Publications
Farewell to the Rhombus
La Casa Encendida-Madrid/L'Alhondiga-Bilbao.2016
Design: Filiep Tacq
Writings: Nuria Enguita (curator), Pedro G. Romero, Teresa Lanceta & Thomas Golsenne.
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Exhibition: Adiós al rombo
Publication (PDF)
Writings
- White Roses - Teresa Lanceta
The Beni Ouarain Handira
Capes or Handiras in the Middle Atlas
In the Middle Atlas mountains, Beni Ouarain women inherit a zealously guarded textile tradition that, when mastered, allows them to make decisions that render each of their fabrics unique.
Handiras are lengths of woven wool that women wrap about themselves like a cape. These garments protect them from the harshness of winter, and their patterns, composition and colours identify the wearers as members of a particular social and ethnic group.
The visual language of handiras is astonishing: from a distance, a handira may seem like a monotonous succession of stripes, but a close and careful inspection reveals a vibrant geometry in constant motion, as the fine, intricate patterns contain a wealth of barely perceptible variations that create shifting points of interest and endless interrelations.
I own three handiras. They are not antiques or collector’s items. Even so, I hold them in high esteem. As commodities, these handiras were subject to an undeniably inequitable economic exchange. I paid what the market stipulated, knowing that the market is a convention that does not take into account the fair value of labour, and that commercial transactions are not usually conducted with honest scales: what for some is an advantage they are unwilling (or unable) to decline, for others is an imposition from which they are unable to escape.
In exchange for very little money, woven fabrics and all kinds of valuable items travel far from where they were made, and, when they change hands, their function and meaning change as well. Heritage and youth: the most precious assets are constantly being absorbed by the dominant world.
The Ermine Cape, a Symbol of Royalty: The Body as a Usurped, Vacant Public Space
In a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, a young woman holds an ermine in her arms. It is the last living ermine, at least in the history of art. Thereafter it merely served to frame the faces of various ladies, as in the portrait by El Greco that inspired the Spanish film La dama del armiño. It is the same title and sense used by Lubitsch in That Lady in Ermine. Thus, since Leonardo, all ermines have been skinned to flaunt the power and prestige of their wearers, as is also the case in fairy tales: evil stepmothers and beefy and unscrupulous versions of King Midas.
Furs are still used today, even in mild winter climates, although ermines have been replaced by farmed mink. But lo and behold, on 30 April 2013 we received reports of the coronation of the king and queen of Holland and the return of the ermine, this time in the form of a cape—again, a fairy tale.
Oh, Holland, you who are so admired for your social progress, for your defence of human rights, your respect for the environment, your bicycles and canals! Now you offer us a monarch cloaked in ermine! Holland, seat of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, you who have efficiently separated the marijuana market from that of hard drugs! Oh, Holland, you who turned flowers into currency and Amsterdam into the city of everyone’s dreams, you crown your king with ermine capes!
On-line we see a mummified image of that event. In it, the new monarchs, accompanied by a host of international royal guests, pose suspended in a fictitious instant, so long it cannot possibly exist, freezing the moment as only photography and blue blood heirs—who have made the act of inheriting eternal—can do it. In that photograph the royalty, like so many wax figures, exhibits an active immobility that guarantees their current status. One by one, the portrayed faces clearly say, “We are the ones who avoid the battlefield of yore”. Power and wealth radiate from the symbols, the stances, the garments, the jewels, from the tiara of Kashmir sapphires and South African diamonds worn by the newly crowned queen. But nothing can compare to the ermine cape in which the king finds himself doubly vested with authority.
The Internet, which sometimes raises the curtain, says that the ermine cape is an imitation, a replica of the genuine article used by a forbear at her coronation, but the king doesn’t seem to mind. Royalty isn’t real either; it is a lifeless body. Something is missing from the photographs: the hieratic self-containment with which the tsars, emperors and kings of old displayed their power. The undisguised cheerfulness of these Dutch royals makes them look more like lottery winners than monarchs. We are and yet are not if we do not hold command. Cate Blanchett had it in Elizabeth; the command conferred by the authority of her art.
The ermine cape is accompanied by a sword, insignias and a sash, as well as by a tiara-crowned woman of undeniably overdeveloped beauty, achieved in a way that sparked controversy in her country of origin.
The lady in Leonardo’s portrait holds a domestic animal which, at the time, was used to exterminate mice and rats.
On-line we read: “The little princesses are very well-mannered, and the youngest, who we must remember is only six years old, is adorable.”
Strolling through the city, experiencing the smells, the colours, soaking up the atmosphere and the closeness of people was wonderful. Residents, waiters, merchants and musicians came to recognise us, and we them. It always surprised me, when we were there sitting on the terrace of a bar, that our hearts did not break at the sight of so many cripples, many of them with operable conditions. But no, Jamaa el-Fna, the king of squares, draws you into its spinning wheel, and all you see after a while is an arena of gladiators who magnify life. And, although the pain never goes away, it is anaesthetised [Teresa Lanceta, “Ciudades vividas”, in Luis Claramunt, exh. cat. (Barcelona: MACBA and MNAC, 2012)].
Weaving Woman, Woman Weaver: In the High Mountains (título grande)
Life passes by in a profoundly forgetful interval.
The Handira
I feel it is a person—a woman who lives, shares a sky with me and is there, just as I am here.
That person has been revealed as a particular person, a particular woman with a particular life. She has been revealed as a person.
And she is like me. She was born as I was, and we have the same profound rights. Deep down, we are pretty much the same. We are all the same despite our uniqueness, our differences, and that is something I experience intensely with the handiras.
I feel a special bond with one in particular. In its modesty, this cape alerts me to the wisdom stored up in textile abstraction and the culture it embodies. It lacks the subtlety of more valuable pieces; its abstraction is not as rich and its technique is less sophisticated, but it exudes freshness and joy. Perhaps it was intended to be sold quickly, or maybe there were other more pressing demands on the maker’s time, or it may just be the work of a very young girl. Whatever the case, I have now owned this handira for more than twenty years, and it still has the power to move me, for it makes me feel, not the style or the period, but the person, the woman who wove it and with whom, though we may not belong to the same place, time or religion, I have much in common. I think of that young woman weaving while she cares for her family, chats with her friends and watches the flock under the wideopen sky, amid pastures and flowers, in her quest for happiness.
Through the handira, I received an unexpected gift, a concise assertion: it opened my eyes to the presence of another. It informed me of the existence of a real, unique, flesh-and-blood person, not an anonymous, anodyne, interchangeable being. The handira does not reveal a name or specify a precise place, but it does point to a real living being and highlights the fact that collective art is neither a uniform magma nor an enormous hand that is present in everything. These are concrete persons, individuals, unique and singular. The handira taught me that the artistic object is not indifferent: above all else, it relates people to one another. Oh, the myriad cultural, cognitive and emotional vicissitudes human beings anonymously inflict on each other through artistic objects!
Skin
The wind is harsh, strong and relentless, giving them tough skin. When they touch mine, I think they find it raw, soft... And I can’t think of a reason why they should like that.
Yesterday I had a dream. Bob Marley was walking down the aisle of the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo: he had received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. He was not alone. His fellow band members and some Jamaican children accompanied him. With their bulging hats and the musicality of their fragile, lilting gait, the Rastafarians reminded me of the aliens in Mars Attacks! But here music didn’t splatter any brains. On the contrary, it brought happiness to all those present, sending them into raptures of joy. As the Rastafarians made their way to the front of the hall, people swayed rhythmically and the colours grew more intense. The doors were opened to the curious onlookers outside, who entered unimpeded. Queen Sofia, whose pale pink dress had morphed into a bright fluorescent red, danced with carefree sweetness and, thanks to television, the joy travelled to the most remote corners of the world, leaving no doubt that Bob Marley is actually an angel come to Earth to tell us that love is the only thing.
Whether you are hearing “One Love” for the first or the umpteenth time, the sensation is always joyous. Bob Marley and his songs strike me as a globalisation of goodness. They speak of the fullness of humility and of love. Listening to him, people know that the plain little room he offers his beloved in song is the place where happiness dwells.
His ballads are heard and imitated on every continent... But not all forms of artistic expression achieve this kind of universality. Some refer to a particular setting, to a specific culture, a history or a need; they are attached to a certain place or time, like the handiras and the ahidous, the Berber songs and dances. And this is no reason to steamroller them.
Although the cosmetic industry experiments constantly, even on animals, to find recipes for smooth, soft, raw skin, some people may be fonder of the tough, brittle skins with which they share their lives under the blazing sun and relentless wind.
Curiosity
There were two humorous questions. One was about uncircumcised men—what are they like?—and the other about night clubs—what are they like? Now these questions have lost all interest. No, I can’t forget all the things that have happened, nor that the situation is becoming more and more radically unbearable. That former curiosity about an alien world has been replaced by the need to survive in an alien world, which is always painful.
Innocence has two definitions: the lack of malice in intentions, and the absence of guilt in wrongdoing.
Innocence, in the sense of guilelessness, naiveté or inexperience, is part of the growth and learning process, and for that reason it is protected and cherished in childhood. The innocence of children is radiant, opening the doors to knowledge and emotions. But in adults, when it implies the absence of accountability and a disregard for consequences, innocence is a form of unjustifiable violence, because knowing is an inherent obligation of human beings.
In the 1980s, “low cost” tourism was still a thing of the future, and places like the Ramblas in Barcelona and the Santa Cruz district in Seville had not yet been turned into theme parks, into remakes of themselves. Tourists flocked to Marrakesh in droves, but that perverse practice of making reality more real had not extended beyond a handful of bazaars and restaurants, and had not even come close to reaching rural areas.
In those days, I travelled to places where the loom was the heart of the home. We were interested in and curious about one another, while each occupied her proper place. It was a time of innocence, a guilty innocence in which everything seems right.
We foreigners only experience positive situations and suffer nothing more than a few minor incidents, which we later look back on as amusing anecdotes [Teresa Lanceta, “Ciudades vividas”, op. cit.].
Face to Face
No would be the answer to the first question.
No would be the answer to the second question.
No to the third and fourth, and so on until a yes is reached, more devastating and despairing than the negatives that preceded it.
The Colour Black
I vividly recall a specific night. The darkness was so intense... that I can truly say I saw the colour black; not darkness but black itself. From afar everything verged on black. It was impossible to see anything at all. I have never seen anything like it. Up close there was a bit of silver, but from a distance there was nothing.
In the south, chiaroscuro marks the day. The sun burns and blinds, forcing us into the shade, where we can see. After rolling along the stony rubble of non-existent roads for several days, our car broke down. It was quite late when a family of shepherds, who lived high up on the mountain, gave us shelter.
We had supper and bedded down in a traditional elongated room. At midnight I awoke and felt an urge to go outside. The darkness was so complete that I didn’t dare move. I remained standing. A few seconds later, I felt a slight movement. A hand took me by the arm and silently guided me to a small level area opposite the house, where the corral stood. Though heavy clouds covered the sky, a few stars peeked out, bathing the objects around me in their silver gleam.
I was moved. I had seen the colour black. Not gloom or shadows, but the real colour black. Not murky darkness or the absence of light. The colour black. I was in it.
Textile Traditions
You shall be called Fountain, and you shall be art, he said.
Textile Traditions
Talking about textile traditions inevitably entails a discussion of endangered traditions and societies in grave difficulties. It is true that textile work is an important supplement to household income and an economic, cultural and vital mainstay for many, but it is also little more than a point of support in a world on the verge of collapse.
The Model or the Beauty of Difference
Familiarity precludes the need for explicitness. Those who claim this can also omit it, because they know how far order and symmetry can be bent before breaking.
From tradition they inherit the possibility of modifying, the possibility of creating something unique and transforming their inheritance.
The exceptional quality of our lives is what enriches those geometric patterns: the beauty of difference.
The Court of the Inquisition was created as an instrument of repression and persecution. During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the political and ecclesiastical powers worked in concert, and patriotism became synonymous with the defence of spiritual purity. Hounding and harassment proliferated, and punishments were numerous and harsh.
Absolutist power was the road chosen by both the church and the Catholic Monarchs; both feared that the lengthy coexistence with Jews and Muslims and the lack of cohesion among Spain’s scattered territories threatened their plans to build a modern, unified, homogenised state.
