Painter, Hermit and Performance Artist Tatiana Garmendia is the 2nd in our series of Interviews with On the Edge Performance Artists!

 

Tatiana Garmendia in the Performance "Patria Querida."

This is the second in a series of interviews with the artists/performance artists of On the Edge: 2^nd International Latinx Performance Art Festival. Tatiana is an inspiration who effortlessly glides from amazing painting skills to thought provoking, powerful performance.

Xavier: Please take a moment to introduce yourself and describe your artwork for us.  Are you primarily a performance artist?  If not, what other forms of artwork do you do?

 Tatiana Garmendia: Think of me as a visual Jungian whose work centers around archetypal narratives. I’m really interdisciplinary and circle an initial image or memory from different points of view, working with a variety of materials like charcoal, ink, paint, photos, collage, sculptural installation, film, language, you name it. Each material adds layers of meaning, of tradition that add clarity or opacity to the narrative embedded in an archetype. I actually do very little work in public performance, like the piece I’ve created for this festival. Most of my performance work is a hermetic ritual taking place in the studio. That’s my principal stage, my laboratory. And really, most of my art production, primarily drawings and paintings, proceed from these isolated performances. An astrologer once told me my Tarot archetype was The Hermit. I was, yeah, that tracks. I’m happiest figuring things out in my studio.

Xavier: That is amazing, one day when we have more time, I would like to really get in-depth into how Jungian archetypes fit into your work and what takes to bring a hermit out of her cave!

How long have you been working as a performance artist? How did you start?  Do you have any formal training, or do you have connections to a specific school or theory/ies of performance?

 Tatiana: My first experiences of performing on a stage came through song and dance. I sang in choruses and also studied ballet, and flamenco. I also did some fashion modeling when I was young. But I was never comfortable on a stage. I hated the scrutiny, having my body looked at. Perhaps a vestige of early trauma– it’s the world we live in, it’s all too common to be embodied in a female form and be the recipient of unwanted and even violent attention. To this day it’s an uncomfortable space, but one that now is filled with the possibility of transformation, for me and for the audience.

Xavier: How would you describe your own performative work? What is performance art to you and what about it motivates you to be a part of its rich history?

Tatiana: I think of performative work as a kind of shamanic journey, latent with transformative potentiality. Even if it’s nonlinear and seems not to go from point A to B in a rational way, you’re still on a trip. There’s this incredible Paleolithic cave painting of Les Trois Freres known as The Sorcerer which really gets to the heart of how art and ritual, artifact and spectacle combine to lift the veil between conscious observation and subconscious awareness. That image still inspires me. You can see my self-portrait The Fool, directly quotes the image. The painting is based on a performance where I pranced around in horns embodying the archetype.

Anyhow, this idea that performance was a vehicle to manifest a potential came to me right after earning my BFA, when I began teaching high school. Try to focus 30 hormone-crazed teens on a task for 50 minutes without using some theatricality to spark their interest! But seriously, before long I realized that sharing stories and materials with a group of people could create the kind of gnosis that I exclusively associated with the studio, with the easel.  I was just a few years older than my students, so we were all discovering the inherent power and magic of artmaking at the same time. The connection between private artistic investigation and communal exploration became cemented. Later, in grad school, I was so inspired by Joseph Beuys, by his notion of social sculpture which connected to my intuitions about creativity and meaning. At the same time Ana Mendieta’s early feminist performances and Silhouette pieces spoke to a deeper space in me, to my personal experiences of multiple selves within Santeria and Afro Cuban rituals, and as a refugee, a marginal being caught between different cultures, different origin stories, different languages, religions, politics, different everything! Performance on that level was something instinctual, a survival mechanism, a way to navigate the liminality of always being an Other.

 

 

‘sorcerer’ at Trois Freres, Ariege, France.  

 

 

The Fool, oils on canvas, 60”h x 36”w

 

Xavier: Can you describe the performances that you will be doing with us? How does it fit into the bigger picture of your work?

