Jana Astanov interviews Sandra Lapage about her curatorial project “In Praise of Magic” at Local Project Art Space in Long Island City.
Featured image Eneida Sanches, Etching Skirt.
“As women, latinas, and artists, the initiative of gathering forces as a group has been fantastic, as we have been working in tune, without hierarchy, allowing each artist to offer her best feature to contribute to the work. We’ve been supporting each other, self organizing and achieving a beautiful outcome, the result of active empathy and collaborative work. Alone, what would have we achieved? Together, we transcended our geographic and circunstancial limitations to connect and offer to the public a dialogue between our works, united by an objective (finding possibilities to show our work) while creating strong connections and conversations amongst ourselves.”
CREATRIX Magazine: What is the idea behind “In Praise of Magic”?
Sandra Lapage: This project was born out of a simple Instagram take over last year. In it, I was free to offer any kind of curatorial approach and illustrate it as I wished. As an artist who has often collaborated with other artists and put together exhibitions, I had never had the chance to map, name and rethink my current creative inspirations in a curatorial selection; in addition to the sources of inspiration that lie beyond visual arts, I also felt like mapping artists that move in close circles to mine (not necessarily knowing them personally), with whom I can establish a direct dialogue, and that have direct connections to my own artwork. And most of all, they are artists who work within the realm of intuition and of material experimentation. In the last year and half or so, I have been reformulating my understanding of my creative process, and it was in a talk with artist Eneida Sanches, included in the exhibition, that I first realized how the fuel of my work is creative trance. Creative trance is for me the height of the creative process, a valuable moment of complete withdrawal of the ego and of profound self-discovery in conjunction to a fuller consideration and better understanding of the world. More than a curator, I have been acting as an artist in search of connections and of connecting others, and trying to make sense of my life and of my practice.
As I kept on researching the idea of trance, or at least removal of rational control (partially, or in the best case, totally) over the creative process, I realized how aligned to our present crisis this standpoint is. In a world obsessed with progress, and deluded by this utopian ideal, which is symptomatic of a society that only priorizes economic, technological and scientific evolution in detriment of other areas of knowledge, it becomes urgent to look into and consider other practices and modes of knowledge, including indigenous and ancient epistemologies to reestablish effective, philosophical and spiritual balance.
CXM: As the exhibition presents eight female Latin American artists, is there a particular tradition of shamanism that is shared by all of them?
SL: The curatorial choice was mainly one of creative proximity, but once I realized that we were all Latin American artists and shared cultural roots, I realized it might not be a coincidence, and that the esthetic and philosophical concerns imbued in the works might translate a cultural trait, as each of the artists are in contact with certain cultural traditions, many of them within a context of cultural displacement or cultural hybridity.
However, two artists in the show employ a particular tradition of shamanism or magic: Julie Brazil refers to Mayan mythology in her Quitapenas piece, and Eneida Sanches draws imagery and experience from the practice of Candomblé, a strong Afro-Brazilian culture in which she was brought up.
Most of the artists in the exhibition do not refer to or use any traditional or preexistent shamanic or magical ritual, but they are all moved by an intense sensibility to their quotidian surroundings and materials, and in that sense work in terms of a cosmogonic connection to the world. Similarly to indigenous and ancient and mythical explanations of the origin of the universe, or cosmogonies, the cosmogonic connection to the world present in these bodies of work is translated by an attitude of understanding the world as one entity, which needs to be nurtured and respected in all its aspects; it is translated by a view of the world that does not put the human element above nature, and finds relevance in all small things.
CXM: Please tell me briefly about each artist and how their work relates to each other in context of your curatorial premise?
SL: All the artists in the exhibition make use of tactile sensuality, mantric repetition or incorporation into an unknown or entity, or all of the above. Their work exist through intuition and the cultivation of moments of creative trance.
Eneida Sanches (Brazil) presents a rich repertoire of images drown both from Candomblé and from her personal experience, recombining them in a body of work that presents art as trance; her drawing and collage piece shows a mysterious object and divinatory hands. For Eneida, reevaluating the current use of Cartesian thought may lead us all into an age of balance, in which modes of knowledge will coalesce in harmony with the here and now.
Jimena Schlaepfer (Mexico) presents elements of nature as a basis for the creation of fantasy and fiction. She has a passion for manual work and craft, such as weaving paper, and slow, accumulative work and operations. In the show, she presents two woven paper pieces and one ceramic sculpture of a trilobite, a prehistoric animal that constantly reemerges in her work as masks, heads or on its own, in a reference to the survival of the species.