Auto da Fe (Pedro Berruguete, Museo del Prado, 1493−1499) is an oil on panel commissioned by Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada for the seat of the Court of the Holy Inquisition. The panel succeeded in meeting Torquemada’s demand for a “propagandistic” illustration of the unswerving determination with which all heterodoxy would be persecuted. The message is clear and unequivocal: a just cause and a deserved punishment. In the painstaking detail of the figures, we can see that the condemned man being led to the stake, rope about his neck, has curly hair and a hooked nose, features then unmistakably associated with Jews and false converts.
Today, Auto da Fe has outgrown the self-interested ideology of its commissioner, instead becoming a testimony of cruel events. That is what makes it art. The panel has lost its original exemplary function, blatantly and irrefutably bearing witness to the brutal actions of the Spanish Inquisition and its violent justice. That is what makes it an art piece.
At the end of World War II, the United States launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan offered aid, but there were strings attached, including restrictions on European cinema to benefit the American film industry and measures designed to fill Europe’s leading galleries with American art. Abstract expressionists, especially Pollock, held major touring shows in which European audiences were able to appreciate not only the quality of their art, but also the fact that a new era was dawning in the United States, a time in which space began to expand and action constructed the picture, bursting out of the frame. These presentations of the best American art coincided with those promoted by the United States government, eager to wield its economic, political and cultural influence and might beyond its borders.
The woven textiles made by nomadic peoples transmit art and culture while also meeting basic needs: haimas (nomad tents) provide shelter for herders and their families; rugs serve as both sleeping mats and flooring, protecting them from the winter cold; and handiras and haiks are coverings, as well as tribal and social symbols. In the Western world, utility is usually at odds with art, but imposing limitations such as the incompatibility of art with practical usage contradicts the universality of art and its history, which shows us that means and functions have changed over the centuries.
Is it not unreasonable to deny the creativity of people who have little to spare and whose art therefore favours subsistence?
Time and Hours
How many hours does a rug have? How many hours did a woman spend making it? How many hours was she paid for her work? What needs can she meet by selling her rugs? The weaver-women are crushed by a comfortable demand that shatters the unitary time of their existence, turning it into work-hours torn out of life itself.
These stolen hours scratch away at time, rendering it useless. They are gnawing hours of detachment; hours of exploitation, of injustice. Rugs, capes and cushions—some of them very simple and modest— are created in arid zones of extreme heat or in high mountain regions with incredibly harsh winters. They are proof that there, in the midst of that impressive, unforgiving landscape, live the female guardians and conveyors of a unique, peculiar, autonomous, secretive language, the language of textiles, which speaks of a community, a culture and a form of art. Today, these weaver-women await the return of the children and grandchildren that have become the stock of big cities and foreign lands.
I think of those women dealing with life’s difficulties, with problems that at times are triumphantly overcome and at others result in humiliating defeat.
Thank You
The beauty of these woven creations constantly reminds me that a balance has been upset. These women whose survival is conditioned by nature, with all the grandeur and overwhelming difficulties of an environment that determines their every act, these women have made art. On the periphery of peripheries, they have made art—useful art, an art for life—and all I can say to them is thank you.
Bob Marley’s first words at the Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony were dedicated to the gypsies who had won the previous year. The audience reacted with enthusiasm, recalling that group of men and women, some of them heaven-sent, who had sung and danced, and stolen the hearts of everyone present. Moments before handing out the awards, the organisers felt a twinge of fear and more than a little regret as they witnessed the disproportionate ruckus raised, without rhyme or reason, by the gypsies as they prepared to enter the hall: the women, chattering loudly, adjusted their bras and sandal straps, while the men checked their clothes for even the smallest wrinkle, warmed up their voices, tapped their heels and clapped their hands. Once inside the theatre, the buzzing swarm calmed down and walked the aisle with decorum, but as they approached the stage they broke into chatter, nervous, joking to attract the audience’s gaze; for despite belonging to a people who prize family and collective identity above all else, individuals still vie to stand out above the rest. By the time they reached the stage, nervousness had segregated the youngest members of the group, who laughed among themselves. A few of them plucked at their guitars. On television it was a sight to behold.
To be fair, flamenco is a shared world heritage, and although it is less widely known than reggae, both types of music have the power to break hearts outside their respective worlds. Flamenco is an inner rending of extraordinary magnitude, an infinite longing. When collective art allows its individual components to express themselves, it becomes great.
When it was their turn to speak, after being introduced by the Prince of Asturias, the gypsies —La Niña de los Peines, her brother Tomás, La Fernanda, Melchor de Marchena, El Terremoto, El Borrico—expressed themselves as best they knew how, through song and dance. That was when the people in the audience and those glued to their TV screens understood that the award was rightly bestowed and richly deserved, and although the troupe had completely taken over the stage, not one of them was superfluous—in fact, one felt the neighbourhood of Santiago, Triana or Utrera should have been there as well.
Between Rugs and Fabrics
The Father
She knew there was something very wrong, a great sorrow. Her father was grimly serious. He did not come out to speak. A curtain of silence fell...
The Mother
Her mother, she and one of her sisters strode along at a very fast pace. The mother’s attitude did not encourage conversation. They walked for a long time until they came to where some of their relatives lived. She didn’t know what they talked about, but the walk back was much more leisurely and her mother seemed calmer.
The Father’s Brother
She remembers that one night one of her father’s brothers arrived. He didn’t even come inside, and she never knew if he had come to say goodbye for good or if he had asked to stay with them and been refused. She never knew what his offence had been. She never knew the reason for this silence.
Cherries
She placed the cherries in her sister’s lap and they began to eat them. Although they offered to share, none of us wanted to interrupt the dance of their hands as they ate them one by one, little by little. Later she got up and divided some among us. No cherry was ever redder or sweeter than the ones she gave us at her parting.
Downhill
Her feet were neither cloven hooves that clung to the rock nor suction cups that gripped the sand, as the children used to tell her in their games. When her husband died, she was seized with a desire to run downhill, to hurtle down the steepest slopes and feel, as she used to feel, the air holding her upright.
The Icy Wind, the Daughter
Again the icy wind and the homeward journey.
When you left, she hugged the trees and pressed her face against the trunk until she could hear your voice and feel your breath.
The Old Cedar
Azrou, the loveliest cedar forest, for my brother. Cedar trees can live two thousand years. He only lived fifty.
The brother watched the flock from the old cedar. He was irresistibly drawn to the irregular pattern of its branches. That morning he noticed the clustering of its leaves, persistent and needle-sharp, like his feelings ever since he had learned that the animals were falling sick.
The Rug
It was impressive and spectacular. It was very beautiful—deliberately and necessarily so. The mother, and now the daughters, not only wanted to prove how industrious they were, how efficiently they worked with the livestock, in the fields and on their daily tasks; they also wanted to express the intelligence, the grace and genius that characterises works of extraordinary quality and renown.
Her Niece and Daughter-in-Law
Her niece, who was now her daughter-in-law, surprised her. She had completely transformed the rug that her aunt and mother-in-law had been making and had passed on to her when she married her son. Back then, rugs took many years to make, and, although each generation added new knowledge and variations to them, they tended towards uniformity. But this girl made radical changes to her part of the rug: she completely eradicated its complexity, instead giving the pattern an extraordinarily light, airy feel. This sharp contrast lent a surprising grace to the composition as a whole, clearly illustrating how intelligently this girl would defend herself in life. The mother-in-law thought it a very smart decision, because she accepted the responsibility of continuing the rug but gave it a respite whose necessity was apparent even to her. That was what the part of the rug that her niece had made conveyed.
Gold
It was just like a pendant of her mother’s that had belonged to her grandmother, but it wasn’t the same colour and the feeling was completely different. She knew it was made of gold because she hid it immediately. Her reaction put her somewhere she had never been before, in a position of non-innocence. It was a constant burden, having to conceal the pendant so her mother and siblings wouldn’t see it. She had to change the hiding place constantly, until one day it disappeared from where she had concealed it, and she never saw it again. Perhaps the burden had shifted to one of her siblings or neighbours. She will never know, because undoubtedly whoever found it also hid it immediately, and so knew that it was made of gold.
The Grandchildren of Salt
The two siblings were very cheerful, very cheerful. With their good cheer and their novelties they invaded the minds of everyone and opened their hearts to desires they had never suspected could burn so fiercely; so much that they seared their innards.
These adolescents did not long; they desired. Longing was reserved for their parents, who had known the mountains, the trees. For them, whose sky was a screen, nostalgia did not exist. Their world was a present that reinstated a mystery filled with hope.
The Grandchildren of Quebec
Taninya had looked at one of her cousins and that cousin had looked at her, but they knew nothing would bring them together because everything separated them. Quebec was the cousin’s red jumper that looked so lovely on her. Quebec was a lake. Quebec was something very distant. Quebec was the school where they learned computer science, which had replaced the mountains with striking suddenness.
Warps, Knots and Wefts
Every knot is a thought. After that day, it was always the same.
If she made a wish at the precise instant when a chickpea swelled and bounced off the pot, it would come true, but she could never be quick enough, no matter how hard she tried.
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They sent some boys, two brothers and a cousin, to a nearby village to collect some goods. “Go quickly, don’t dawdle”, said the mother... But they never arrived. The father and uncle were waiting for them round a bend in the road. As soon as they saw them, the boys understood what was about to happen to them. With the switches they used to punish the livestock, the adults beat them. It wasn’t the slaughter and sale of a wild boar to outsiders that had earned them so many blows, but the fact that the village had learned of the transaction. And where was the money?
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She works in the fields, tends the livestock and the bees, grinds the wheat, makes the bread, cooks the food, brings water from the well, spins, weaves and also cares for the children and helps the old ones. This woman, toujours malade, is a beloved daughter, although her slanting eyes, awkward speech and clumsy gait set her apart from her sisters and from the still remembered beauty of her mother.
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She dropped it again and again, so often that, by the time she angrily tossed it into the ravine, it was no longer good for anything. With her action she wanted to disprove the notion that the vessel had rebelled against her.
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The donkey trotted gladly to the spring. On the way back, with the drums filled with water and retracing his steps along a steep, stony path, the animal slipped and twisted his legs, but either he didn’t mind or he retained no memory of it, because he always hastened eagerly back to the water, as if the return journey did not exist.
The girls also went willingly, happily traipsing under the awning of the sky, hoping to meet someone along that path. Afterwards, when they grew older, their happiness subsided. Later on they would leave.
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She heard stories of lions that had attacked some children.
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Thoughts provide consolation for the teacher’s solitude.
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When the wind blew strongly in winter, the scar screamed louder than she had screamed on the day of the accident.
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In the late afternoon a neighbour, shut up in his house, let out a cry, a single scream, long and strangled. Was the cry more piercing with the full moon? She didn’t think so. It always had the same tone and issued the same prophetic warning: that night was falling.
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No one said it out loud or in the light of day, but at night, huddled close round the fire, they passed on the warning: children had disappeared in the vicinity of the great souk. This time, no one spoke of witchcraft or women’s spells. Some whispered: corruption kills.
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Four daughters are not four wives, she said.
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A lack of timidity set her apart, though she tried to fake it.
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And the blood gushed forth...
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The clumsiness, arrogance and abuse of the siblings ruined the family. The mother was sacrificed.
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She can’t stop thinking about why she was so inflexible with her father, how she reproached him for his distress at a time when fear clouded his future and prevented him from defending himself.
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She was the queen of the streets. Shunned by relatives and neighbours, furtively she was well loved—even by her husband, who lived comfortably off the hidden desires of men.
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A disturbing, devastating rumour was circulating: a strange disease had taken hold of young people in contact with certain foreigners. There was no reprieve for those who contracted it. Doctors did their best to avoid treating them, and some hospitals turned them away. Suffering and death. A cursed ailment against which many mothers had raised their voices, demanding justice.
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Two brothers went to Rabat, and one came home to marry.
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His wife told him, “The abandonment that is my lot and which you will experience when you leave is so great that I cannot help but be afraid”.
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“We’ll see each other every year!” became every two years. A year is a long time, but that was the timeframe. Later, it became “whenever I can”.
