LUCIA PIZZANI: Material Narratives of Personal Cartographies

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From Acorazadas Series, 

hand-cut collages with inkjet pigment ink photos on cotton paper print.

From Acorazadas Series, 

hand cut collages with inkjet pigment ink photos on cotton paper print.

LATAMesa: You just touched on this, but allow us to expand more about your exploration with materiality. The way you source and research materials from various places it's an intriguing approach that naturally creates connections and narratives of intersecting trajectories. For example, as you mentioned, the use of Mexican corn or British clay. This approach delves into a history of colonialism, trade, and migration. But it might also be a way of telling your own personal story and cartography. To what extent do you draw from the physical and emotional distance you've encountered in your own life?

Lucía Pizzani: Yes. One example is the Acorazadas Series, where I worked with imagery taken from books of national parks in Venezuela. These particular collages are embedded with a deep sense of nostalgia because I wasn't able to return for so long. They express the longing to be there. While growing up I spent time in some amazing places such as Choroni, El Avila or Turuga - where my father lives - a rainforest one hour away from the city, with ancient trees, toucans, and all kinds of biodiversity. You can go through a rainforest to suddenly find yourself on the sea, the Caribbean Sea. For this series, I placed myself in these beautiful, crazy landscapes of Venezuela and covered myself with the armours of its animals.

This also reflects the idea of the ‘second skin’ that is very present in my work. It's about protection and notions of vulnerability. How do you feel when you are in a country, or you are from a country that is almost in a permanent state of violence? The idea of the second skin allows me to play with these aspects, but it is also related to some ideas present in ancient history. Like when I went to Mexico and learnt about a deity called Xipe Totec, a god of life. The ritual for its devotion involved a priest wearing the actual skin of a defeated warrior. They would do this just at the beginning of the cropping corn season to mark the start of the corn harvest. So, I started to incorporate corn into the clay. But also, corn is crucial for the Americas because it's our bread. When I relate to materials, I also relate to their symbolic power and what this material means for a population. It's not only in Venezuela because corn has a lot of stories for the Mayas, for example, in The Men of Maize, and how supposedly humanity, when made out of corn, finally thrived and succeeded. So, it's something that unites a lot of Latin American countries. These are the things I tend to look for: powerful symbols. 

Another one that I use a lot is the snake, also present across all sorts of different cultures in the world. People worship it as it symbolises healing and transformation in how it changes the skin. So, it's this same idea of the skin that I was telling you about, and the possibility of transformation that the immigrant experience involves, it puts you into a position of adapting. The snake's skin symbolises the shedding of human skin, which eventually turns into dust. Did you know that 80% of household dust is actually made up of human skin? However, unlike humans, the snake sheds its entire skin in one go. This is why, in Greek mythology, the goddess of health was often depicted with a snake on her arm. The double helix of pharmacy and DNA, to mention another example. There are many connections, across time and cultures.

Another example; I produced a whole body of work for the exhibition at Bosse & Baum called MERUNTÖ: In the House of Spirits earlier this year. The name comes from the Pemón, indigenous people of Venezuela. MERUNTÖ, means “the energy that comes directly from the sun that makes everything alive on Earth”. I found it beautiful and poetic. Also how one word condenses such a whole concept. I felt using this word was a way of keeping the language alive and disseminating it. I was using a lot of photosensitive ink for the work shown in this exhibition. It was almost like cyanotypes, but I was doing them on a specific day; the day of the solstice, as a homage to the sun. I feel like this explored something particular and local, but that it can connect different cultures. This tension in my work goes both ways. 

Anyways, MERUNTÖ: In the House of Spirits, had a lot of landscapes, images, and even seeds that I brought from Venezuela. This show was like a re-encounter with the utmost abundance of life. That, for me, was the feeling of going back.

Tactile Botanica Series, 2023 at MERUNTÖ: In the House of Spirits at Bosse & Buam.

Photo by Damian Griffits 

LATAMesa: You have delved into female histories with your work in the past. I'm curious if the idea of a ‘second skin’ can be explored more particularly in relation to the female body, perhaps from a feminist or political standpoint?

Lucía Pizzani: Yes, when I began my artistic work, I had two main concerns, or areas of interest. Firstly, a deep engagement with the body, influenced by my mother being a choreographer and visual artist which exposed me from an early age to participate in her video works and enrol in dance classes for years.  At the same time, it is of course, nature. This led me to adopt a research-based practice, often interweaving both aspects into my projects. An illustrative instance would be my exploration of the suffragettes' attack on Kew Gardens, documented in the project titled Orchids. The suffragettes set fire to the Orchid House to demand voting rights. As I delved deeper into this, I discovered that the Greek origin of the word ‘orchid’ means testicle. I found this intriguing: how a flower that visually resembles female genitalia is named after a male reproductive organ? The term ‘orchid’ was assigned due to the tuberous, less visible part, reflecting the influence of a deeply patriarchal society. In my work, I often seek out forgotten histories of women and try to bring them back to light. Although, I also use myself a lot. I touch on my personal experiences, such as exploring motherhood and the experience of being a woman. I put my own skin into the artwork.

