Discover the vibrant artistic world of Betsabeé Romero, a leading contemporary Mexican artist. From her unique perspective on cultural influences to her impactful art exhibitions, explore how Romero addresses pressing social themes through her work.
Betsabeé Romero is now listening to the suddenly silent streets of Mexico City, North America’s largest city. From her little street house in the Villa de Cortés district, the artist is on the lookout for the sadness that invades the world faster than the disease. The absence of funerals, the hidden violence against the women and children in her country, and of course, her own personal fight fight for female artists.
The following column is contributed by Jean-Christian Agid and is part of his regular ‘Not At Your Home’ cultural blog on his 37 Street media site. A reminder: we make our content free worldwide in the public interest. If you like what we do, then please contribute to our journalism.
Confined, she writes, draws, and reads, mostly philosophy, at the moment. She is thinking about art installations to illustrate the staggered mourning that many people will experience. Incidentally, she has been invited to create and speak on this topic at the Frieze in London this Fall, as well as in Sydney and Rome.
Betsabée Romero (BR): Like a city that has never been able to stay in total confinement. Traffic has been cut in half, total silence during the night, unfortunately always interrupted by ambulance sirens. The ability to confine oneself to at home has been a luxury that only a part of the population can afford
We are listening to the birds; they are singing everywhere. Spring has burst forth with its jacarandas and bougainvillea, more colorful than ever. There are also those who walk door to door selling tamales, cookies, gas, water, fruit, flowers, each with their own sound signal, an urban symphony of street vendors who wake us up to life every morning to remind us that we are still in Mexico City.
The car is for people, an object of extreme consumption, the extension of the body in movement. Here, it is brought back to its toy state, but on a human scale. The interior is made of sheet metal, as are the seats and the driver. There’s a big key on the outside of the car. If you turn it around, everything lights up: the headlights, the vehicle cabin and the music too, a song by Agustín Lara, Veracruz, that this immense 20th century composer had written when La Condesa became a very modern district of Mexico City.
BR: The very meaning of the vehicle has always worried me and seeing them without movement fascinates me. More than 500,000 cars are parked indefinitely in Mexico in front of houses and buildings. Their owners don’t want to get rid of them.
Not to mention the immobility of cars stuck in traffic. When you don’t move, you’re thinking, you’re with yourself, you’re going through a crisis of thought. All these daily journeys in large cities, all this time spent in a car in slow motion, often stopped, time wasted, between home and work, between work and where we go afterwards, are all moments of intimacy and introspection for drivers and passengers.
BR: This world revolving around consumption has reached an incredible frontier. Health, instead of being a human right, has become part of this world. It has become a luxury for people who have enough money to pay insurers and go to hospitals, for a world of pharmaceutical laboratories that sell drugs as if they were commodities, with the reinforcement of advertising to convince us. Healthcare is part of this irrational world. Even though we knew this pandemic was coming, the system was not preparing for this crisis.
BR: And to nature’s signals. The H1N1 flu, which passed through Mexico, marks the beginning of the current situation. We knew that the next war would be a fight against a global health or a digital virus.
De-Confined | Illustration by Marion Naufal (c) |You were born with the silver moon (by Agustín Lara)
BR: A French philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, wrote that people should be given the right to die as they wish. Totally isolating the elderly is worse. Physical health is becoming the most important human being value. But that is not true either, physical health is not what is keeping us alive. We are not just a machine with a functioning heart. If health becomes an excuse to monitor us “inside” as well as “outside,” we could be entering a new form of obscurantism.
BR: I had confined myself in the middle of the countryside, far from the city. One Sunday morning, a few hours after a lively sports and dance session with my mother, sister, daughter and niece, I felt a big pain in my stomach. I consulted a doctor over the phone. The diagnosis was muscular, and he prescribed me anti-inflammatory drugs. When I woke up the next day, the pain was frightening. I called a friend this time, a gastroenterologist. He ordered me to rush to a hospital reserved for non-Covid19 care. When I arrived, everything was already prepared: the auscultation, the operating theater, a room too. I had a major attack of appendicitis and narrowly avoided peritonitis.
If health becomes an excuse to monitor us “inside” as well as “outside,” we could be entering a new form of obscurantism.
BR: We die today without being able to say goodbye. We arrive at the hospital in a serious state, we can no longer see anyone, we die, there is no mourning. It’s all over now. Even science fiction films and novels never imagined the suspension of funeral services. We didn’t prepare to live without saying goodbye, without closing the circle. We are not even allowed to see the body of the deceased.
Once dead, here, the body is cremated. What’s happening right now will leave a lasting wound on Mexican society.
BR: It is important to work on artistic projects to accompany the collective mourning that will remain in our society for a long time. This experience, I hope, will bring us closer together. I have even already proposed a great tribute to the doctors and nurses who died because of Covid19. They are like soldiers in combat during a war. In Mexico, they suffered a lot.
The conquistadors did not need military force to defeat the natives. Diseases took care of it and killed 90 per cent of the population.
BR: It is a private relationship that can be collective. It is important to know that we are accompanied, that we all live through the same predicament.
It is because of situations similar to this pandemic that funeral celebrations have become very important in our culture. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Spaniards brought along with them syphilis, measles, smallpox and the plague. The conquistadors did not need military force to defeat the natives. Diseases took care of it and killed 90 per cent of the population. The Indians fell like insects. The Catholic Church, established along with the Spanish conquest, had to do something to help the survivors overcome their pain, a deep and infinite pain. It needed to embrace the Indian rituals, this celebration of the dead that transcended the centuries.