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Two children had come from Madrid, but the woman only bathed one. The reason could be read in the nakedness of the other: he was not her grandson.
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Farewell to wicker and wool. Farewell to weaving, to combining colours and tying swift knots, farewell to decorating a wall or assembling an intricate carved ceiling. Farewell to sowing and harvest times, farewell to chiselling iron and making bread. Now they learn quickly as they discover the habits, oddities and customs of their bosses, who express themselves clearly and peremptorily. Their orders aren’t very complicated and hardly require instructions. Nothing more difficult than “Don’t mix the detergents and clean behind the appliances”, “Helmets are mandatory when unloading material”, or “The faster you work, the less insecticide you’ll inhale”. That’s just the way they are.
Farewell to the rhombus, farewell to innocence.
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She moved through the darkness, searching for garish colours and sour smells. There was joy and celebration, but also despair, injustice and abandonment.
White Roses
Nothing shows off the red of blood more gloriously than white roses.
The Son’s Mother
The son’s mother is not the same as the daughter’s mother.
Macaque or Hyena?
The fact that her brother would be the one to determine her future filled the young girl with anxiety.
This constant undercurrent of fear diminished when she went with her friends to find firewood or to gather fodder for the livestock. On the way, they talked and played at comparing their neighbours with certain animals. One was a goat: don’t you see his chin? The gaze of another marked him as a lamb. Her brother was a macaque, her girlfriends suggested, based on his agile movements, his constant restlessness and how funny he was. She never contradicted them, but when the other girls said macaque, she heard laughing hyena.
Or…
“Either you do what she says or...” She could never tell if it was a choice or a threat, because the second alternative was dissolved in the conjunction that preceded it, and to her it sounded like a butcher’s knife sliding across a lamb’s throat.
Tazzayt-Tazzayt
We focus our attention on the processes and trust them to handle the changes and the outcome, but then, suddenly, that instant appears when everything is definitively defined.
Her name had to be repeated twice before she would answer when called. The girl’s stubborn insistence on multiplying her name amused everyone, and it wasn’t long before they acquired the habit of calling her Tazzayt-Tazzayt, which stuck with her for many years.
The split-second delay between saying a name and repeating it was the interval that the husband used to hand the girl a brazier. Catching her off guard, the coals spilled onto her hands and dress.
In this way, he wielded his arbitrary authority over the girl, and her name was forever divided in two.
Seven Years Waiting
Seven years waiting. “That’s emigration for you”, they said. Seven years under the mother-in-law’s scrutiny and charity, because it was she, her husband’s mother, who received the funds that eventually—though somewhat depleted—reached the wife and daughter. Seven years waiting to be reunited with him. Seven years to complete the journey that brought her back to her husband’s side. Seven years isn’t all that long when you arrive in the promised (longed-for) land. But when you arrive at a house where there is another woman and another daughter...
The Butcher With the knife he used to ritually slaughter lambs, he sliced open the woman’s chest, belly and back. When the screams subsided to death rattles, he left. The three girls, aged six and five, and the youngest barely days old, accompanied their mother in silence and stillness throughout the night. The next morning, the telephone rang insistently but no one answered. Later the aunt, alerted, came to rescue the girls.
No one in Taza remembered them, but the news reached an Internet café and spread by word of mouth over the next several days. It was said that they came from the mountains south of town, and it was probably there that the woman, and years later the man, had obtained the papers they needed to go abroad.
A tragic event in a far-off place that awakened hidden fears. At night, more than one woman mistook glints of light for the bright blade of the knife brandished in Madrid, and something that had never existed hidden in words was given a name: murder.
Paths and Roads
Margallo War (1893−1894) / Melilla War (1909) / Rif War (1911−1927) / Tragic Week of Barcelona (1909) / Battle of Annual (1921) / Spanish Civil War (1936−1939).
He was missing a leg. A huge rock had fallen on the leg while he was digging a well. They waited for the doctor but, when he lapsed into unconsciousness and the leg became gangrenous, the brother decided to amputate it. Eventually he got used to the crutches and continued to care for the livestock. The accident brought back memories of the relatives and neighbours who, years before, had been killed or horribly mutilated by shrapnel.
Men who worked during the day crossed the River Moulouya at night and, under cover of darkness, attacked the camps of the soldiers brought over from France to protect the road and railway that were being built to connect the north with Algeria. These foreign interests hindered the free movement of flocks and brought about the ruin of entire families. Peasants and herders defended their lands, which were snatched from them time after time. These peasants and herders, young men, heads of households, were not unlike the conscripts forcibly recruited in Spain to kill and die: the former fought for their lands, and the latter for the interests of others.
Roads, railways, power lines, reservoirs, mines, growing urban centres and privatised lands shaped, among other things, the face of modernity. And from that they could not escape. On maps they are lines and tiny icons superimposed on the rivers and natural contours of the terrain, creating a more complex and varied landscape. But this new panorama was not made without tremendous sacrifices and lucrative profits: profits for a few and sacrifices for a large part of society, who would not reap even the minor benefits of those changes for years to come.
The afternoon has been magnificent, serene, resplendent, and even without reckoning the infinite number of curious objects I have found along the way, this ride would still be one of the most delicious of my entire life, given the graciousness and beauty of the land I have crossed. The objects of which I speak were for the most part Moroccan plunder from yesterday’s action: spurs, munition bags, dead horses, saddles, corpses, bloodied garments, and a few weapons of little worth. All around and in every direction, the fresh footprints of broad Moorish slippers and of horses, oxen, camels and goats. The appearance of our company had sent men and herds running from that place. All had fled before us... except the land, grim and mute like the fearsome spectre of defeat [Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África, 1880].
“Yes, they’re fierce, but they bleed. They hide, but not behind a cannon. They know a terrain that aeroplanes discover. They are strong, but hunger and shrapnel will prove stronger still.” With these words, the French or Spanish captain harangued them.
Ah! Truly war has a poetry which, at certain moments, surpasses all the inspirations of art and of nature! [Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, op. cit.].
Years Later...
Upon hearing the news, she removed the scarf from her head and pulled her hair hard, very hard, until it stopped her wailing.
The men came to the house. They wanted to hear the news from a neighbour who had arrived the night before from a nearby village, where he had done some livestock transactions. He told them that from the souk drifted the sounds of a party underway, when suddenly the music and singing turned to screaming and weeping: a raft full of immigrants had sunk, and everyone on board had drowned. Twenty people from the village. Twenty.
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They remember him as a boy who played in the village streets for a summer or two. Those were the days of plenty, a time now past. His name is not spoken, and it’s the women who mostly talk about him; the men do it in hushed, cautious tones, although some only bring him up to relive a tale that takes them back, again and again, to the litany of the sun-drenched summer days of their childhood. Then smiling, now gutted.
Going back is not possible for a youth raised in a fast-paced, multiplying era, full of what might be and is not. An emptiness that could hold so many things! That strip of separation we can’t always conceal but which outlines the contours.
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The longer the wait, the stronger the hope. But that is not how things work. Not at all. Time exacerbates problems. Stagnation and stillness are not for the living, who slip on the slopes of pretence and concealment.
They could not distance themselves. They knew the mother. They were too close: they were the same. The question hung like a cloud over the woman they had run into several times at the doctor’s office, and with whom they had exchanged a few words, even about the children. For things had also gotten worse for her. Her heart had frozen solid. Her feelings were expressed so briefly that they failed to realise that nothing was or ever would be the same again. Did what she had hoped for have anything to do with what happened?
What gardens were they talking about? So that was the journey they were discussing, the reason why their horizons had been stripped of the rushing thaw-water rivers they once bathed in as youngsters, and the longing of grandparents, parents and children who grew up in summer frolicking on the steep mountains of ancient cedar forests. No one spoke of all that anymore and, what was more disheartening, no one even desired it anymore. Now they dreamed of dangerous deserts. Being part of the destruction, clinging to hope when none remained—that is what death talks about.
To kill and to die: what facile, commonplace verbs. She thought of her daughter rather than her grandson, of the pain he had caused her. First the drugs that dazed so many; later the night and the neon lights; and finally, the sibylline words they whispered in their ears. One of them was identified by a chunk of finger whose prints were still intact. She remembered that boy who fell down a cliff on Bou Nacer, tumbling head over heels, striking the stones until his body was dismembered, and how the echo kept him alive after death.
In Search of the Future
To Be Something in Life
My grandmother jokingly says, “God doesn’t have time for you. He’s busy. Do right and make the most of it” [Salim Bayri, 2016].
INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED IN FEZ, MOROCCO, IN 2010
Souad
My name is S.b.H. I’m twenty-two years old. I study Spanish at the university in Fez, and I’m also a basketball player. I like everything that has to do with sport and theatre. My hometown is Errachidia: I’m a desert girl, by birth and by principle. I left Errachidia and moved to Fez to complete my studies, to become an educated girl, to earn a living and be self-reliant and not be a burden to my family or to society, though it’s very hard to live far away from my family on a scholarship that’s only enough for me to buy one book... I left Errachidia and the desert because I didn’t want to be like my grandmother and my mother, who spend their lives weaving. That doesn’t mean I don’t like woven fabrics, but nowadays everything is already on the market, so what’s the point of me weaving? What I need is money, and to get it I’m not going to weave like my grandmother.
Ayyûb Ait Oumagha
I have four siblings. One brother is in Casablanca, working for a company. Another is in Spain. My sister is earning her baccalaureate and the youngest boy is in school. I want to study Spanish so I can have a very good future, unlike my parents.
I want to study Spanish to be a teacher. My parents don’t want to be weavers anymore. I want to be something in life and not be a burden to my parents.
Nawal Arfi
I hope you understand my words. My mother and grandmother make rugs; it’s something within their culture that they have to preserve. They also sell them and earn money to live. They can’t give it up, it’s very important for them. In my house there are antique rugs. My father is dead. I only have my mother, who earns a mere pittance from the rugs. I am studying in Fez on a scholarship and living in a student residence, but it’s hard to study because I can’t make ends meet. But despite the difficulties, I try to press on, to have a future and get my degree in Biology.
Do You Keep the Old Ones?
INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED IN ALICANTE, SPAIN, IN 2012
Amal El Mouloudia
It’s the men who remove the woven goods from the house and take them to the market. Some are for selling and others for the house. There are some people, a handful, who only weave for their homes, because they lack the strength to work more.
Inherited items are not for sale. Heirlooms are kept for the home. But we sold everything. They come directly to the houses, looking for them. They like antiques, old things. People from the Arabian Peninsula.
In Morocco, customers come and show us a photo, and we work to order. We have to sell so we can buy more material and keep producing. We don’t keep what we make. It depends on the order. Some people work to export, making things for Rabat or Casablanca, but in Spain, even if you bring the material, who are you going to sell it to? Here you need to pay the Social Security tax. If you have workers, you have to spend money, and how would we find buyers?
She wants something to fill her time. Instead of just sitting in front of the television... she wants to do something.
In Search of a Decent Life and Future
As for my sister Fatima, before she had even turned fourteen she began working as a “maid” in the home of a wealthy family, where she had to do all the housework and also care for six children, working thirteen hours a day or more with one day off a week, and all for a miserable salary of three hundred dirhams [approximately thirty euros]. At fifteen, her hands were cracked and covered with sores.
Another of my sisters, Ikran, got a job with a foreign-owned company in the textile industry when she was sixteen; those factories mostly hired women, because they knew that, given their submissive attitude, they wouldn’t make trouble for the owners. They also knew that jobs were in high demand and took advantage of that fact to exploit the women, making them work more than twelve hours a day for a salary of 650 dirhams [sixty-five euros]. And they did all this with the consent of the top government officials, most of them corrupt, who protected the employers in exchange for substantial benefits
The sea was growing more and more dangerous, becoming increasingly turbulent. As theboat went under and resurfaced amid the roiling waves, the panic grew. Prayers, wails and cries rang out. Even the ra’is was scared, but we had come more than halfway and “the die had been cast”. In other words, going back would have been just as dangerous as pressing on [Mohamed El Gheryb, in Ofrim Suplementos, 8 (Historias de vida e inmigración), 2001].
