Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Research project Interludes
Location Joods Historisch Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Can you describe your research project?
Still in its development process, my project is a testimonial in prose form of my experience researching Life? or Theater? a collection of 769 gouache paintings by Berlin-born artist Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp five months pregnant at the age of 26 years old. These paintings trace her Jewish, matrilineal family and their history of depression and suicide through a range of ecstatically colorful, abstract and fragmented paintings that frequently reference opera, music, theater, poetry, history, and literature. Structured as an epic opera informed by the likes of The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, it is also built as a künstlerroman (a genre designation typically for novels) that narrates Salomon’s development as an artist from childhood to maturity. Multidisciplinary in content, form, and scope, the piece in fact ends with the moment of its creation. Cyclical in nature and haunting in its breadth, my project ruminates on Salomon’s life-changing decision as a refugee in hiding during World War II to sequester herself in a hotel in order to make her life’s work.
Why have you chosen this topic?
My project began as an impulse, a need to exist in proximity with Charlotte Salomon’s visual language. It’s difficult for me to articulate the dimensions of this desire, as it felt as if it arose as a calling from a subterranean part of myself. At the time that I learned about Life? or Theater? I was very involved in the theater scene in New York City, not quite sure if I wanted to stay there, full of unease about how to make work that felt as if it should emerge from life, whether the work was sufficient reason to shape my life around its creation. By choosing to study Salomon’s work, I felt as if I was walking along the borders between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, painting and literature, life and theater, through Salomon’s explorations of those questions as a documentarian of her interior and familial life. She is the reason I left New York City, moved temporarily to Amsterdam, and initiated a new phase of my life focused on ekphrastic writing about the interrelationality between painting and literature. Two years into this project, I still often feel as if I’m fumbling around in the dark, looking for the right room to enter where I’ll finally find the form for expressing how much Salomon’s voice has infected my own.
What research methods do you use?
Much of my time is spent looking at the online archive of Life? and Theater? located on the Joods Historisch Museum website and noting down my impressions of it in a stream-of-consicousness form, unguarded by assumptions or second thoughts. I make sure to fill one entire page in a notebook per gouache. Given that there are 769 of them, as well as additional discards, I’m still in the midst of this work. It’s important to me to record more emotionally-driven writing in a tactile form, while the more historically or theoretically-driven type should be documented in an electronic format. I spent two intense months in late 2022 in the Charlotte Salomon archives of the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam. This meant reading essays on opera, theory, painting, as well as listening to testimonials from her family members and/or artists who’ve made work inspired by her own; as well as collections of journals and magazines that have featured her work in some capacity. During my time there I read chapters of novels and/or theory by Walter Benjamin, Charlotte Delbo, Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Griselda Pollock, and many, many others. I’ve since those months taken the time to read those writers’ subsequent works. I’m still in the midst of immersing myself in the world, the references, the works cited by Salomon in Life? or Theater? but given the scope of it, I often worry that I’ll never finish. At some point I’ll have to stop this phase and make the decision to start composing a continuous book about Salomon’s work, rather than the short essays, prose pieces, impressions, and interviews that I’ve created so far.
In what way did your research affect your artistic practice?
In countless ways. Since my time beginning this project, I’ve shifted from using theater as the inspiration for my writing, to painting. As a result of this new orientation, I’ve noticed myself lingering on more two-dimensional aspects of our world as entrypoints to exploring its kaleidoscopic depths. Previously, I was much more focused on interrogating the ways in which performance informs our daily lives. Now, I find myself lingering more on details of the everyday as portals in and of themselves that can render language’s materiality into its own surface upon which to crack with meaning. Salomon’s work is also considered by some scholars to be the first graphic novel. Aside from that accomplishment, it is very interdisciplinary. Though I was already inclined towards an intertextual approach to my own creative work, she’s inspired me to be raw in how I embrace them on the page.
What are you hoping your research will result in, both personally and publicly?
I hope to always remain curious about Life? or Theater? and return to it over the course of my life as an originary text responsible for my life as an artist. Of course, I hope to write a book explicitly in relation with Salomon’s work, though given the form and subject matter of her paintings, it feels impossible that one will feel like enough. I don’t wish to become an expert on her work, as that position feels rather violent to me, as if I wished to possess her in some way. I hope to be considered in the public sphere more of a kind of comrade, a friend of her artistic language, an advocate for her voice. In the other projects I’m developing in my life I also sense her presence, encouraging me to challenge myself beyond what I think I’m capable of.
