Dillon Chapman on Maria Antonia Eguiarte Souza

Installation view of *Tomándome mi tiempo, conversaciones trascendentales en la morada interior - Nuestros cuerpos son símbolos más que un hogar,* 2022, University of California, San Diego. All photos by Arlene Mejorado.
[Image description: A wide shot of two sets that sit on a draped fabric separating them in a black box room. On the left is a vanity with a mirror, lamp, other implements, and various orange candles in metal candle holders. On the right is a bedroom set complete with a side table with another lamp, various implements, and more candles. The artist is lying in the bed. Everything aside from the candles and mirror surfaces is covered in a cream colored felt fabric. The image glows from the ambient light.]

On Monday, May 2nd of this year, a draft of the Supreme Court opinion regarding Roe v. Wade was leaked by politico. In the document, several Justices outlined their intentions to overturn the landmark case decision, removing federal protections for abortion healthcare— leaving it up to individual states to decide the legality and legitimacy of abortions. This connects to a long history of patriarchal disregard (and contempt) for the bodies of cis women and gender expansive people who need access to reproductive and abortion healthcare. Resistance is a historically ingrained part of being a woman and/or a queer person, and resistance can take many forms, such as tending to one’s community or oneself. In her new installation and series of performances, titled Tomándome mi tiempo, conversaciones trascendentales en la morada interior - Nuestros cuerpos son símbolos más que un hogar (translates to English as “Taking my time, transcendental conversations in the inner abode - Our bodies are symbols more than a home”), artist Maria Antonia Eguiarte Souza practices self-care as a way of connecting with Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun from the 1500s who founded numerous convents and contributed mystic and spiritual writing to the studies of Catholicism, and histories of queer and feminist spirituality (particularly around the afterlife) and subversion. Eguiarte Souza experiences episodes of temporal epilepsy, which she relates to Saint Teresa’s own ecstasies (speculated to also be a form of temporal epilepsy), through which she had divine visions. Other important influences include the writings of bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and Maggie Nelson, along with artworks by Janine Antoni, Louise Bourgeois, and Every Ocean Hughes.

In the Performance Space within the Visual Arts Facilities at UC San Diego, Eguiarte Souza invites viewers to engage with a video, sculptural installation, and series of performances that explore themes of the Cartesian divide between mind and body, incorruptible bodies, and the notion of bodies without organs. When first entering the space, floor and walls painted a matte black, your view is blocked by a series of heavy, black curtains. In this makeshift foyer, a single video plays on a medium sized monitor in which Eguiarte Souza performs a series of exercises for the camera, taking her time and drawing out the duration of the processes (such as letting a pill dissolve on her tongue). I am reminded of the works of Nao Bustamante, particularly Neapolitan (2003), in which the legendary performance artist openly weeps to the end scene of the film Fresa y Chocolate (1995) by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, then rewinds the scene and rewatches it, weeping over and over. As the viewers, we are left to watch Bustmante’s face, without seeing what she is watching— she takes her time and also asks for ours, much like Eguiarte Souza’s own video. This initial work functions as a primer for what is to come. A note on a table asks that viewers remove their shoes before entering the second space.

Within the interior space the room is again divided into two tableaus, separated by a large swath of fabric, under which a viewer may walk to look at the installation from another vantage. On the left is a vanity with a mirror and various objects. On the right is a bed and nightstand. Everything is a soft cream color, except for the metal candleholders and a few copper implements. Each ordinary object, like a hand mirror or nail polish vial, has been covered methodically and lovingly with this soft felt. This contrasts with the blackness of the space, which is critical to the installation. Conventionally a blackbox, as seen in live theatre performances, the blackness of the space allows the light-colored felt to glow in a way that would be impossible in a traditional white cube gallery space. This blackness also contradicts much of popular film’s depictions of the afterlife, in which characters are usually surrounded by white light that is illuminating and unrelenting. Black spaces in film are often reserved for the void, where characters are either trapped or go mad from isolation. Eguiarte Souza’s installation subverts this trope and insists on a dim, reverent, and interstitial space.