Oh, distant husband of mine, emigrant!
Two years now have passed
since your sad departure for France,
in search of work,
in search of money
Two years now…
Bread in our country is something impossible.
Bread is a constant drama.
Oh, distant husband of mine, emigrant!
And I am here:
Gnawing on my desires
licking my frost.
The narrowing horizons press in on me.
Two years without your tender love,
without feeling your embrace,
without your shower of kisses.
Suddenly you vanish
amid mines of iron and lead,
to make a lovely future
for the rest…
You are murdering
the best of your precious youth
too soon.
You send me sacks of longing and nostalgia,
of shivers uglier
than the chill of tombs.
[Ahmed Hanawi, “Poemas crucificados: de versos para la buena gente”, in Literatura y pensamiento marroquíes contemporáneos (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura, 1981)].
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In Zienab Abdelgany’s words [“Passing the Baton”, 2012]:
Won’t it be lonely to die among strangers in a land that’s not your own?
I don’t want to die in a land of strangers. I need to know you.
Teresa Lanceta
White-Roses (PDF)
- Introduction - Nuria Enguita Mayo
Adiós al rombo [Farewell to the Rhombus] is Teresa Lanceta’s third exhibition devoted to the weaves and wisdom of the women weavers of the Middle Atlas, a joint project that began in 1985. The show features woven fabrics, paintings, drawings, a text and several videos compiled from her interviews with both women of that region and relatives who migrated to Spain. In addition to Lanceta’s work, the exhibition includes documentation on folk art from regions bordering the Sahara Desert, as well as on the work of young artists interested in traditional craftsmanship and migration. There are also two collaborative creations: a digital map of patterns and objects of the Middle Atlas, created by Nicolas Malevé, and an interactive audio - visual installation based on a binary code, produced by Lot Amorós.
In the mid-1960s, when painting and conceptual art dominated both the Spanish and Catalan art scenes, Lanceta decided to embrace weaving as a medium of artistic expression, stretching the limits of comprehension of what can be considered art. Moreover, she did not approach it from the perspective of critical analysis but started with the formal elements, with the original, inherent aspects of woven fabric: its ligaments, materials, traditions and techniques.
In the mid-1980s, Lanceta lived among weaving communities of the Middle Atlas. Through their textile traditions–a knowledge passed down from generation to generation– she discovered a collective art that has helped people live, communicate and endure: an art marked by ancient habits, motifs and rules that, when mastered, allow expressive freedom and creativity, recounting the passage of time and incorporating histories and events. Like the overlapping threads of warp and weft, “doing” and “living” share the same time. In these textile traditions of nomadic peoples, the weaves transcend their decorative purpose and symbolic function: they are part of a way of life and, as such, they convey a shared, everyday knowledge, deploying their ornamental and artistic power.
Textile art is therefore an art linked to life itself. Yet this very fact has been one of the theoretical pretexts for labelling decorative folk art as a mere “craft”, as opposed to the “pure” arts of painting and sculpture. In the latter disciplines, the artist’s idea takes precedence over technical realisation and, unlike other forms of art, they have no ritually, socially or culturally symbolic use. However, it is no longer possible to make this distinction, since folk arts also originate with an idea and are materialised by means of a technique. Lanceta has proved that weaving is an artistic tool at the service of the human soul. And, in doing so, she has shown that the so-called ornamental arts are in fact “pure” art, for they entail formal innovations that express innovative ideas. In the Western world, the debate about “art for art’s sake” versus “useful art” grew more heated in the 1980s, sparked by exhibitions such as Primitivism at the MoMA (1984) and Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou (1989), when Lanceta had already been “weaving” for more than ten years. Since then, the representation of the “other” has been a prominent and oft-debated issue in contemporary art, with some advocating an autonomous appreciation of the art of “others”, segregated from its functionality, as if that were even possible. This dichotomy is primarily expressed in terms of “contextualisation” and “decontextualisation”.
Teresa Lanceta’s woven creations, like those of the Middle Atlas and other non- Western regions, are bearers of “agency”, together with nature, people and technology. We can affirm, along with philosopher Bruno Latour, that they partake of the transcendence of the societies in which they originate, defining an enduring collectivity. As constructed–or, in this case “woven”–objects, they also weave. And just as their manufacture is not dictated by a single predefined form, pattern or direction, so their meaning is not fixed, either; it is refreshed with each new appearance, reworked to reflect the new relationships that emerge in each new context.
Teresa Lanceta draws one final fundamental lesson from the weaves of the Middle Atlas: that rugs, cushions and handiras are essential elements in an ecological conception of life that combines environment, social relations and forms of subjectivity. This is particularly relevant in our day and age, in which, as Félix Guattari reminds us in his book The Three Ecologies, as a consequence of the acceleration of techno - logical progress and the global economy, whole sections of the collective subjectivity are floundering or simply huddle around archaisms; as is the case, for example, with the dreadful rise of religious fundamentalism.
This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue take a closer look at Teresa Lanceta’s artistic practice, acknowledging her weaves as complex devices for inhabiting, as Pedro G. Romero might say, or dynamic folds in constantly evolving thought, in the words of Thomas Golsenne. Her artistic practice is a way of being-in-the-world that does not shy away from ecological reflections and that advocates the utility of art and collective creation.
Nuria Enguita Mayo
- A Coarsely Woven Web - Pedro G. Romero
A Coarsely Woven Web
Loose threads here and there. A few tapestries lined the floors and walls. They also served as bedclothes and garments. Others covered the floor area reserved for the animals. A fairly pretty blue one, shot through with orange and red threads, lay in the centre of the sitting room as a decorative piece, framing the seat usually occupied by grandmothers and mothers. Tied high above, the most threadbare cloths provided shade–or, rather, protection from the rain in cold, wintry Vienna.
These notes were gleaned from the reports filed by civil servants with the Austrian Ministry of Culture who, several months later, attempted to retrieve the works by Teresa Lanceta that had been exhibited at Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna. For the past two years, the house had been occupied mainly by Bulgarian and Romanian gipsies, who had been assembled there by the Bulgarian Embassy, current owner of the Jewish Viennese philosopher’s erstwhile residence. Urged by Romani associations and a few artists and curators working on the resistance mechanisms of the scattered culture we refer to as “gipsies”, Teresa Lanceta agreed to show drawings, old pieces and tapestries at the house, in part as a gesture of solidarity with its occupants, but also motivated by a desire to recover her memories of the many years she spent living among gipsies in Barcelona, Granada, Madrid, Seville, and all across Spain.
All that frayed material had to be useful for something besides the insurance reports, which was what the cultural bureaucrats sought to certify. That experience, that ending– whether sad or happy we cannot say, but undoubtedly exemplary–should have something more to offer. That was my task–also a bureaucratic one, I fear. I had to find something useful in those reports and photographs. It was rich, disturbing material. I had images, catalogues, all the preliminary materials put together to prepare the exhibition. The scrap of a rug, with its black-and-white rhombus pattern, taken directly from among the remnants of the house, and the photograph of a tapestry used as a shroud for a dead gipsy were sensitive materials: touching, seeing, smelling them immediately triggered thoughts, preparing us for action, placing us in context. I left the room without any ideas–full of suggestions, yes, but without a single clue as to what I might pour onto those blank pages.
Because we live in houses...
Narrow street, narrow stairs with steep steps, small building with insignificant courtyards. An elongated flat with a constricted corridor where the electric light was always on, the third floor in a five-storey block. Seven tiny rooms. Three private quarters: bedrooms with little more than a bed and a wardrobe of meagre dimensions. One for her, Ch., and him, J.; another for the grandfather, Ch.’s dad, and the grandkids; and the third for L. and me. In ours we had to walk sideways because the walls were lined with shelves that held our belongings, some of which also hung from the ceiling.
The common areas: a small sitting room with a balcony overlooking the street where L. painted and the children played when he wasn’t there. L.’s painting tools were always stored in our bedroom which, like the grandfather and children’s room, opened onto this little parlour at one end of the house facing the street. To reach the other innermost end, where the third bedroom was, we had to pass through a microscopic loo or wash-room, although in reality there was nothing to wash with: no basin or shower, just a toilet with a high pull-chain and old newspapers. To wash up, we had to take turns in the kitchen! Those were the times of daily shopping trips. Ch. prepared gipsy stews and potatoes with cod that I never ate, because I worked in a nearby restaurant, and on Sundays, when I was off, we’d buy several rotisserie chickens and eat them straight out of the wrapping they came in. It was a party.
I would go from the Central University to the restaurant where I worked. Free afternoons and evenings were for roving; the cobblestones and asphalt of the streets called to us. We walked at a slant, zigzagging to draw out the narrow places we passed through. We lived on the streets.
That was the kitchen where one night Ch. spilled a huge pan of chips on her belly. We went to the hospital and they gave her ointment, anti - biotics and sedatives. Afterwards she went to work swathed in bandages because she couldn’t afford to lose her daily wages. And also because she feared being replaced.
Now that I obsessively long to change my place of residence, I think of the needs we had those days: few and simple, and perhaps for that reason easily satisfied. We had hardly any possessions or even furniture, aside from a chair for each person, two tables and beds–no sofa or armchair or ornaments, just a telly for V., who smacked it now and again to rescue the image from the perpetual affliction of fuzzy lines. The house was old and hadn’t been touched since it was first built, more than a century ago. Wall panels, tiles, carpentry and light fixtures were all original. There were no decorative details or photos hanging on the walls. They owned only a few photographs, which they kept with their “papers”, and I have never been fond of personal photos myself.
The walls in the room where we ate were painted green–an intense, glossy enamel in the bottom and tempera above. Every memory I have of that house has a green halo.
The grandfather had linked the deep sorrow brought on by the death of his wife with the “loss” of his beautiful young daughter, Ch., at the tender age of fifteen, to a much older gipsy man whom he had asked to watch over his darling child during their tours along the Costa Brava. The guardian’s pledge was broken on a train one night, when the two of them, the mature guitarist and the young dancer, found each other in their sleepless lust-driven rambles. The two men had never spoken since, and that guitarist, now the father of his three grandchildren, shared a bed with his daughter, even though he never abandoned his other family. Home is where happiness lives, but not always.1
The story is more or less well-known. It appeared in Arquitectura del cante jondo2, a compilation of texts by Federico García Lorca on the subject of cante jondo–or “deep songs”–and the 1922 Cante Jondo Competition in Granada, a genuinely ecumenical encounter between progressive Spanish intellectuals and flamenco. Anyway, the episode takes place one night in Granada, when Lorca and Manuel de Falla are out for a stroll. Their conversation revolves around the decline and waning prestige of the Spanish folk songs called coplas, which, according to these two good friends, are now in the hands of delinquents, drunkards and flamenco singers. As they ponder this predicament, suddenly they hear a copla, an old song, floating through an open window: Flowers, leave me, for he who has a great sorrow, is no fun for anyone, I came out to the countryside for amusement, let me be flowers, let me be3 Published decades earlier by Rodríguez Marín in his Cancionero popular, there are more recent version of this tune, sung by Porrina de Badajoz, among others. Juanito Valderrama used it as inspiration for one of his coplillas. But, apparently, the version that Falla and Lorca heard, the old song, had been made popular in those days by Manuel Escacena, better known as El Niño de Escacena, a flamenco singer from Seville who had recorded it, given those lovely lyrics good publicity in taverns and flamenco clubs. This is important, of course, because for Lorca’s mythological vision the meaning of the lyrics was far from coincidental. The “flowers”, or tavern entertainment, attempted to “amuse”, in the most disreputable sense of the word, and distract from true sorrows, from the tragedy expressed in the authentic folk copla. Although Lorca and Falla eventually changed their minds–after the famous competition, which was an artistic failure in spite of all its glittering publicity and fame–at that time they wove a discourse–somewhere between paternalistic and redemptive–about the needs of the common folk, an Adamic vision of peasants and gipsies.
And this is important, because the narrative takes a surprising twist:
We stepped up to the window, and through the green lattices we saw a white, aseptic room without so much as a single picture, like one of the architect Le Corbusier’s machines for living in, and in it were two men, one with a guitar and the other with his voice. The one who sang was so clean and pure that the strumming man subtly averted his eyes to avoid the sight of such nudity. And it was perfectly clear to us that that guitar was not the guitar that comes in raisin cases and is marked by coffee stains, but the liturgical box, the guitar that comes out at night when nobody sees it and becomes spring water. The guitar made with the wood of Greek ships and African mule manes4.
