Daily archeology
Her projects are born from a plural observation of the context that surrounds her: be it the environmental and political problems or the denunciation of the injustices suffered by women or other disadvantaged groups.
Frequently, in the first phase, Marisa is involved in an experiential fieldwork based on repeated action (for example, the continued collection of artificial waste on the beach, the exposure of fruits and seeds to the process of putrefaction, or the methodical photo shoot of visitors to her studio for years).
Feeling the thickness of time is fundamental in her work, intertwining personal and collective memory. In Matadero Express (2003) she managed to capture the last vital moments of the old slaughterhouse in Madrid before changed its use to cultural functions. In the high part of the drying section, the artist composed unforgettable images of ghostly female presence in dialogue with the painful history of space.
These instinctual actions, so as not to "lose the now", and sometimes during a trip, end up configuring a set of starting images, which are joined to a file of objects, books, waste, old gadgets... a file of conversations that has been accumulating in her famous Madrid studio on Argensola Street, turned into a meeting point for people interested in culture, always open to welcome different generations of artists.Marisa "embraces life" and here I make a conscious quote to the book by Vananda Shiva[1], a classic of ecofeminism, and I encourage you to read the work of Marisa González from this perspective.
[1] Staying Alive:Women, Ecology and Development, 1988.
Love and memory, Metaphors of the past
Affections and archeology coexist in the work of Marisa González. That's why Love and Memory, the title of this exhibition, sums up well the selection of works, which far from covering all her practice, act as push buttons for some of her key themes.
A passionate impulse, a desire, starts the motivation. An impulse that in principle can be a gesture, a habit, moves its machinery. To affirm it, it is enough to observe the mountains of dehydrated fruits arranged in her studio and her collection of tiny remains of dolls collected on the beach.The micro and the macro. Hence the relevance of the choice of the video: Poem of love, hermaphrodite passion (2010) in this exhibition; in which two snails make love, under the humorous and zen gaze of the artist who, from raw simplicity, views the extraordinary spectacle of life.
From that nude and lucid tone, Marisa makes a file from which she will choose final forms through a laborious process of polishing and making decisions. In this "cooling" of the impulse she is aided by technologies she uses, always from the time of the work, in order to impregnate contemporaneity to the pieces and a very personal touch in which, together with the geometric tone, silhouettes and shadows predominate.
The time is recorded in the pieces and itself becomes the temporal waste of a moment. A good example, is a series of portraits, that she took to the travel companions from the art world, she made this pictures with the Lumena photo-video-computer system, invented by John Dunn, student of Sonia Sheridan. Sonia donated in 1992 the system so that this graphic method could be disseminated in Spain. This technology allowed the artist to generate digital portraits for her many colleagues, critics and friends from the art world that during the 90s went through her studio. Among those portrayed are: Pedro Garhel, Claudia Giannetti, Menene Gras, Lola Dopico, Carlos Jiménez and José Ramón Danvíla, among many others.
Environmental art[1] and ecology: " to embrace life"
It seems that at some point in our history mother nature was transformed exclusively into raw material and the natural world was no longer venerated. For decades, an indiscriminate pillaging of materials has been taking place; leading to unsustainable situations of food shortages and poverty in some poor areas of the planet. In this context of radical devaluation of the environment, women have been acquiring a greater role at social conflict and socio-environmental movements, configuring a kind of popular feminism focused on the relationships between body and territory.
Marisa González has been interested not only in making art related to the feminist engagement, but also in the exploration of the land as "territory", extended to social, anthropological, geographical and economic aspects. In the mid-1980s, in books like Embracing the Earth, Indian physicist and philosopher Vananda Shiva was already focusing on the "green revolution" to criticize neoliberal globalization, and the governments' dependence on transgenic multinationals. The artist transfers this feeling, in a poetic and conceptual way, to her magnificent series Chayotes, vida muerte y transfiguración (2018-19), a fascinating project that can be read from spiritual and ecofeminist perspective. The mutant forms that she portrays offer a triple vision: the reflection on the plurality of sexed bodies, the allusion to the finitude of the existence and the invitation to act with urgency if we want to save the Earth.
The effects of chemistry and pollution, under her gaze, transform the bodies of the chayotes into deliriously beautiful forms... Perhaps if beauty is generated in such decadence... there is still hope.
Susana Blas, Madrid on May 21, 2019.
[1] Within the ecofeminist environmentalist trend I would refer to authors and paradigmatic works such as Helen and Newton Harrison (USA), Lagoon Cycle (1974-1984); Mierle Ukeles (USA), Touch Sanitation (1979 -1980); Pretty Ely (Australia), Murray River Punch (1980); Helène Aylon (USA) Earth Ambulance (1982-1992); Agnes Denes (USA), Wheatfield - A Confrontation Battery Landfill Park, Downtown Manhattan (1982); Cornelia Hesse-Honneger (Germany), 51 verschiedenen Fliegenrücken / 51 Diptera, Wild Flies, Different Species (1984); or Jill Orr (Australia) Walking on Planet Earth (1989), among many others.