Julie Brasil (Guatemala/Brazil) presents artistic ritual as a possibility for healing trauma; her durational performance is presented as a candid camera recording in the exhibition, in which, dressed in a embroidered mantle adorned with a hundred Quitapenas and family heirlooms, she welcomes a sitter by her side, and listens to his/her/their ailments in order to alleviate pain: Quitapenas are tiny guardian dolls to which are attributed magical powers as they act as listeners, easing people’s problems.
Mônica Lóss (Brazil/USA) shows playful and lush wearable soft sculptures; in her work, she revisits affectively craft and deconstructs these traditions, subverting their function. The gloves in the gallery invite the visitor to play with her pieces and consider their intricate details and the pleasure of manipulating them. Also in the gallery, a mask made of similar materials present a game of hide and seek, simultaneously hiding and revealing, speaking of body and nature, human and animal, the female and its relationship with ancestrality.
María de los Vientos (Colombia/Brazil) approaches mythological images and rituals of power as a starting point for her work. Her photo-performances present a tension between local imaginaries and Western culture in a construction of fantastical narratives and entities. She seeks for the spiritual in small things of everyday life.
María Yolanda Liebana (1st generation Latinx US Peru/Colombia) simultaneously reveals and hides herself through the creation of a persona, Venus Glotona; her work resides in the realm of kitsch and of the ultra ornamental, enhancing beauty to the point of the grotesque through artificial means and excessive consumerism, as well as low-brow technology and social media language. She appropriates drag and other elements from pop culture to present herself in extravagant portraits and video-performances.
Vanessa Freitag (Brazil/Mexico) also presents wearable soft sculptures; for her, revisiting traditional crafts from her childhood memories is a tool for dealing with displacement. She employs repurposed and second hand clothes and fabric and often presents her sculptures as photo-performance, in which the artist appears as engulfed, devoured, surrounded, but at the same time protected by her work.
And, for myself, I create sculptures from trash and discarded materials which are often malleable and even wearable, and address a series of environmental and behavioral issues. In the emergence of the unconscious, I am interested in the appearance of primal forms, remnants of timeless myths and ceremonial objects, and in this sense I refer to art as shamanic practice: by limiting the presence of consciousness and the censoring ego in the process, I hope to channel an essential poetry.
CXM: Do you think that creating work that inscribes itself within a particular shamanic tradition is synonymous with female empowerment?
SL: This is an elaborate question that I found better replied in collaboration with the artists in the exhibition. As discussed in the group, we considered that most shamanic traditions do not necessarily mainly pertain to a gender, although Eneida Sanches did indicate the strong role of matriarchy in Candomblé. But what I do find important is the fact that a creative practice centered around creative trance and intuition does bring about a better sense and understanding of self, and that in itself is empowering.
Also from our conversations, artist Maria de los Vientos cited the book “Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype”. For her, the wild woman is a reference to women who develop their intuition and the logic of deep instincts, not only from an animal standpoint but thought sensitivity, through the perception of the body and of the senses.
This would indicate a quality to the so-called “witches”, or non domesticated women. Being wild would mean keeping open a communication channel with the self, without rational intermediaries, obeying a profound sense of knowledge from what cannot be explained but one simply knows.
And this, for Maria, brings true freedom, which brings about individual empowerment.
Speaking for myself, I do believe that the work leads and shapes me. I discover myself through it, but I am also transformed by it. And that allows growth. I am thankful for being an artist, being able to work with sensibility towards the world and myself, and being able to identify a growing community of like-minded individuals.
Being able to work and act in a personally fulfilling activity allows me to feel less powerless in regards to the many crises the world is facing. Not feeling paralyzed is paramount to being able to exact or at least move towards change.
CXM: How do you see the role of the female artists in the post Covid world?
SL: Personally, I am still having a hard time considering a post Covid world, when so many parts of the world and notedly Latin America is still strongly assuaged by the disease. However, I do find that the pause created by the pandemic brought realizations and the need of changes, in a world increasingly affected by the rise of right wing populism and even extreme right wing politicians, as well as generalized ecocide; this exhibition is the result of a collective effort, and maybe this kind of self agency its what we can do to strengthen our voices in the context of political, affective, psychological, spiritual and philosophical decline. Over the last six months, we have been meeting and organizing at distance, to produce and coordinate this project.