It is obvious that some years passed between the time of the events and that when the text was written. Falla and Lorca’s evening walk must have taken place in 1921, and the text was written in the 1930s. Le Corbusier visited Madrid’s Residencia de Estudian - tes in 1928, and his discussion of folk architecture, of the adaptation of vernacular construction to the lay of the land in Spain, inspired Lorca’s words in what we might call an exercise a posteriori. Even the final metaphorical images of a Greek ship and African mule manes are in synch with the Swiss and French architect’s discourse at the time, which perceived a degree of continuity between Mediterranean and African architectures. For Lorca, Le Corbusier’s visit was a momentous occasion that flooded his mind with aesthetic options and suggestions. Permanent records of that visit can be found in his conversations with Salvador Dalí5, among other sources. Lorca began using the term “purism”–coined in reference to painting by Le Corbusier’s acolytes in L’Esprit Nouveau–to describe the austerity and primitive functionalism of flamenco song, more in that precise sense than in the racist meaning of original, racially pure or untainted that the word would later acquire. We should remember that Amédée Ozenfant published in 1923 a review of flamenco songstress La Niña de los Peines in that same journal.
Despite considerations of historical context, and despite the changes that Lorca’s views on flamenco and folk culture would later undergo, the comparison that the poet drew between a poor man’s house–which judging from old photographs and accounts of Granada in those days was probably beggarly–and the functionalist comfort that European architects, spearheaded by Le Corbusier, sought for the modern home–la machine à habiter become a machine for living–is still revealing. It reveals that paternalistic, redemptive gaze I mentioned earlier, a terrible vision related to a certain bourgeois ideology, festooned with colonial embroidery, which aimed to regenerate and urbanise the lives of the poor, the proletariat and the lumpen-proletariat, as they were called at the time.
It is no coincidence that, under the auspices of Le Corbusier, architects began experimenting with housing estates on North African soil, dormitory towns for working-class labourers on the outskirts of modern urban centres that would later spread to European and Latin American cities and, eventually, the rest of the world. Interestingly, Le Corbusier sublimated many of these cultural and political references in parallel ideas and projects. Thus, while he supported that “concentrative” streamlining of lower-class suburbs in Algeria, he was simultaneously capable of waxing poetic on the subject of the tapestry, the “Muralnomad”, or nomadic mural, to which he gave architectural and constructive roots in the dwellings of nomads, gipsies and Saharan peoples, among others.
The idea of the tapestry as architecture borrowed notions and applications from bourgeois life and even from American still lifes: Tapestries are “nomadic murals”. It is the “mural” of modern times. We are nomads inhabiting apartment buildings, and we change apartments as the needs of our families evolve6. The tapestry is the home. In Le Corbusier’s primitivist fantasy, times and cultures, north and south, past and future are folded together. We cannot have a mural painted on our apartment walls. However, this wall of wool that is a tapestry can be taken down from the wall, rolled up under our arms at will and taken to hang elsewhere. This is why I have called my tapestries “nomadic murals” (Mural nomad). The Granada-born architect Juan Calatrava elaborates on this topic: Questioning the traditional use of tapestries and, in general, of textile elements inside the home soon reveals the autonomy of the tapestry as a genre separate from painting and points to a closer connection with architecture, understanding it not as a mere ornamental object but as a powerful means of defining space (including the acoustical aspects with which [Le Corbusier] was so preoccupied at the time: the balance between concrete, “a sound material”, and textile, a “sound-absorbing material”). The tapestry is more like a wall than a canvas. In fact, Le Corbusier even specified what the height should be, that of the “Modulor” minus 5 cm. 7The Modulor with 5 cm lopped off! He certainly must have believed gipsies and Moors were short people.
In 1953, Aix-en-Provence hosted the 9th International Congress of Modern Architecture, or CIAM, on the theme of habitat, where Le Corbusier’s unité d’habitation, or “housing unit”, was enthroned as a universal standard. Unlike Team X, the group of architects (Alison and Peter Smithson, Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck) who refuted these ideas at the next CIAM–the 10th CIAM in 1956, to be precise–the selfstyled International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus emerged as a knee-jerk reaction to that hegemonic discourse about what “habitation” ought to mean. The emphasis on traditional crafts and other supposedly “lower” arts was one of their leitmotifs. Constant, who played the guitar and was a fan of gipsy music, brought fabric patterns with the names of flamenco song styles to the Alba Congress in 1955. Asger Jorn also responded to the invitation with pieces related to textiles–works made of pure cotton–and other crafts which he associated with his ceramic creations. This exaltation of craftsmanship was at the heart of their preoccupations. The aim was to modify the habitat through its tools, but by endowing it with psychological and even magical properties, instead of the functional value ascribed by Le Corbusier. Both Jorn and Constant were familiar with the psycho-geographical experiences and unitary urbanism advocated by a group of lettrists related to Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein. The North Africans Mohamed Dahou, Mustapha Khayati and Abdelhafid Khatib were especially active, becoming the first to enunciate psychological conditions for objects and the urban space: fundamental conditions that had nothing to do with the rationalist practices of functional architecture and touted the merits of the hair of a goatskin or the elasticity of a net8.
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, who played the role of host at the Alba encounters, had ties to a group of gipsies camped on the esplanade of Alba’s Central Market. Gallizio was a socialist councillor on a town controlled by Christian democrats as well as a member of the former Partisan Republic. He proposed that the gipsies should be allowed to settle on lands seized from his family by the fascists, where one of Mussolini’s old Youth Colonies had stood until the Tanaro River flooded and destroyed it after the war. Taking advantage of Constant’s presence at the congress, they worked together to design a colony, an architectural project to give the gipsies a permanent home that would later, as is now common knowledge, give rise to the New Babylon urban development project. Constant and Gallizio’s shared observations associated the gipsies with those psychogeographical qualities: their known nomadic lifestyle, of course, but also their special custom of establishing relationships between people and things.
Gallizio had earned the gipsies friendship in the open-air cloth markets where they earned their living. It was more than just buying and selling; he was also struck by the special use of fabrics and scraps. The infinite cloths and prints of his Industrial Painting grew out of those observations. Drawing on the gipsies’ unique way of dealing in yards of cloth, on their imaginative ability to reuse scraps and bits of wool and cotton, Gallizio thus produced his Industrial Painting, based on artisan printing systems–no less than a candy-making machine!–and the sale by pieces, cut to the customer’s specifications, of those same fabrics. Another of his works, Cavern of Anti-Matter, was based on his experiences in the cloth-draped “habitats” that the gipsies created inside their wagons and temporary rental homes. By lining the walls with fabrics, mixing textures and colours, the gipsy women maintained a familiar common thread in all of their rooms, whether they were here or there, on this road or that. Observing how the gipsy women took advantage of the insect-repellent properties of rosemary or the fragrance of lavender to “decorate” their rooms, Gallizio gathered country herbs with magical properties and spread them on the floor. With the collaboration of Walter Olmo, he also had a soundtrack made in which industrial and electronic music was mixed with gipsy songs and music, a cushion of sounds that reverberated deep inside the environmental construction formed by the fabrics in his Cavern of Anti-Matter.
Years later, the situationists Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho would proclaim the merits of a textile artist, Jan Yoors, who had lived and travelled with gipsies since he was thirteen9. Yoors’ fascinating devotion to crafts was inherited from his father, a glass artist who had travelled and worked in Spain, where he developed a taste for flamenco and for gipsy culture in general. It was not that Yoors attached special value to gipsy crafts or discovered any special form of textile craftsmanship in his wanderings with Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, French and Spanish gipsies, but he was convinced that that life experience had planted the seed of his devotion to the tapestry, to the construction of tapestries with architectural dimensions, motivated by a determination to shape space with cloth, in other words, to provide habitability. In one sense, Yoors inherited Le Corbusier’s preoccupations, although he had no intention of pursuing a functionalist purpose. Ornament and other sensible sensations are at the root of his tapestry art. His large abstract rugs, modelled on his own architectural photographs, are quite curious. Posters torn down from the wall, dark alleys, the rear side of old mansions: these are the sources of an abstract profusion of interwoven colours, spreading colour fields in the form of tapestries across rooms, halls and lobbies of large buildings.
When he speaks of the gipsies, Yoors exhibits a sensible memory related to the use of clothing, of a new suit–a gipsy man will don a newly-bought suit and wear it until it falls apart or becomes intolerably stained and begrimed–of dressing well, of nary a hatless head, of the connection between that personal grooming, that concern with looking one’s best, and the dead. Recalling the tastes of his dead brother, Pulika–Yoors’ fellow adventurer–purchased new suits, shirts, shoes, coats and hats in order to give them to the first gorger (non-gipsy) he met in the street, thus honouring the memory of the dearly departed. A strange expenditure, indeed. Yoors says that no one ever explained the origin of that custom to him. Nor did they tell him the history of the mulengi dori, or “dead man’s ribbon”–colourful pieces of patterned fabric as long as a coffin–which they would tie about their necks like amulets; yet there was something about the comfort and shelter of the clothing, the blanket on the floor and the mattress of bunched rags that Yoors found reassuring, even though it simultaneously brought to mind a clear image of death and, perhaps in consonance, a joyful awareness of being alive. Ultimately, the gipsies’ constant struggle to survive–for Yoors does not idealise the often miserable and harsh conditions of their way of life–is what he finds comforting. It is a tactile memory of all this, triggered by frills, by the rustling sensation of mere cloth, that brings home both the reality of death and of being alive and enjoying that moment.
Yoors also speaks of that unconscious learning in connection with gipsy women. Of course, he does so with plenty of misgivings. The consideration of weaving as a lower art, a craft associated with women’s work–Yoors never overlooked the collaboration of his wife and his sister-in-law in these labours–and the secondary social status of the gipsies were elements that had to be taken into account in order to practise the art of the tapestry. Nevertheless, that lower condition offered Yoors the possibility of eluding high art, of avoiding the commercial and corporate web of contemporary art that somehow excluded him. In that exclusion, in his dedication to craftsmanship, in the feel of the threads and the smell of the dyes, Yoors found a carefree sense of separateness that for him was the source of the joie de vivre with which he wanted to face each day.
Francisco Moreno Galván, a one-eyed flamenco writer and painter, liked to give his maimed condition an aesthetic dimension. He had only one good eye, the painter claimed, because he had dedicated and lost the other to the flamencos, to the gipsies. In reality there was nothing wrong with his eye, but that supposed disability was a useful defence against the reproaches of his brother, the art historian and critic José María Moreno Galván, who believed Francisco was losing his talent as a painter because of his passion for flamenco song and dance. Francisco applied the same handicap, more or less mockingly, to his sister-in-law, the artist Carola Torres, who won the National Visual Arts Prize in 1980 for her work with tapestries; she was the first woman to receive this distinction, but, if we attach any importance to institutional recognition, this honour has done little to promote the understanding or study of her work, conceding her successes with the Tàpies and Miró tapestries but disparaging her status as an artist. Francisco thus equated that lower condition which José María attributed to flamenco with another “disability”, the female condition and the craft of weaving.
Curra Márquez, a tapestry-maker and loom artist who has worked in Seville since the 1960s, also suffers this type of disregard. Her work with the architect Luis Marín has always been written off as merely ornamental; however, this is patently false, given that her curtains and draperies often serve a constructive purpose, whether they are designed for housing projects or grand theatres. Her tapestries, whether they are lavish stage curtains or modest drapes, humanise the space, transforming and making it visible. It is in that condition of visibility that Curra Márquez devises her ingenuous patchwork creations. The important thing is, of course, the constructive aspect, the weft, not the figures and patterns of the different patches; the plaiting, not the anecdote of small representations.
