custard), chicken and rice, vegetable souffle, white rice, chocolate, cake, and cookies. It was a banquet without plates. I participated in the first Salón Rabinovich (1981) with this work. The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) had organized another splendid and beautiful banquet on the second floor, however it was my face everyone wanted to eat. They even ate the white rice without silverware, with their hands; it was a beautiful, primal gesture in which manners themselves were forgotten. 

We were all surrounding the table and unified in our common task of eating fragments of my face. It was a macabre party, accompanied by laughter, comments, and interpretations. The readings ranged from being about the head of a decapitated woman, to being about a feminine body that offers herself. Even today I hear from those who were present, “We ate María Teresa.” 

In Yo servida a la mesa there are several texts at play. In the case of cannibalism, for example, indigenous people would eat the organs of the person that had been sacrificed to strengthen themselves; the head was related to thought, which in our culture is considered of primary importance. Other interpretations included the idea of “eating another” as a political metaphor; the religious interpretation, in which the body is offered in a ceremonious banquet to be eaten in the last supper; the death and deterioration of the body that is consumed; and even the idea of a woman who offers herself to be eaten, which can also carry erotic implications. 

The body is the medium through which I am here present. It is my way of generating encounters, of interconnecting and relating myself with others. The body becomes a mediator of feelings, histories, narrations, and emotions, in many cases ambiguous. That is why Thanatos and Dionysus appear together in this feast. 

After Yo servida a La mesa, I participated in the Salón Atenas (1984) at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO), with a work made of chocolate. It was my whole body cast in chocolate fragments: a giant chocolate treat. I have practically no photos of that work because when I arrived at the opening, visitors were already leaving with large fragments…They were like ants…In fact, it’s because of this that ants appear in my later work.

The Autobiographical

When I say that Yo servida a la mesa draws from personal experience, I’m referring to a particular event from my childhood. When I was a child, I had my first communion; the cake was the head of Christ and the children’s treats were the heads of angels. Yes, they were heads! My father made metal molds of my favorite doll. I still have one. It's lovely. You can see it in the photo. 

In my family we all have a relationship with art. It was myself, my father, and my five siblings. My house was a studio. We had easels, paints, wax, modeling clay, a lithography press, and a darkroom. My brothers worked in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. My father worked in painting and woodcarving, as well as with plaster, clay, and other materials. My house was always a laboratory for experimentation. I have been very fortunate. 

To be honest, I did not want to study art. I was interested in forestry engineering, but my father said, “only art,” and so my academic life became dynamic and enriching. I was formed in the 80s, amidst the conceptual art boom that happened in Medellín; it was a moment of great change. At the time, MAMM was very active. The museum believed very much in young artists and bet on them. I was formed as an artist in the midst of those dialogues and in those new spaces that the city offered for emerging artists. 

It is inevitable for the work of an artist to have something to do with autobiography—with everything that one lives, the reflections that those experiences generate, and the ideas one forms about what to say and how to say it. I feel very fortunate for the story of my family life. That’s why the autobiographical element is there in my work. Not because I wish to speak about myself, but rather to speak from my perspective, because I am also the other. I am them. 

Thus, one family story may trigger other stories that are not necessarily my own. One work that deals with this idea is Sucesión (Succession,1998). The work, which was part of a show at Valenzuela Kleener Gallery, is unfortunately incomplete. Last year, when it showed again in this gallery, there was a robbery of three of the pieces that make up the work; no one was held accountable, and nothing has been known since. Sucesión was originally composed of twelve tablecloths, each printed with images of plates and accompanied by texts which narrate fragments of stories shared by people close to me. The tablecloths are displayed on hangers that hang from a suspended clothing rack. Each of the tablecloths is individually cloaked in plastic. A single line of text unifies them: Olvidarás su olor (You shall forget their scent). Succesión refers to the transferable and consecutive nature of inheritance, alluding to the process by which a memory is constructed in relation to a space, in this case, to the familial environment. 

In my house we were two women and four men. My mother passed away when I was six years old. There was a very strong masculine presence in the home, and also an understanding between us about what I was not allowed to do and who I could be. My work Calor de hogar ( 2018), probably comes from this experience. It’s that iron that burns you; it carries with it that duality. Perhaps the burn is because of carelessness, happenstance, anger, or irony—because there is irony. The work is a simple piece of cloth over which I placed a hot iron. In some ways, the burn is like a mark of servitude. I hadn’t intended for it to become specifically about gender, however the task already carries with it that association. It alludes to the ambiguity between service and care and evokes the idea of tradition. Calor de hogar smells like the vapor that is released when a piece of fabric is dampened from ironing. 