Tatiana: I tend to work in series over a period of years, each series exploring an archetypal image that constellates personal or communal stories and memories, real or imagined. For the past few years my work has been exploring alchemy. For Jungians, alchemy is a metaphor for the individuation towards the Self—the Bride is a feminine projection of this symbol. So, I’ve been questioning what happens to our development in a world where the feminine story is encoded in degraded and distorted forms. At the same time,  3 in 5 girls or women will be physically or sexually assaulted in her lifetime, we bombard them with images of the bride. What for Carl Jung is a projection of our communal self-actualization, in contemporary life it has become a pretty crude bait and switch enterprise.  My interest started with the synchronous find of a collection of bridal magazines at Goodwill. A treasure trove of these models dressed in outlandish white gowns, with crowns and veils and trains. To my eyes, bridal wear is preposterous, even comical, unless it serves as a metaphor, setting the wearer outside of normal space and time into a mythical or symbolic space. The space of performance, right? And of course, not all cultures costume the bride in white, but in the West it’s a convention that began with Queen Victoria, and I mean, it’s quite a lucrative industry. For the purposes of the performance premiering at the festival, the bride’s gown is transformed into a typical Santeria costume…an all-white dress. Mind you, I had to wear white my entire Iyabo year, and in the performance, it is a vehicle for traveling back to my mother’s kitchen, where I witnessed countless rituals to connect the living to the gods and to the dead. Here I’m alchemizing personal experiences and transporting them into the stage of transformation, not as a bride, not as one of the faithful, but as an artist. Like The Fool in my self-portrait, or the sorcerer in Les Trois Freres. In essence the performance takes the spiral shape of a dream initiated by music and movement. It commences with Eleggua’s dance, jumps back in time with Oshun’s dance, and then is released from the dream state into our world by Delilah’s dance, which I hope will become a conga line the audience joins in. The entire narrative pulses with rhymes that I composed in iambic pentameter, which mimic the beating of the human heart.

 

 Xavier: Wow! That is beautiful and poetic, which brings me to my next set of questions, stolen directly from Proust! Do you believe in love and what is your definition of magic?

Tatiana: Oh yes, I believe in LOVE. I can’t live in this world without it. I don’t think any of us can. Love is the real alchemy, that can turn the most leadened heart to gold. It sounds like some mamby-pamby platitude, but I’ve known real hatred and also know its opposite is the only thing that can save us. When my father fell in disfavor, the Cuban government sent him, my mom, my brother, and me to a camp for political dissidents. I wasn’t yet 6 and my brother was all of eight years old. My father was tortured. My mother interrogated.  My brother and I witnessed acts of unspeakable violence, so much so that to this day large swaths of our memories are complete blanks. Erased. You know, the CDC did a study on violence, it’s such an epidemic, right? So, they found that it you survive a physical or sexual assault, you are three times more likely than other people to experience more assaults for a variety of external and internal reasons. It makes sense, and my experience coincides with their findings. Which is to say, I’ve lived just about every kind of physical and sexual offense this effed up world dishes out to girls/women, to refugees/immigrants, to people of color. So, I have intimate knowledge of love’s opposite. Of hate, of brutishness, of humanity’s capacity for punishing the Other just because they can. Yet here I am- not just a survivor, but a thriver. What differentiates me from those that succumbed to their shitty deal of the cards? Love. The power of Love to heal. Love from the Divine Mother. Love from my husband. Love from my brother. Love from my teachers and friends. Love from our ancestors who preserved their stories so we could learn. Love from the work of artists who devoted their lives to an act of irrational hope in an act of grace and service-the smearing paint on a piece of cloth, the scribbling of ink on a page, the molding of dust into a vessel, the projecting of lights on a wall- and yeah, hopefully my Love will reach out and touch all those who come to La Boveda (My Mother’s Kitchen). I definitely believe in Love. Look at this festival, it’s an act of love for the community.

Xavier: Thank you for that amazing set of insights into your work! 

Xavier: (After a long moment to think.) Do you have a website/s where people can learn more about you and your work?

Tatiana: My website is basically an archive of my decades-long practice, http://tatianagarmendia.com but if people want to see what I’m currently working on, thinking about, or doing, they can follow me on IG @tatianagarmendia_art

I basically use the platform as a kind of sketchbook/diary/blog.

Anyone who wants to read more about my alchemical series, there’s a free catalog Dreaming the Bride: https://tinyurl.com/4e6twpc3 and another free catalog from my solo show Her Kind: https://tinyurl.com/25jbex7m

Xavier: Thank you so much for this amazing interview!

On the Edge: 2nd International Latinx Performance Art Festival is supported by LadyPants Productions, CoCA Center on Contemporary Art, The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture,  La Sala, 4Culture, Xavier Lopez and DJ Name. The event will occur over 3days from October 5th--7th.