Yet this is precisely what Teresa Lanceta has been doing for years, ever since a chance encounter with the world of textiles set her on the difficult road of investigating and reinventing the expressive possibilities of textiles, aside from any decorativist intention. That road is especially difficult when dealing with a medium so long associated with the decorative arts, and when available channels of artistic dissemination are so habituated in painting
“For a long time, at the galleries they told me, ‘Do the same thing with paint and we’ll show your work right now’. But I have always refused to do that. I admire the gestural nature, the rapid rhythm of painting, but I can’t do it. It’s too straightforward for me. I need to shape the idea and make it emerge little by little. Plus, there’s something about tapestry that I find particularly appealing: the fact that if you make a mistake, you can’t correct it. It’s like life. What’s done is done, and you just have to accept it.”10
Cripples
(It always surprised me, when we were there sitting on the terrace of a bar, that our hearts did not break at the sight of so many cripples, many of them with operable conditions. But no, Jamaa el-Fna, the king of squares, draws you into its spinning wheel, and all you see after a while is an arena of gladiators who magnify life [Teresa Lanceta, “Ciudades vividas”, in Luis Claramunt, exh. cat. (Barcelona: MACBA and MNAC, 2012].)
The fallen light is very lovely
There were many cripples back then. The dictionary definition of the term “cripple” described most of them fairly accurately: “A person who is partially disabled or unable to use one or more limbs.” And I’m not really talking about the handicapped or disabled persons sheltered under the wing of the National Association for the Blind, of charities or churches. No, these were red-light-district cripples, with clearly visible, unwieldy metal braces supporting their legs that made you think how hard it must have been for them to get used to the pain inflicted by those same apparatuses. There were also those with poorly disguised prosthetic hands and arms.
The jerky movements of both types certainly gave them a Frankensteinish air–much less pronounced than what I saw later in Morocco, but pretty much in the same fashion. And there were others in wheelchairs. They stood out, not only because they were more handicapped than crippled, but also because their need for a companion, a kind of travelling guide, added a picaresque nuance.
In that neighbourhood no one bothered to conceal their misfortunes, perhaps because, even though it was a place where natural or inflicted cruelty existed in all its potency, luck was present in equal measure, even when the dies were cast. They engaged in a wide variety of activities that essentially boiled down to making a living by any means possible–a life of precariousness and dedication, sometimes even grazing the hazily-defined boundary of small-time racketeering, doing errands or multiple favours.
Their survivor mentality was another visible indication of extreme want. Thus, although they distrusted and personally despised the police, they also admired them and always showed themselves willing to cooperate, especially with the officers that blended in well in the red-light district. The police represented authority and the powers-that-be: something that simultaneously commanded both fear and respect, the authorities and the powerful.
The cripples were accompanied by the drunks, later far outnumbered by the drug addicts. Both shared the bars, taking daily communion in their efforts to forget. They lived in the realm of possibility and crowded together under its sheltering wing, some in their daily struggle and others in their going wherever the winds took them.
To float was an art form, and that verb upheld the entire neighbourhood. The gipsy drive had a fascinating allure: survival as violence and art. And so this one artfully sold his lottery tickets and that other one had an artful knack for hoodwinking, singing or getting folks to fork over a few quid.
Among these small-time specialists the odd murderer would suddenly appear, like that newlywed cop who killed his pregnant wife with his standard-issue weapon. But he wasn’t crippled; he was young and strong and he got paid every month.
Night came before sleep11.
Teresa Lanceta’s own observations on her work, her structural analysis, are quite clear. María García recorded some of her remarks about the square-triangle dichotomy in the symbolic development of abstraction during the twentieth century. 12Erwin Panofsky has already warned us that perspective, for example, rather than an innocent tool for representing the world, is actually a powerful ideological weapon for colonising it13. Perspective, like courtly love and financial credit, was born in a certain place and era and is bound up with a particular way of understanding the world. Therefore, conceiving the opposition between square and triangle as structural composition forms–the opposition between the cube-house and the gabled roof, as María García puts it–is something more than a mere aesthetic choice, among other reasons because there are no mere aesthetic choices; all decisions, including ornamental ones, have consequences. Ornament and crime14.
For instance, let us compare these notes from Teresa Lanceta’s writings with the reports filed with the Austrian Ministry of Culture–mentioned at the beginning of this text–on the whereabouts, abandonment and loss of the tapestries exhibited by the same Teresa Lanceta at Haus Wittgenstein.
One pick, another, one thread, another; starting with the most primary forms, vertical threads crossed by horizontal ones [...]. As she was making it [the striped weave], she intermingled the white and grey stripes with a few in colour [basically red and yellow], creating small variations in the pattern. I interrupted the stripes and later continued them a bit higher up, and so appeared those diagonal rhythms that emerge so often in my work15. In his report, the bureaucrat tells the story of the boy Saú, the spitting image of the children persecuted by Herod, who barely knew German and could hardly speak Romani but clung fiercely to the tapestry that, according to the enclosed description, was secured to the wall by ropes and marked his place in the house at bedtime. It was a gloomy, miserable place, a hole in the partition wall separating the kitchen from the sitting room, a wall on which that cloth meant something so significant that the orphan boy held on to it–the civil servant’s interest was mainly focused on the inexplicably good condition of the cloth–with desperate determination.
The square creates and delimits the space, while the triangle allows movement and optic activity. The triangle is the simplest polygon, and its uniform multiplication produces bands, rhombuses and hexagons, transformations in which colour also plays a part. Given its properties and visual behaviour, the triangle is associated with the rhombus, as shown in many predominantly geometric traditions, including North African textiles16. On the terrace, which lost definition when the gipsies took over Haus Wittgenstein, the new overhead coverings had been draped with several eye-catching cloths, tapestries that fell left and right from the makeshift roof. These weaves, onto which some of the dogs, and even the house goat, frequently climbed, had withstood the natural deteriorating effect of rain fairly well, and on sunny days one could still pick out a few colours–oranges on blues–or the odd unexpected glint among the frayed threads that moved when the wind played havoc with the rooftops of the building.
The unit, which constitutes the module of repetition, is simple and joined directly to the next, following the Western method of seeking the essence of the image and winnowing out accidents. The outer areas of the house, those visited frequently by the police and bureaucrats who were constantly hassling the community, had barely any tapestries, so the fabrics could not be construed as any kind of signage or sophisticated communication system. The decorative urge was not touted as a banner by the group; those draped weaves had nothing to do with expressing their identity. In fact, the prettiest tapestries, in the gipsies’ opinion (the most splendid and best preserved, according to the bureaucrats), were placed in the “delinquent zones”, the police term for the areas that escaped their surveillance through the house’s large windows.
The juxtaposition of bands is not a common pattern, for the module can only be multiplied on two of its sides, whereas on the other two there is extension rather than multiplication. The most peculiar characteristic of this pattern is its resistance to hierarchy, even when the bands differ in size and colour. Yet the arrangement of the tapestries in the different parts of the house had a significance that the bureaucrats noticed and highlighted despite their inability to understand it. There was a meaning. The grey triangles were transferred to the bedrooms, and the red edges were predominant in the kitchens and food storage areas. No one could explain why this was so, but all of the house’s occupants understood and knew how to follow that enigmatic rule. The German expert who accompanied them believed he had discovered the meaning of several small white fragments hanging from the ceiling in a zigzag arrangement; he thought he had found markers indicating some kind of hidden exit. But he got lost and ended up in a room at the back of the basement, a corner where no one ever went and where he could clearly hear everything going on in the small theatre that the Bulgarian authorities had built on the sloping terrain where the house stood. That theatre, of course, was where the parties were held; the many parties where the gipsies celebrated everything that entered or left the house, distinguished visitors, barbecues and weddings. But everyone joined those festivities; it never occurred to any of them to hide out in that remote basement corner that apparently boasted such excellent acoustics.
The quadrangular arrangement presents itself as the most neutral one, whether in grid form or with coloured blocks, and rarely violates its salient characteristics: homogeneity, virtually infinite extension on all sides, and non-hierarchical composition. Because there was tidiness. Everything always had an efficient, orderly appearance. The reports described the most lurid details and the deplorable condition of the rugs and tapestries, but the general impression was one of hygienic, cerebral order: this goes here, and that over there. The camp mentality, with its military connotations, had taken over. That was why the tapestries had captured the gipsy community. In the clarity of their arrangement and the force - fulness of their forms, the inhabitants found a tranquillity and a visual comfort that compensated for the prolonged contemplation of the wefts, for the complexity of the lines, for the visible and lazy scattering of zigzagging curves and triangles. The authorised voice of a young man called Musika, who had entered the house months after the occupation– another escapee from Herod’s wrath–ikened the tapestries to televisions and computers: a bunch of dots and lines, the famous bytes, the entertainment of seeing the world there, in stitches of thread. Now we ran among the tall ears of wheat, punching and kicking each other as we chased a ball of rags; the cigarette butt that still passed from hand to hand, no one wanting to selfishly hog it even while defending each puff to the last breath; the value of the awkward tripping episodes that made you go flying and take a nose-dive into the straw and grain, yelping in pain and then immediately letting out a roar of laughter met by all with raucous applause.
The triangular arrangement also has the possibility of extending itself infinitely on all sides, of not establishing a hierarchy or prioritising certain parts of the composition. However, in shattering the parallel with the architectural environment, it tends to create a continuous sense of motion. The work itself is so patient and, in a certain sense, monotonous–one pick, another, and another–that the only way to avoid stagnation is by making allowances for intuition and improvisation. And yes, life also became a nightmare. Some tapestries were condemned without just cause simply because they had served as the backdrop for a fight, for the cruel beatings the women sometimes received or for a bloody brawl between two leaders over who got the pig head or the strongest liquor. The snaking line that reminded us of the old streets of Kampala became an actual snake and awakened old fears, superstitions and bad omens, condemning the weave to conceal a crack or soak up a water leak. One of the final reports mentioned restored tapestries, which were actually some of these disgraced cloths, which the older women of the house had tried to recover by altering the arrangement of triangles, lines and squares. They cut out the most significant part of the design, flipped it over and presented the weave once again, to be seen by everyone through new eyes. As I have already said, that practice had no symbolic purpose; there were no signs or warnings. It was simply a question of redrawing the design. No matter how hard our ethnographers try to relate these designs to elementary literacy systems, the fact remains that the patterns of craftsmanship had no meaning other than that of impression, a sensation of space, an attention-grabbing capacity: all of this was deemed sufficient reward for the mending work with which the older women occupied their breaks and free time.
In The Arachnean17, Fernand Deligny constantly quotes from Karl von Frisch’s classic Animal Architecture18, but his motivation does not derive from an elementary fascination or a desire to find a scientific basis for his conjectures. Deligny knows what the predominant forms of architecture are in the human animal and has no intention of distinguishing them from the constructions of other animals. He knows that inside humans there is a conscious animal colonised by language, and that colonisation is what gives rise to the various habitats, habitations and modes of inhabiting. That alternative tension between language and animal is what opens the door to the possibility of understanding other needs, other ways of being in space, and even of being without full acknowledgement of that state as true habitation. The spider’s highly precise modus operandi illustrates the complexity of the habitational apparatus that Deligny wants to demolish. We know that Deligny works with autistic children, but he does not abuse that specificity. What interests him is the ability to differentiate between a web of seemingly non-standardised and definitely non-hegemonic ways of being-in-the-world and the inherent complexity of one who must also survive, eat and stay warm in that cold, harsh world. How is that interaction possible? Deligny does not conceal the fact that the same system with which the spider segregates the slender threads of its web is also the maw it uses to obtain food and the constructive channel that enables it to move through, inhabit and colonise the space. The spider’s web is at once a digestive system, a home and a mode of transportation in the world, a trap for self-defence and for hunting others. The complexity of this system must serve to understand a certain world, not to become its lord and master. Thus, nothing is exemplary; there is no model, only threads that vibrate here or there, music rather than signs. This is what The Arachnean desperately attempts to achieve: that the vibrations of the woven web and the knowledge it entails should not be seen as signs or vocabulary of any kind, but only as intentions, as the acknowledgement of certain gestures, as nothing effective, as a mere dissolution in a system of affects. At most, as a music of sorts.
