Exhibition at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona focuses on the life and work of Mari Chordà

BARCELONA.- Image, language and social action are the foundations of the work of Mari Chordà and an integral part of her life: the artist, the writer and poet, and the activist form an unbreakable bond and a basis for an attitude and convictions that make up the backbone of her work and biography. As well as being an active, attentive observer of the reality around her, she takes part in it, shaking up and subverting everything she sees, guided by a political stance that emerged as a response to the Francoist dictatorship and endured in the form of feminist struggles for the visibility and recognition of women’s work.

The aesthetic references in Mari Chordà’s work are completely alien both to the academicist, anachronistic environment of the School of Fine Arts where she studied and to the art scene at the time when she started to form her own language. Her imaginary is close to the visual sensitivity of pop art and psychedelia, but she has never considered herself a pop artist. A pioneer in her generation in terms of discussing sexual freedom, she talks about pleasure, motherhood and lesbian relationships in her paintings and poetry. She painted her first Vagina in 1964, while she was still a student: ‘I imagined the female body on the inside, but it was an unrealistic kind of figurative art, with some recollection of its shapes.’ She paints bodily fluids, secretions, sex organs and sex, not from a perspective of debasement, but with sensual shapes and seductive colours, in solid tones that call for a full, complete kind of eroticism. These are artworks that give off strength and vitality, in which creation is linked to sexual identity: ‘I wanted to “paint-talk” about sexual life and sexual identity.’ Mari Chordà investigates women’s bodies through her own, but instead of portraying her face – as we expect from conventional self-portraits – she explores and depicts herself by painting her genitals. Self-referentiality, the exploration of one’s own intimacy and the changes that take place during pregnancy are just some of the themes examined. There is no obscenity or shame of any kind when it comes to showing or talking about sex, to enjoying the body and painting it or writing poems about it. While the State, the Church, the establishment or a misunderstood morality encouraged the repression of sex and pleasure, the exacerbated sexuality in Chordà’s work represents self-affirmation and legitimises freedom and joy.

Between 1964 and 1974, the artist also created various interactive mobile sculptures: toys that could be used to generate changing shapes. The first one was for her daughter. However, after this highly active period, she did not return to her artistic activity until the early nineties, first by simply recovering her earlier work, then soon after, by incorporating new areas of research, with references to the natural world, especially the sea and creatures she calls cetàcies (cetaceans, but in the feminine). Later came the spirochaetes, in homage to the biologist Lynn Margulis and her work on these microorganisms in the Delta de l’Ebre. Her most recent works include a series of underwater photographs and the Úter/ou (Uterus/egg) installation. In parallel, she has written poetry and essays on women’s issues, as well as participating in all sorts of projects to call for more visibility for female professionals, creators and scientists.

Like other women of her generation, Mari Chordà believed that ‘the personal was political’ and made this conviction a driving force in her life. She founded Lo Llar in Amposta: a hive of cultural activity that hosted concerts, exhibitions and endless other events. After moving to Barcelona, she and a group of other women created laSal, a collectively organised bar-library intended as a meeting place for women to talk and support each other, which gave rise to ‘laSal, edicions de les dones’, the first feminist publishing house in Spain specialising in women’s literature and essays. But laSal was also a place for having fun: ‘We devoted ourselves to generating words, generating music and, especially, generating pleasure … Pleasure is very subversive.’ Indeed, everything Mari Chordà does is imbued with the need to enjoy and to play, understood as a key part of the fight for women’s rights.

In Mari Chordà, there is a complete overlap between attitude, life, text, image, language and form. By championing pleasure, delight and celebration as spaces of artistic, sexual and political dissidence, she helps to break down the established moral, cultural and social order. Chordà advocates for culture and the local, as well as connection to her roots, which she views as a way of life and resistance. Painting, writing, acting, taking a stand, organising collectively and denouncing what she believes is not right – as she has done publicly on several occasions – are her ways of dealing with the urgent matters of her time. Mari Chordà’s commitment is situated in the ‘continuous present’ defined by Gertrude Stein’s feminist writing: an extension of the present in her life and work that does not allow any fragmentation and only permits us to approach her as a whole in constant movement.