The Mexican tradition is much more cathartic in this respect than that of the Catholic religion.
BR: The Spaniards had to tolerate the Aztec heritage: the family gatherings to revive those they loved; sharing their favorite meals and drinks; and making offerings to them on an altar. The church had nothing better to offer to help the Indians transcend their sadness, a sadness that prevented them from working. The Mexican tradition is much more cathartic in this respect than that of the Catholic religion.
BR: The Mexican revolution in 1910 killed two million people in one decade, more than 10 per cent of the total population. It was at that time that Jose Guadalupe Posada, an engraver, created the Calavera Catrina and thus revived the iconography of the pre-Hispanic period.
BR: The Catrina became the modern figure of the Days of the Dead and helped renew Aztec traditions.
We honor the life of the missing person, not its death. It is a very active, generous celebration.
BR: These celebrations are particularly important, whenever there are too many deaths in a world that should be rational and safe. After a deadly earthquake, an ongoing war between drug traffickers, a series of inexplicable deaths, mostly that of migrants or feminicides.
BR: Día de Muertos is playful. It is a tradition that offers those who want to participate a way to remember the people we have loved by remembering the dishes we have shared together, the books we read, the music we played or listened to, anything that made that person alive. We honor the life of the missing person, not its death. It is a very active, generous celebration. My grandmother used to make mole, cut paper flowers, and while she was cooking, she would tell us about our dead grandfather, even the way he danced. My installations are contemporary interpretations of these rites. I involve the spectators in this creation. It helps. That was the concept of my work in the Zocalo Square in 2016.
BR: This work was done in a museum, not in a public place or a park where everyone can make an offering. The museum context therefore restricted the artistic process, but this creation in the house of an icon of feminism was necessary and symbolic. The increase in femicides in Mexico over the last four years is tragic.
BR: This is terrible. I thought Frida Kahlo’s house was a perfect place to pay tribute to all those women who died from the inconceivable violence of a man.
BR: The danger is extreme. Femicides during the pandemic are very high. Institutions helping women at risk seeking refuge for themselves and their children are receiving an increasing number of calls. Women are trying to escape from their homes and survive an abusive husband.
It is inadmissible that this violence against women is not officially recognized.
BR: These are men who are completely sick. Fragile beings are a material against which they can actuate all the violence contained within them. It is women and children who receive the blows.
BR: It is inadmissible that this violence against women is not officially recognized. These crimes, this suffering, are on the increase throughout the world during this period of isolation. How can the Mexican government deny that? We’re talking about a 30 per cent increase of violence against women. I have just signed a petition so that the urgency of this reality is recognized as lethal as the pandemic itself. More services should be put in place to protect women at risk today.
BR: It is a little-known episode in Mexico. The public recognition of the artist Frida Kahlo and of her artwork is the result of a trip to France. It was not her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, who gave her this fame. Frida was of course all over the news because of her life, her suffering, her exotic beauty, but not because of her work. She travelled to Paris for the first and last time in January 1939, just before the Second World War. An exhibition was to be organized there by André Breton, but when Frida arrives, the surrealist movement is in full decadence and divided on the position to take on Trotsky, then exiled in Mexico. The exhibition was cancelled. Frida’s paintings, stuck at customs, were also slow to arrive. It is at this time that artists, among them Marcel Duchamp and his companion Mary Reynolds, fly to Frida’s rescue. It is art that saves her. It is art that finally allows her to exhibit her works.
BR: Other Mexican artists are included in this exhibition, and among them Diego Rivera and Alvarez Bravo. But Frida is the one who receives public acclaim and praise from the great artists of the time, including Picasso and Dora Maar. Kandinsky, Miró, Yves Tanguy, Duchamp of course, Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba all attend on the day of the opening. Above all, the French government decides then to buy one of her works, a self-portrait—Le Cadre—for the Louvre collection, a first for a Latin American painter.
BR: She had just had a successful exhibition in New York at Julian Levy’s gallery. She sold paintings there but without being celebrated, as in Paris, by important personalities such as Picasso.
BR: This trip made her appear as an artist in her own right. She travelled alone. When she returns to Mexico City, the first thing Diego, very angrily, asks for is a divorce.
Art has to be tasty.
BR: My house sits right next to my studio. I found it by chance while going every day to my studio and visiting my parents. It was a house that had been abandoned for over 15 years. I was married at that time. We thought that we could reinvent this place.
BR: In the chaos of Mexico City, a city you know well, the home is an essential refuge. It is very important to be able to isolate yourself in big cities. So, I needed an interior patio, to let daylight in, to shelter plants. With an architect friend of mine, we opened windows and invented this little courtyard. We added a small outdoor dining room, to confine ourselves there, within the city.
BR: When you are an artist, you have to test your works to see if they can accompany people. The way to do that is to live with them. That takes time.
BR: It is all about cooking. Art is also about cooking. You have ideas, you have to simmer them, for a long time, patiently, add spices, bring out the hidden senses. Art has to be tasty.
Jean-Christian Agid is a former French journalist and foreign correspondent. He is founder of 37EASTPR, a media and business development agency based in New York with clients in France, Mexico, and the United States. He is also a trustee on the Advisory Board of the American Friends of the Paris Opera.