The important thing is the network. On that point, the reports of the bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture are conclusive. If the intention of the thread networks woven by the artist is something other than mere decoration, we cannot say that their dissemination and ruin across the length and breadth of Haus Wittgenstein at the hands of its gipsy inhabitants implies the alteration of that intention–in fact, it probably offers its most convincing expression. Indeed, the tapestry–the tapestry understood in its profound warp and weft–becomes a way of understanding the complexity of languages that appear in the world, and whether with gipsies or North Africans, with videos or with fabrics, with pencils or with hands, overlapping threads always appear, multiple opportunities to make room for different things. The tapestry, that web of overlapping threads which, in reiterating the design, also reiterates its own structure and rationale, allows for a diversity of forms to emerge, provides opportunities for things to occur in different ways; the warp of happenings that keep us alive day after day.
And this web, like the spider web Deligny spoke of, is a highly efficient political tool. The network is a city, yes, a public space, a cluster of rooms and streets. The warp of the weave allows for things–the everyday flow of things that are repeated and different, the habits conferred by each space–not to repeat themselves in the same manner and form. The network of the tapestry permits differences within continuity. One does not only find rest in the tapestry, for its designs also inspire nightmares. Good and evil are interwoven, inseparably intertwined. The woven web is both comfortable and coarse. So arranged, the warp of Teresa Lanceta’s tapestries has that ability, that design of the world and its experience. We are not really interested in the reasons or cultural references they establish, not even in their tremendous capacity of evoking intensely lived life experiences. The tapestry is an apparatus, and a complex one at that. In contrast with other models, such as miscegenation or multiculturalism, the tapestry has its own meaning. In that sense it functions as an anchoring system, a complex government of the world and its things. But the principal matter is that the world happens in a thousand ways, and it is enough to be able to record it in all its complexity, to have a model, a way of truly inhabiting it.
Crime versus ornament. Teresa Lanceta knows that the law is no longer ornament, but its containment, the functionalism that governs us. If Adolf Loos linked crime with ornament, we must realise that what is presented as rationalism is in fact mere decoration, the smoothness of a roof mere modern imposture, minimalism a mere chic trend, simplicity a police uniform.
The weave versus the arabesque. It is no coincidence that Teresa Lanceta explored in Morocco the forms of craftsmanship that withstood Arab colonisation and its imposing calligraphies. Yet that focus on the abstract imagery of the nomads who dwelled in this land before the Arab invasions, before the Alawite kingdoms and sultanates, also hides something that seeks to direct our gaze. Teresa Lanceta’s interest in artisans and their lives, in the daily reality of the women weavers she worked with and in that of their daughters, many of them now emigrants, has to do with the act of looking at the cloth, at the structure of the weave: threads beyond threads, expanded warp.
Ragged tears versus melisma. Let us stop for a moment to meditate on Lanceta’s work from the 1990s Mujeres con rajo [Women with Rajo]19, a series of written portraits of flamenco women–flamenco understood as “gipsy” but in a broader sense, beyond ethnicity, almost as an art, a different qualification of life. One thread shows the strength and character of these women, while the other, the overlapping thread, represents the chauvinistic atavism that covers them with beatings and acts of submission. Another group of threads intersects, like roads from Minor Egypt, between Siria and present day Greece, with the paths of gipsy basket-makers and restless wanderers of old and those of present-day petty thieves pursued by the police. Another thread shows their voices when they sing. Another one shows the voice that guides them through the daily routine, the one that keeps their houses, families and labours alive. And still another shows the voice of complaint. Threads that come from Romania, from scrap dealers, threads of copper wire, threads that clash with the sedate lights of the Andalusian towns where they settle, threads from a different time and place, threads of social discrimination intersecting with threads of symbolic hyper-representation, romantic threads intersecting with miserable threads... A weave, rich and extreme.
And so I understand why the gipsy carries a rug to bed down on the grass, letting stalks, spikes and nettles mingle with its warp and weft. Nobody wants to lie on the hard ground: that only happens in romantic imaginings or bourgeois picnics. The gipsy prizes the thickness of the weft when he lies down on the earth. He knows there is no difference between the forest floor and the cloth on which he rests; he knows that culture and nature are one and the same. I am not talking about all gipsies. No. I speak of the one who, at the end of the day, lies down and sings, I have a mat, I have a mat, where I sleep off my drunken haze, where I sleep off my drunken haze20.
1 Teresa Lanceta, “Arquitectura”, spring 2015.2 See Christopher Maurer, Federico García Lorca y su “Arquitectura del cante jondo” (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2001).3 “Flores, dejadme, que aquél que tiene una pena, no se la divierte nadie, salí al campo a divertirme, dejadme flores, dejadme”.4 Christopher Maurer, op. cit. (note 2).5 See Juan José Lahuerta, Decir ANTI es decir PRO. Escenas de la vanguardia en España (Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 1999).6 Le Corbusier, Tapisseries Muralnomad (Brussels: Zodiac, 1961).7 Juan Calatrava, “El sentido de una exposición”, in Le Corbusier el artista, exh. cat. (Zurich: Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, 2010).8 Pedro G. Romero, “Los nuevos babilonios”, in Constant. Nueva Babilonia, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2015).9 See Jan Yoors, The Gypsies (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1987).10 See María Escribano, “Sobre la exposición ‘La alfombra roja’”, El País, 9 December 1989.11 Teresa Lanceta, “Tullidos”, autumn 2015.12 María García Ruíz, Notas de construcción. Somos las calles (Madrid: Espacio Nadie, Nunca, Nada, No, 2015).13 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991).14 See Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, California: Ariadne, 1998).15 Teresa Lanceta, Esperando el porvenir (Madrid: Galería Buades, 1993).16 This footnote and the following ones are excerpts from Teresa Lanceta’s PhD disser - tation: “Franjas, triángulos y cuadrados: estructuras de repetición en tradiciones textiles y en artistas del siglo XX”, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Geografía e Historia, Departamento de Arte Contemporáneo (read on 17 July 1999).17 Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal Publishing, 2015).18 Karl von Frisch, Animal Architecture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).19 Translator’s note: Rajo is a Spanish word that literally means “gash” or “tear”, but in flamenco music it refers to a rough, coarse, ragged or “torn” vocal quality that is essential for singing certain types of songs.20 Juanito Mojama and Ramón Montoya, “Que calle tan oscura” [What a Dark Street], 1920 (soleares and bulerías): [What a dark street, / What a dark street / what a street of darkness / oh, what a pretty girl / if only her mother would give her to me. // There comes Pepe with the charcoal / holm oak charcoal is what I sell. // What you’ve done with me / you can never pay for, not even if you were drawn and quartered. / What you’ve done with me / not even if you were sent to the streets. // It frightens me so / It frightens me so / to see the Moors fight / oh, to see the little Moors fight. //After a while / a while / a little while / a voice answered me / ay, and ay, ay, ay ya / ay and ay! for the love of God! // I have a mat / I have a mat / where I sleep off my drunken haze / where I sleep off my drunken haze].
A Coarsely Woven Web (PDF)
- The Rhombus Is A Horizon. Teresa Lanceta in Conversation with Nuria Enguita Mayo - Nuria Enguita Mayo-Teresa Lanceta
The Rhombus Is a Horizon
[Nuria Enguita Mayo] Adiós al rombo [Farewell to the Rhombus] is conceived as the final part of an exhibition trilogy, but it also introduces a new twist, a reconsideration in light of the time that has passed since your first trips to Morocco in the mid-1980s. It’s the consolidation of a way of working, of doing things and feeling, that now acquires a different presence in the field of contemporary art.
[Teresa Lanceta] From the moment I first saw them, I found rural Moroccan weaves deeply moving. I have created three projects about them, spaced out over the years. La alfombra roja [The Red Carpet], an exhibition held at Barcelona’s Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària in the late 1980s, was the first show. By then I had been weaving for more than ten years and already had reservations about the concept of “originality”, so it wasn’t a stretch for me to focus on the fabrics of the Middle Atlas and emulate them. I maintained the technique, the materials and, as much as possible, the format of the original weaves. My idea wasn’t general or vague; I was drawn to very specific pieces, and I got as close as I could to them in order to clearly observe the hermetic textile abstraction of the cushions and handiras. The result still interests me, but the romantic vision I had of the rural world at the time has been shattered; nowadays only organised tour visits still maintain that idyllic perspective. Today, a day in March 2016, I open the newspaper and read about a bomb attack at the airport and a metro station in Brussels, a place where, back then, I would have wanted to show La alfombra roja, because a lot of women who speak the language of the Middle Atlas live there, women who have learned to weave from their mothers... But my desire would have been nothing more than a dream rooted in fantasy, because those weaver women, in travelling to the new world, left behind not only their homes and family but also their craft, their savoir faire; also, it’s quite possible that none of them would have come to see that show because they wouldn’t even have heard about it. La alfombra roja was an intuitive approach to the formal concepts of weaving in the Middle Atlas, to the ornamentation of objects for everyday use as a form of language. The original woven creations were exhibited alongside my own. That was the idea. The second project, Tejidos marroquíes: Teresa Lanceta [Moroccan Textiles: Teresa Lanceta], had a more complicated history. Marie-France Vivier offered me the chance to show my woven fabrics at Paris’ Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, where she was a curator. That invitation seemed like a wonderful opportunity to return to the theme of rural Moroccan textiles, of which that museum had an extraordinary collection, and Vivier was very receptive to the idea of showing my work in connection with those textiles. At an advanced stage in the project, the museum unexpectedly closed, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía agreed to take on the exhibition. The chance to present a substantial collection of rural weaves, of “folk” textiles, in a young contemporary art museum like the Reina Sofía completely fulfilled my initial intention of contributing to a broader knowledge of this art, which up to that point had been relegated to ethnological museums. Woven textiles from the Middle and High Atlas and the Tensift plain would be displayed a few paces away from Picasso’s Guernica. And why shouldn’t they be? Actually, some of the pieces I planned to exhibit were made during the same period. Between the first exhibition, in 1989, and the second, in 2000, things had changed considerably, but I stuck close to the idea behind the first project, as much of what I had intended was achieved with the presence of those amazing rugs, cushions and hanbels, and so my work would once again underscore the most significant aspects of the original weaves and maintain the dimensions of the selected exhibits. I once again referenced the formal facet of the fabrics, but emphasising the traditional premises based on repetition and transgression. The exhibition included historic woven fabrics and rugs from the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, from Rabat, from the Louvre collection, from the Bert Flint collection in Marrakesh, and from private Swiss collections. Nevertheless, a lot of people took issue with the show.
[N.E.M.] Now we have reached the third project. Sixteen years have passed and, as you said yourself, we live in a profoundly turbulent, transformed world. Moreover, this show is presented as a conclusion, as a farewell.
[T.L.] Adiós al rombo warns us of the diminished acceptance of cultural facts. In this show, weaving women appear in a series of videos and in the text entitled “White Roses”. We glimpse weavers from the Middle Atlas who are now out-of-work immigrants in Alicante, as well as young students in Fez and women I got to know in places where fabrics are made. I decided not to violate their privacy by using images they couldn’t control or even see. Their stories and opinions are succinctly told in the text. The title Adiós al rombo refers to a way of approaching the world that is no longer possible and that is beginning to reveal its bitterest side, now that we incorporate the heritage of others while casting off those who created it. Heritage and young people are absorbed by a world where the notion of what “belongs to us” is much easier to assimilate than that of “us”. Farewell to the rhombus, farewell to innocence.
[N.E.M.] Let’s go back to your early days for a moment. You began weaving in the late 1970s, when you were still an Art History student in Barcelona. Since then you have produced a body of work which is quite extraordinary, for both its uniqueness and its rigorous consistency, as the result of your choice and your commitment to an idea.
[T.L.] In the 19s I lived in Barcelona. I was surrounded by interesting conceptual proposals that were shot through with political denouncements. Although I knew that they had something powerful to offer, one day I stumbled across a skein of natural cotton thread that I had never seen before–in those days it was all acrylic–and that led me to woven textiles, especially to “popular” textiles. So, although I realised that my decision would create a huge gap between me and the artistic expressions that surrounded me, I didn’t hesitate to make it. Others rejected my practice, but fortunately youth is bold, so it didn’t bother me.
[N.E.M.] Since then, you have remained loyal to a precise technique, based on the conviction that weaving is also an art form, and thus overcoming the idea that what is considered mechanical and “popular” can’t have a “higher” value.