Give me the pleasure, old poet,
of seeing you burn, in the new bonfire,
all those papers you devoted to me
and in which I do not recognise myself.
Give me the pleasure of knowing that
you tear off your skin day and night
to strip yourself of covering manuscripts.
Give me the pleasure, now naked,
of approaching me without identity;
I will recognise you, because I don’t have one either.
(… i moltes altres coses […And Many Other Things], 1976)

PUBLICATION

Mari Chordà... And Many Other Things
This publication contains an extensive selection of Chordà’s pictorial and poetic work, as well as a biography that charts her feminist and cultural activism. In addition, it includes a foreword by Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Director of the MACBA; an essay by Teresa Grandas, the exhibition curator, in which she analyses the formal and political aspects that run through the artist’s work; an article written by Mar Arza on the ambiguity between art and toys; an essay by Claudia Elies that considers Chordà’s poetry from a visual perspective and in relation to the practice of younger artists; an essay by Andrea Soto Calderón, who presents a more philosophical reading of the artist; and a piece written by Conxa Llinàs Carmona, who gives us insights into her experience as a fellow traveller, friend and comrade in arms of Chordà. One edition in Catalan, English and Spanish.

BIOGRAPHY

Mari Chordà (Amposta, Tarragona, 1942) is a Catalan painter, poet and feminist activist. During her studies at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, she began to experiment with pictorial representations of the female body. Despite the context she grew up in – the Francoist dictatorship – and her traditional Catholic upbringing, from an early age she sought to explore and subvert the situation of women through principles determined by feminism and her own personal and public commitment.
In 1965, she moved to Paris for two years, where she came into contact with the artistic activity of the time. Though close to the visuality of pop art, she did not belong to the movement. In her works, she uses very bright, flat colours, which combine with sinuous, non-figurative forms. As early as 1964, she began to work on her series Vagines, in which she explored her own body, sexuality and pleasure. In fact, pleasure is fundamental in her work, acting as a form of subversion. Painting and poetry – two inseparable elements – are present throughout her career and linked to feminist convictions. In 1968, she founded Lo Llar, a place in Amposta for multicultural action and social activism, which shook up the city’s cultural life. In 1969, she began to create her mobile sculptures, designed to be interacted with to create changing forms.

Mari Chordà abandoned her artistic practice from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. During this period, she carried out various activities, including action to support working women and housewives during the lectures of the I Jornades Catalanes de la Dona (First Catalan Women's Conference). In this context, she presented her first collection of poems, ...I moltes altres coses, from which this project takes its title. It was initially presented without authorship because she considered that it belonged to all women.

In 1977, alongside a group of women, she founded a unique spot in Barcelona and all of Spain, the laSal bar-library. It was designed to be a meeting place where women could share experiences, enjoy themselves and receive health and legal advice. That same year, the publisher ‘laSal, edicions de les dones’ was created, which would develop several fiction and essay collections. The publishing house would give visibility to the writing and thought of women authors in the Catalan, national and international contexts, before closing in 1996. In 1978, Mari Chordà published her second book of poems, Quadern del cos i de l'aigua. At the same time, she contributed to several magazines, debates and essays on feminism.

In the early 1990s, she began to revisit her initial artistic work and started to include references to the natural world, especially the sea and what she called “cetàcies” (cetaceans, but in the feminine). In 2000, she published two new collections of poems, Umbilicals and Locomotora infidel del passat. That same year saw the first solo exhibition of Mari Chordà’s work, which was followed by two further monographic exhibitions in 2008 and 2017. In 2015, her work was shown at The World Goes Pop, an exhibition that looked at local and international trends in the pop art movement beyond the context of the USA and the UK held at London’s Tate Modern in 2015 and curated by Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation and a member of MACBA’s advisory committee.