There is an almost eerie sense of peace in the space, which you may enter and find Eguiarte Souza performing, or the absence of people altogether. The mirrors, candles, and soundtrack— made in collaboration with her cousin, who is an opera singer, other singers, and an organ– invokes a feeling of the sublime. I immediately think of the sumptuousness of spirituality in the film Carrie (1976), based on the Stephen King book of the same name, in which Carrie’s mother engages in a sadomasochistic relationship to Christianity— abusing her daughter to preemptively prevent her from participating in the ultimate sin: womanhood. Though various religions, particularly various sects of Christianity, such as Catholicism, have facilitated longstanding misogyny and abuse toward women and queer people, it was also a refuge for subversive and intellectual women in Spain during the 16th century. According to Eguiarte Souza, at the time you either “got married, joined a convent, or were burned at the stake as a witch.” Joining the church as a nun was the only way women of this period were allowed to read and write, a respite from other dominating forms of misogyny. That is, at least until Saint Teresa’s passing and the discovery of her incorruptible body, a clear sign of sainthood. Nine months after her entombment, the nuns discovered that her body was not decaying. Saint Teresa is, like many women, reduced to an object and dismembered for political purposes— her hand was cut off. Over time several other pieces of her body, including her heart, were cut off/out and taken as relic souvenirs She was posthumously canonized sixty years after her death by Pope Gregory the XV and her writing remains some of the most important scholarly contributions to Catholicisim.

Detail shot of *Tomándome mi tiempo, conversaciones trascendentales en la morada interior - Nuestros cuerpos son símbolos más que un hogar*, 2022
[Image description: A detail shot of the side table in front of a black backdrop. We see the table itself, a lamp, seven candles, a hand mirror with a felt handle, a nail polish vial, a copper cup, and other small felt items. The dim light provides a high contrast effect]

To pay homage to Saint Teresa, Eguiarte Souza consumes a number of communion wafers and then regurgitates them into a glass display box, shaping the vomit into an effigy of this woman with whom she feels a spiritual kinship. The act represents a transmutation of the Body of Christ into another form. Over time the regurgitated body begins to mold and the box is overtaken by Saint Teresa. This transmutation is a queering of both the partaking in communion, but also in Saint Teresa’s body itself— this is not an incorruptible body, but it is a body without organs. Eguiarte Souza tells me during a conversation that she wanted to create a body for Saint Teresa in which she could rest in peace, undisturbed by patriarchal intrusions and entitlement. The effigy figure is reminiscent of various spiritual practices connected historically with witchcraft. The artist remarks that Mexican Catholicism is a subversion of mainstream Catholicism that has roots in the indigenous customs that existed prior to colonization by the Spanish. We might think of voodoo dolls, which are intended to harm those who trespass against the practitioner, or corn husk dolls, which function as protection charms. This separating out of Saint Teresa’s body and her spiritual force through the communion wafer doll also signifies the Cartesian divide, for the installation itself is a recreation of the space in which Eguiarte Souza communes with her during their epileptic episodes. Her spirit permeates the space. The candles and careful staging of the sets make the whole room feel like an altar— a devotional space.

Other performances include reading and sleeping in the bed, as well as the affixing of binders made from felt and copper that constrict the movement of the wearer (reminiscent of various forms of “mortification of the flesh” in which individuals self-inflict pain as a display of devotion). Eguiarte Souza uses this act as a way to comfort herself, finding serenity through imposed stillness. This calls to mind the rigid choreography and body horror of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), a film that, underneath layers of misogyny, points to the fear and dread surrounding empowered women. As viewers, we are asked to consider that women in power might be just as terrifying as, if not more than, men. The fear is rooted in not just female autonomy, but feminist collectivity. A world in which men are incidental and superfluous. This echoes the fears of legislators who, both historically and contemporarily, are trying to restrict women’s autonomy, to force them into subservient and palatable archetypal figures. Autonomy is a right, however, not a privilege, and sainthood does not protect women from violation. Suspiria is a haptic nightmare that revels in the sensuality and horror of being in a woman’s body.

Perhaps more mise-en-scene than sculptural arrangement, touch is encouraged in Eguiarte Souza’s installation, and the sensation is comforting. This dynamic draws from Louise Bourgeois’ soft sculptures, yet instead of presenting us with contorted human forms that are at once gruesome and erotic, we are asked to engage with our own bodies, as well as Eguiarte Souza’s, but also given a space in which to disengage or disassociate. We don’t have to imagine what she feels when she interacts with her set, we are given permission to also touch, feel, take up space. It is hard to communicate the experience of such an immersive installation. All senses are engaged, with the soundtrack a reverberant drone that both grounds the listener while urging them to evacuate their body through meditation. This feels like an antidote to the outside world, and also a reminder that women making space for themselves and other women and femmes is still fundamentally a radical act. Eguiarte Souza’s love letter to Saint Teresa feels particularly timely at a moment where, once again, women and gender expansive people are having their bodily autonomy stripped from them.

Dillon Chapman is a Southern California-based artist who works in filmmaking and writing.

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