[T.L.] I was primarily interested in the weave itself, in its basic structure. I was also drawn to its soft, ductile materiality, a quality that was vindicated by artists like Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris in the 1960s. It’s the exact opposite of the hardness and rigidity of traditional painting and sculpture. I made my choice and I have stuck to it with constant, unswerving determination. I decided to work with the most basic, primal aspects of woven fabrics, with their ligaments, techniques and materials, and also with their linguistic tradition. Weaving has allowed me to understand a primeval, universal code that reveals an internal law, transcending physical, temporal and cultural borders. I wasn’t interested in palace tapestries or lavish cloths made by obedient hands acting on the orders of others. I was interested in the woven creations of predominantly textile cultures in which manufacture and practical usage go hand-in-hand–in other words, in fabrics that develop a language as a testimony of culture and art.
[N.E.M.] In fact, usefulness has been one of the theoretical pretexts for labelling decorative forms of art as “lower” arts, as opposed to the self-sufficient “high” arts of painting and sculpture. But, as you have already pointed out, weaving is one of the tools of art and it too ministers to the human soul. With your work, you have proved that the so-called decorative arts are in fact “pure” art. You have also explored those premises from the perspective of art theory: the structures of repetition of the twentieth century are something that folk art and avant-garde artists have in common. And that assertion creates a shift, focusing attention on the art object itself, rather than on the circumstances in which it was created or the pedigree of its creator. In this way, the object is endowed with its own “agency”. It seems to me that the rugs of the Middle Atlas with which your work is associated also possess that characteristic, in the sense that their meaning is not exhausted in either their aesthetic or their primary function. In fact, they have the capacity to deploy fresh new meaning with each change of context. I have often heard you say that weaves are necessary presences because of their beauty, their social function in bringing people together around a shared task, their promise of warmth and shelter and, above all, the complexity of their language, which speaks of the lives and emotions of the women who make them.
[T.L.] In the 1970s, the feminist art practice involved the critical and satirical decontextualisation of fabrics, but I was more interested in talking–positively–about the work of women who generate language and art using their own methods and tools, and who are generally overlooked because of their dual subaltern condition, as females and as residents of poor rural areas. Through their weaving, these women define and transmit the culture to which they belong; they are creators of an artistic language which, once mastered, allows for a more profound exploration of inherited ideals, and it is impossible to deny that their useful objects can also be art. To think otherwise is to gainsay the universality of art. Such notions penalise precariousness and are an affront to the essential value of cultures which, in this day and age, might even be upheld as models of artistic sustainability. Women weavers construct a human space through which we can come to understand the true definition of artistic creation and of art. If we reject useful art, an art for life, we sidestep the issue of ecological reflection and the responsibility which it, like any other medium, has to the environment. Western art, now a widespread cult of globalisation, avoids defining its interlocutor and half-heartedly questions its dependence on the political and economic powers that be. When I think of all the myriad objects that exist, of all the superfluous, unnecessary objects that are produced, and their subsequent environmental impact, I always find consolation in the thought of my fabrics returning to the place from whence they came, dissolving in that great pie in the sky that will eventually absorb and dissolve us all. And if part of their thrill and language is lost along the way, at least they’ll still be useful: they’ll protect someone from the cold, serve as a rug or construct a space.
[N.E.M.] As you have already mentioned, in your works on the weaves of the Middle Atlas there is no appropriation, in the sense of imitation or reproduction, nor do you use their forms to give them another meaning in a new configuration. Your work converses with a collective, time-honoured art and thought, with a set of traditional norms, motifs and habits and, through variation and personalisation, it intensifies its openness, which is subject to change and at the same time evidences a continuity of forms developed by a community over time. There is a vindication of the merits of a certain type of knowledge, of a technique, but there’s also an affective component that leads you to interweave your life with those of others, to understand, to enjoy and modify.
[T.L.] Art proposes ephemeral conclusions that are open to other meanings. That is precisely why it endures. Art is the “open-source code” of a collectivity whose members can read, appropriate, transform and transmit it because, as a collective language, art not only proposes a dialogue but also reveals the internal law that holds it together, a law that allows those who master it to delve deeper into their inherited ideals and attain expressive freedom–and, with it, creativity. Woven fabrics are art because many women weavers reach that climactic moment where the familiar is transformed, offering a glimpse of that which is hidden bellow. Moreover, perhaps because of their colours or their materiality, weaves appeal to our senses and our need for joy and pleasure. Accepting these fabrics means accepting the other art and the art of others, as well as the possibility of designating, of establishing universality as something everyone can achieve, without hindering anyone’s ability to do so. If an artist can designate an object as art, why shouldn’t the spectator do the same? And, most importantly, why shouldn’t the woman weaver do the same?
[N.E.M.] Like that woman who wove the handira that has accompanied you ever since you bought it at the souk in Marrakesh in 1985.
[T.L.] That woman has been a major figure in my life. She wove a Beni Ouarain handira that has accompanied me, as you say, since 1985, and has always been a source of delight and knowledge. I think of her when I work, and the text I wrote for this catalogue is dedicated to her. Her handira was an unexpected gift, a concise assertion: it revealed her presence to me, the fact of her as a real, flesh-and-blood person rather than an anonymous, anodyne, interchangeable being. Her woven creation made me understand that collective art is neither a uniform magma nor an enormous hand that makes everything; it is about concrete persons, each a singular and unique individual.
[N.E.M.] The weaves of the Middle Atlas have ornamental structures that clearly set them apart from other textile traditions. As Bert Flint has noted, in both Moroccan poetry and in your tapestries, the whole is the sum of individual parts, like verses that combine to form an intelligible, independent unit, unconnected to a central totality: the whole results from a juxtaposition of equal parts with no introduction, climax or conclusion1. There are other characteristics, such as repetitive non-figurative structures, the absence of a visual centre, the lack of clearly defined borders or edges and the importance of details, which refer to the nomadic lifestyle of these peoples, in stark contrast to the stable sedentary condition of Western societies. In their writings on “nomadology”, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also explored this opposition between the state and nomads. I think it’s pertinent to recall what they said about the jewellery-weapons “assemblage” that characterises the nomads, versus the tools-signs assemblage of the centralised state: The relation between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the earth is no longer anything but ground (soil), where there is no longer even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif2. This also ties in with the rhombus, an irregular shape, a design that doesn’t fall neatly into place and is always moving, as opposed to square-based shapes.
[T.L.] In the 1980s and 90s everyone was talking about the nomadic facet of certain famous artists. Those comments always made me laugh, because in reality their “nomadic” lifestyle consisted in owning holiday homes in exotic places like Mali or India, but they certainly weren’t about to give up their primary residences in New York or Paris. When you get close to the gypsies, when you live with them and enjoy their art, when you discover the rugs made on portable looms, the world becomes a bigger place; your land is the ground you tread and your home is wherever you go, not where you come from, because the return trip isn’t a homecoming but an endless journey out. This is the rhombus. A rhombus has no horizontal or vertical lines; it’s made entirely of diagonals that form infinite designs. In its reiterative expansion, the rhombus network does not reveal any coordinates; it has no centre or frame, just a network of equal parts. Repetition is not an enemy but an asset capable of assimilating variations and transgressions. The rhombus is a horizon.
[N.E.M.] For a long time, the “other” was viewed as a source of artistic merchandise by Western elites eager for exotic novelties. Your work has been more quiet and understated, but also more ambitious. However, I’m struck by the lack of critical feedback on your work during the final decades of the twentieth century. It seems to me that the new century has opened up a different horizon, one where, thanks to the consolidation of feminist and “decolonial” thought and to new anthropological approaches, certain dogmas are being shattered. The world has changed, but so have our points of view: the decolonisation of modes of knowledge holds out new possibilities for evaluating work like yours, formerly relegated to the decorative arts category, in a different light. New theories about the body and movement in performance and dance also shine a spotlight on artistic practices that cast off oppressive dualities like technique and theory, body and mind or reason and emotion. The reconsideration of ornament as the dynamic opening of form (neither abstract nor figurative), as a disequilibrium, which Deleuze describes in his work on Difference and Repetition; the consideration of the art object as an “animate” thing endowed with “agency”, according to sociologist Alfred Gell, who drew attention to the ways in which an artefact is capable of affecting people, triggering emotional responses, sparking ideas and provoking a variety of social processes and actions; and the vindication of a technical knowledge emancipated from theory for contemporary art, which we can trace in the ideas of Bruno Latour or in the performance theory of Bojana Cveji´c... All of these open up a new space from which to re-examine and reconsider your work.3
[T.L.] The reflection on and recovery of ornament as a value in itself, which we see happening today, interests me more than the appropriationist current infused with irony and criticism of the 1980s and 90s. Do not clouds and waves ornament the vast colour field that is the sky or the sea? Do they not ornament to proclaim that the world moves without stop, without direction or meaning? Women did not enter the art world in the 1960s and 70s to do what was already being done; they wanted to say other things, to say them another way and with their own tools. They refused to let their bodies be the battlefield in order to be the battle themselves, so that they would not be the place where events happen but the happening itself. And now we see that artists from “artistically subaltern” countries burst onto the art scene in a different way, with heterogeneous ideas and themes, and from a more emphatic stance. The number and quality of these artists from nations once considered peripheral has grown considerably. Many of them live in places where traditional trades are still practised, allowing them to incorporate unusual collaborations. That broadens the knowledge and enjoyment of art. Personally, I wish I were in a better position to dialogue with those works, although I also know that some of those artists want to get away from what they see as ancestral hindrances.
[N.E.M.] Adiós al rombo is also, by your own decision, a “collective” exhibition. You have invited two artists who are also activists and data analysts: Nicolas Malevé and Lot Amorós. And you also decided to include a group of young artists who have been students of yours at Barcelona’s Massana Design School in recent years, when you have been very active on the educational front. Earlier you were telling me that now is the time to work with others, that you never want to work alone again. Therefore, this seems to be a natural evolution of your work and the fulfilment of a desire. Not to get into autobiographical details, but I do think it’s fascinating–as Pedro G. Romero magnificently recounts in this catalogue–how your life has become interwoven with that of “others”: gypsies, weaving women and all sorts of subalterns. And now with other artists.
[T.L.] As soon as the other appears, whether one by one or collectively, there is a fragile, unstable part of us that is fortified and magnified–even when that other isn’t what we expected or as positive as we thought, as happens over and over again in close relationships or migratory movements. Of course, as Sartre said, other people may be hell, but even so they complete us, they move us and make us happy.
With regard to Nicolas Malevé and Lot Amorós, I admire what they do and how they go about doing it. Nicolas is an artist, software programmer and digital activist, but he’s really a poet. He works with computers like bees work, barely grazing what he touches, touching it just enough to pollinate a network, data or files. I find Lot stimulating because of his facet as an IT inventor and because of his activism. Salim, Marta, Clàudia, Eulàlia and Andrea were all students of mine. When you have people with so much personality by your side, the best thing you can do is try to put your experience to good use, to protect them from bureaucratic interference while you try to understand what they are incubating. My invitation has been quite timid, but it has reaffirmed my interest in future invitations and collaborations. In the same way, the incorporation of recycled objects from the Centre d’Investigació de la Trinxera (Corbera de Ebro, Tarragona) in my project El paso del Ebro [Crossing the Ebro4] has made my own work grow and confirmed this idea as a form of commitment.
1 See Bert Flint, “La dinámica del arte del tejido en Marruecos”, in Teresa Lanceta: Tejidos Marroquíes, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000), p. 21.2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 401.3 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Enquête sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Bojana Cveji´c and Ana Vujanovi´c, Public Sphere by Performance (Berlin: b_books, 2012); and Bojana Cveji´c, “Un infiel regreso a la poética (en cuatro argumentos)”, in La réplica infiel, exh. cat. (Madrid: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, 2016).4 Included in the group exhibition La réplica infiel (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2016).
The Rhombus Is A Horizon. Teresa Lanceta in Conversation with Nuria Enguita Mayo (PDF)
- Textile and Tactile Surfaces - Thomas Golsenne
- Rhomboid Strips - Nicolas Malevé
- The Hinge between Art and Design - Maria Diez Santiago Planella
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