Mail Art

In the 80s, Beatriz Jaramillo and Carlos Echeverri developed a very interesting group for mail art. At the time, letters were written by hand and the post was used as a local, national, and international medium of communication. Generally most mail art proposals were works on paper, and to participate, the work had to be small enough to fit inside of an envelope. We achieved an international level of exchange with the project.The responses were slow due to the nature of the postal system, which meant there was even the possibility of return mail. 

I loved to participate in that game of giving and taking, of sending something out without the certainty of a response. 

I participated with Calor de hogar. I sent out many prints, though in truth I don’t remember to whom, nor where they might be today. Each one was different, because the stain left by the iron was a register of the heat it produced, one-by-one. I made them on the kind of fabric that is typically used when ironing on an ironing board. Remember?

The project later became the subject of an exhibition titled Arte Correo. I recall that Alberto Sierra invited those of us who were emerging to participate alongside more established artists. It was very exciting! Everyone was putting together stamps and postmarks. It was a beautiful sight. I brought a cage that contained a messenger pigeon, which had a message tied to its foot that no one read. I remember that I would go every day to feed it corn and change its water. 
Now of course, we have the internet, and communication is impressively agile.

Intimacy and Gender

Though we often relate intimacy with those feelings and personal beliefs we keep for ourselves, there are also aspects of intimacy that can be found in traditional ideas of the feminine condition and its role in social contexts. Three of my works that address this topic are Sobre nupcias y ausencias (1992), Matrimonio y mortaja (1995) and Una habitación propia (1997).

Sobre nupcias y ausencias (On Nuptials and Absences, 1992): The work consists of printed text on a section of wallpaper. At the foot of the wall, there is a bed of potpourri that emits the strong scent of sweet flowers. The text is a fragment of the poem Olor Frutal by impassioned Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou: 

Cuando de los estantes

pulidos y profundos 

saco un brazado blanco 

de ropa íntima, 

por el cuarto se esparce 

un ambiente de huerto

Ese perfume es mío. Besarás mil mujeres 

jóvenes y amorosas, mas ninguna 

te dará esa impresión de amor agreste  

que yo te doy.

The poem evokes a feminine sentimentality, suffused with yearning, like that of an eternal love; an ambivalence between giving oneself up and reserving oneself to privacy. The poem arouses the idea of a woman whose body feels, vibrates, and desires.

Matrimonio y mortaja (Marriage and Shroud, 1995): The work is comprised of two metal panels upon which are installed two acrylic urns. One urn displays a wedding dress, and the other, flowers. Printed onto the acrylic is a fragment of the poem El Fuerte Lazo by Juana de Ibarbourou, which reads: 

Florí

Para ti

Córtame. Mi lirio.

Al nacer dudaba ser flor o ser cirio.

Matrimonio y mortaja is a popular saying that alludes to the inevitability of certain events in life, regardless of a person’s gender, though gender is what determines how you are treated and what you are taught. It affects the way you are expected to be and act too, even though I simply am. Despite that, I have still been burned by those traditional ideas that our culture imposes. 

I took the title of my work Una habitación propia (A Room of One’s Own, 1997) from Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. The work consists of a house constructed in fabric and suspended 50 centimeters from a green floor and blue walls. The walls feature text that reads: Lentamente construido (built slowly). No one can enter the house, nor touch it. It can only be appreciated from a distance. In the interior of the house is a blue light that changes intensity in sync with an audio track of my own breathing. Una habitación propia relates to my own condition as a woman, a woman who is solitary, pensive, and independent, a woman who decides, vibrates, and determines, without necessarily waving a feminist flag, because I find the -isms to be too radical. I’m not interested in fighting against any position, nor in adopting a cause as if I were going to war. I only wish to feel that I am who I am, from inside out, and in this case, from my perspective as an artist. 

* The English language translations of these poem fragments by Juana de Ibarbourou are not a part of Cano’s work. I made the choice to translate them alongside the original Spanish-language poem for the convenience of English-speaking readers.