As discussed with the artists, we found that the biggest strength of this endeavor was collective agency. As artist Vanessa Freitag put forward, as women, latinas, and artists, the initiative of gathering forces as a group has been fantastic, as we have been working in tune, without hierarchy, allowing each artist to offer her best feature to contribute to the work. We’ve been supporting each other, self organizing and achieving a beautiful outcome, the result of active empathy and collaborative work. Alone, what would have we achieved? Together, we transcended our geographic and circunstancial limitations to connect and offer to the public a dialogue between our works, united by an objective (finding possibilities to show our work) while creating strong connections and conversations amongst ourselves.
And, last but not least, in terms of gender, the curatorial choices did intend to favor a female predominance in the group in an active resistance against the unbalanced presence of female or female identifying artists in the art world, but in no way I feel that the group is exclusively about female identity, although it did bring a nurturing feeling of sorority, which I believe, as the group hopefully grows and lives on into new projects, will survive and develop independently of the gender of the artists involved.
CXM: Can art be perceived as spiritual practice? How does this concept translate through the works presented in In Praise of Magic?
SL: I firmly believe art is a spiritual practice. Here, I draw from the curatorial text from the exhibition to speak of spirituality through art practice. Indigenous epistemologies often teach us that the universe is a cosmogonic system. Myths and folklore stem from magical thought, which offers an analogy between microcosm (mind and body), and macrocosm (nature, universe, cosmos). In magical thought, there is a connection between name and thing, between object and image. In this sense, I propose to speak of magic from a secular, or at least non-religious point of view. After all, Jung speaks of Mana, Bergson of “élan vital”, Jane Bennett of vibrant matter, Jeremy Narby of universal genetic communication through DNA, and Isabelle Stengers of the intimate bond between human and non-human: there is a sense of magic in these investigations, in the mystery yet to unveil. Mystery and magic.
An art process that strongly engages its creator shares its state of trance with its listener, reader, viewer, in a moment of wonderment and charm which ignites magic in a metaphorical sense. If we think of the sense of charm as the power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration, we can also recall its etymological root, of incantation or magic spell. In that sense, all poetic-creative thought and process function as magic, producing a state of charm in both creator and receptor when achieving high levels of involvement.
Wonderment and the contemplation of mystery is a spiritual practice.
About Sandra Lapage
Sandra Lapage lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She got her MFA from the Maine College of Art in 2013. She has participated in collective and solo exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the United States, notedly at the Brazilian Embassy in Brussels (2007), at the Ribeirão Preto Art Museum for the 2006 exhibition program, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo in 2012, at the Gowanus Loft (NYC) in 2014 and 2015, at the Blumenau Art Museum and Aura Arte Contemporânea (São Paulo) in 2018, Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto and Andrea Rehder Arte Contemporânea (São Paulo) in 2019; in 2020 at A60 Contemporary Artspace (Milan), Kunsthalle am Hamburguer Platz (Berlin), Surface Gallery (UK), Tianjin International Digital Imaging Exhibition (China), SP-Arte (Brazil), CICA Museum (Korea) and Art/World Brazil and Art to Wear, BG Gallery (Los Angeles/Artsy); Antipode Gallery (France), The Royal Society of American Art, Sculptors Alliance (NYC), John B. Aird Gallery (Canada), and Espronceda (Spain) in 2021.
Sandra has resided at various institutions such as the Fondation Château Mercier (Switzerland) and NARS Foundation (NYC), Camac Art Center (France) and Paul Artspace (USA), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Monson Arts, and will hopefully attend ART OMI and Odyssée (at Château de Goutelas, France) in 2021/2022.
Her work was featured on Bluebee Magazine V. 6, Artmarket Magazine 50, Friend of the Artist V. 12, Art Hole Magazine, July 2020, Create Magazine, Issue XIX, Studio Visit Magazine V. 48 (April 2021).
Sandra was a visiting artist at the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) and Maine College of Art (Portland), United States.
In addition to her solo work, she develops a collaborative work in the collective Eclusa and runs, with 4 other artists, the independent art space Galpão Japaratuba in São Paulo.
About the interviewer:
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, a writer, a poetess and an independent curator born in Mazury Lake District of Poland and currently living in the Shawangunk Mountains, in upstate New York. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine: www.creatrixmag.com, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. Her work includes performance art, photography, sound art, and installation. Together with her partner Niko van Egten she co-created an electronic music group ASTRALOOP featuring her poetry in dark electronic arrangements. She is also the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox.
