We Are the Same Thing: The Sutured Selves of María Magdalena Campos-Pons

For the past few weeks, I’ve been mulling over an image from a single-channel video by interdisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons. In Baño Sagrado (Rite of Initiation, Sacred Bath) (1991), an extreme close-up of a bare stomach, brown and downy, occupies most of the wall it is projected onto. Soil scatters across its surface and a single root seems to be growing from the figure’s navel, creating a visual rhyme between skin and earth. “Somos la misma cosa,” a hushed voice reminds via voice-over. “We are the same thing.” In another image that has burrowed its way into my consciousness, a gangly seedling rises defiantly from the small patch of land nestled between two small breasts. I continue to return to these two sequences because they both communicate the idea of the body as a mutable landscape in constant dialogue with the material realities of earthly and spiritual life within the African diaspora. Lost in these portraits of ground and skin and breast and stalk, I think about how my own form telegraphs excerpts of histories known and unknown, and how the meanings of those narratives fluctuate depending on a slew of variables, from where I am to who surrounds me.

The video is one of many works on view as part of the exhibition María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, a four-decade retrospective that has made stops at the Brooklyn Museum, Frist Art Museum, and the Nasher Museum of Art before landing at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, this February. The survey organizes Campos-Pons’s peripatetic multimedia practice into thematic sections where photography, watercolors, video, performance, sculpture, and the spills between these methods rub up against and into each other. Curated by Carmen Hermo and Mazie Harris with Jenée-Daria Strand, the exhibition makes clear how the legendary Cuban artist uses recurring motifs and preoccupations to pull from history and autobiography in order to examine how her own positionalities—a Black woman raised on a sugar plantation in the Matanzas province whose ancestors were enslaved Nigerians and Chinese indentured laborers forcefully brought to the island—intersect with concepts of exile, motherhood, colonialism, ancestry, and the future. Alongside these particular geographies, Campos-Pons considers how her spiritual lineages (she was introduced to Yoruba traditions through her grandmother, a Santería priestess, and her father was an herbalist) rebuff traditional notions of place and identity as determinate and immovable.

“Geography is not, however, secure and unwavering; we produce space, we produce its meanings, and we work very hard to make geography what it is,” Katherine McKittrick writes in Demonic Grounds (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which explores how Black women puncture and remake our definitions of land and belonging. McKittrick points to work by writers Dionne Brand and Toni Morrison as examples, and like them, Campos-Pons narrates “new geographic stories.” Her images and objects chart the ways that land and people have been touched and transformed by the destabilizing histories of the transatlantic slave trade, where both nature and Indigenous and African communities were violently exploited, ruptured, and decimated in the name of greed and control. We are still contending with those ruptures today, and Campos-Pons’s work attempts to parse through how her own familial lineage has been shaped and molded by the ripples of that ongoing violence. In doing so, she translates the volatilities of memory and experience into material forms that capture our shifting relationship with ecology, cultural history, and diasporic community. During my visit to the exhibition, I felt those shifts intimately, as I moved through the many incarnations of Campos-Pons’s psychic landscapes. Installations like Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) combine video, sculpture, photography, and sound into a matriarchal shrine that both celebrates and unsettles the daily hum of domesticity, while glass mobiles, part of the series The Rise of the Butterflies (2021), suspend from the ceiling like fallen teardrops.

Across Campos-Pons’s practice, eyes, feet, and hair alchemize into symbols charged with mythical and mystical meanings. Baño Sagrado, one of her first forays into film that was transferred from the Super8 original to video, depicts a performance of reimagined purification rituals that are inspired by Santería limpiezas, in which the body and spirit are shorn of negative energies. The video sutures together scenes of Campos-Pons preparing the ritual in a nondescript room. Five coupe glasses are organized in a pyramidal pattern. Arranged in front of the glasses, an arc of quartz crystals forms another layer to the altar-like offering. Standing in the middle, her full body cropped so that only her legs and feet are visible, Campos-Pons grinds herbs using a mortar and pestle, while ambient noises and percussive electronic sounds (the score was composed by Neil Leonard) play over the flow of images. Cuban aphorisms and African proverbs float in and out, as Campos-Pons’s voice recites a stream-of-consciousness reflection. “My feet are torn from so much walking, I am here to rest,” the English translation reads. In one enchanting shot, the camera hovers over a porcelain-enameled steel bathtub. Feet and legs float within the basin, still and ghostly in contrast to the orange-hued fish that zip through the deep blue sea, a superimposition of underwater footage. An homage to the Yoruba deities Yemayá and Oshun, the video muddles the body and natural surroundings to such a degree that it becomes a fool’s errand to distinctively mark where one ends and the other begins. Campos-Pons made this work while navigating the draconian US immigration system, and its disjointed editing style mirrors the literal and psychic experience of fragmentation caused by imperial bureaucracies.

Although Behold visualizes what disintegration looks like across different contexts, from ancestral to geological, it also reveals how Campos-Pons locates a sense of power and agency through engagement with nature and spirit. Elevata (2002) is one of many examples of her renowned gridded portraits, where individual large format Polaroids are organized into a network and displayed as monumental images. Composed of sixteen Polaroids, four rows and four columns, Elevata is another plunge into the watery depths of the artist’s subconscious. The second column in the first row presents an image of Campos-Pons, her back turned towards the viewer and her figure flipped upside down. Her black hair is sectioned into six braids, which continue to extend and loop across the lower panels, forming circular patterns that resemble eyes. The braids cascade against shades of blue that alternate between a light, splotchy wash of watercolor and dark blue scrawls that turn into dribbles of ink. The artist seems to be lost in her own daydream, and the braids chart a winding journey towards an ancestral knowledge, which return as orbs of blue energy. The braids also recall collares, sacred beads that act as a physical link between the earthly and spirit realms in Santería. As in most African traditional religions, especially those forged in the Caribbean and Latin America, the sea is both origin and afterlife, a literal and mythical site whose ripples hold the memories of colonial dispossessions across time and space. Still, Campos-Pons reaches towards her ancestral kin in spite of the fractures by threading together that which bonds our various worlds.

In Elevata, the grids are an acknowledgment of the many dislocations Campos-Pons has experienced on intimate and collective registers, while also expressing her particular interventions into the systems and frameworks that attempt to confine Black communities and subjectivities as unknowable or nonexistent. Campos-Pons has said that she draws “from a dismantled archive,” and Behold articulates such an archive via the artist’s relationships with history, ecology, and spirit, living as its own protean landscape. What stays with me as I navigate the many terrains of her practice are the metaphysical qualities of her poetry. How an eye can develop into a vexing symbol of both protection and witnessing, as well as selfhood and surveillance, such as in the watercolor painting Miasma #7 (2020), where unblinking eyes stare through plumes of smoke and blood orange sunbursts.

Campos-Pons’s images and objects act as crossroads of sorts, ushering me into wayward languages and forms that visualize the artist’s own experience of fragmentation and temporal play. In doing so, she creates a geography that defies a singular reading. In Santería, no ceremony or ritual can begin without an invocation to Elegua, the orisha of the crossroads, who rules over all passages and roads. Similarly, in Behold, it is impossible to amble down Campos-Pons’s forking paths without first acknowledging what it means to move between worlds, between cultures, between histories, between selves.