LATAMesa: Yeah. I'm also thinking of that video-performance with raw clay: La que viste la Piel 

Lucía Pizzani: I used to do mostly video and photo performance. But in the last two years, I've started to do more live performances. It's always very research-based and site-specific. I have also been collaborating with different musicians and singers. 

In one project, for example, I responded to Maya Attoun, an artist who passed away last year. She had a fantastic, beautiful exhibition at Magasin III, in Stockholm. So, the challenge was how to create a dialogue with her work in a respectful way. We had lots in common. We were almost the same age, we both have kids of the same age. The starting point of her project was a volcanic explosion, something that I have always found attractive. I had worked around volcanic landscapes in the past with my cocoon fabric suits. The cocoons embody the idea of transformation, and they were mirroring the volcanic landscape, which is in permanent change. For the performance at Magasin III titled Lava, I ended up working with black sand and glazed ceramic sculptures. I used sounds from the Archive Lares. Some of the sounds I selected were from a recording of the 70s of people from the Sierra de Perija singing, calling out animals by imitating their sounds. The work, therefore, included the voices of people from half a century ago, the work of a late artist, all in conviviality. 

LATAMesa: Your work strongly conveys many elements of pre-Columbian cultures. How and when did the inspiration for these cultures begin? How do you interpret many of these cultures' spiritual and general cosmovision around nature in your practice? How does this relate to your previous commitment to your ecological activism in Venezuela and your work with indigenous communities?

Lucía Pizzani: The distance from Venezuela made me value even more the importance of these cultural roots and landscapes. Reconnecting with nature is not just a personal experience but something that relates to the history of humanity. At some point in time, we were all one with nature, and over time, that connection was severed. 

The Acorazadas Series, a collection of collages, conveys this sentiment of wanting to be one with nature again, emphasising that nature is a refuge. I worked with pangolin armours, the animal that was thought to be the carrier of COVID-19. I wanted to highlight that nature is typically a refuge, not the source of diseases. Zoonotic processes only occur when humans interfere with nature, by deforestation and destruction of natural habitats. 

Going back to the ancestral question, and connecting it with the idea of this distance after I migrated, every object, music or tradition we had in Venezuela I looked at with new eyes. Re-discovering the corners where I grew up. One noteworthy experience occurred during my visits to El Cercado, while my parents were living on Margarita Island. There, there is a community of potters, mostly women, who create ceramics using ancient techniques: no kiln and extracting the material for the clay from the mountains. Inspired by them, I did a series of photo performances where I put myself inside large-scale terracotta vases made by these women potters and tried to make the body an extension of the pot.

Around that time, I also worked with hammocks made from the Moriche palm tree's fibre. These hammocks were like cocoons. I felt the need to connect with these objects, which have been a part of people's lives for generations. Later, during my time in Mexico, I conducted extensive research and familiarised myself with that incredibly rich culture. There, you can feel a sense of pride and witness so many living traditions passed from one generation to the next on a much larger scale than the ones I had observed in Venezuela.

LATAMesa: How long have you stayed in Mexico?

Lucía Pizzani: I have been travelling to Mexico since 2018. My first time there I was invited to exhibit at ZONAMACO for a solo project, but I stayed longer to conduct research, primarily in museums in the city. The second time, I joined a residency program in Ciudad de Mexico called Fundación Marso. I also visited Oaxaca City, and went to see the nearby town where each one specialised in a particular craft. I was specially drawn to San Bartolo Coyotepec the place where they make the famous ‘barro negro’ of Oaxaca. Only to witness it, it is not really a process that can be replicated and it wasn’t in my intent either. 

At Casa Wabi, where I stayed during my third year, I worked on a new project for the botanical garden, which is permanently open to the public, called Seres Vegetales - Vegetable Beings. I am a research-based artist, and I always like to explore the meanings of words. I learned that Oaxaca means the land of the Guajes, which refers to a seed pot. Any seed pot is called a Guaje, but there are diverse trees that have these pots. For example, in my artwork, I include the Parota tree, which they call the ear tree because of its shape.

I ended up imprinting each sculpture with one plant. The plants in the sculpture garden are made with plants that either have healing properties, are edible, or have some significance. The idea was to generate a dialogue with the visitors.I also did an extension for their children’s workshop at Casa Wabi. I made imprints of each species into a stamp, so they could stamp them onto plates or produce more creative objects or masks. That project was the beginning of a line of research that has continued, trying to represent the spirit of plants.

Some examples of more recent sculptures that come from the Seres Vegetales project are the Ser de Maiz, el Ser de Tapada, El Ser de Pino, and even the new solar prints I made in Caracas last summer with Moriche palm branches. It's this idea of trying to get a closer connection with the vegetal world. We’ve always had a stronger understanding with animals, as flora requires longer times of observation to see change and growth. Nowadays, with new research and long recordings, we can see them move and know they communicate.

Solstice performance.

Contemporary Sculpture Fullmer curated by Jenn Ellis. 

Photo by Sebastian Gili. 

Lucia Pizzani with Seres Vegetales - Vegetable Beings 

Group of 9 sculptures of clay and steel installed permanently at the Puerto Escondido Botanical Garden (Part of the UMAR University of Oaxaca). 

Produced during the residency at Casa Wabi. 

LATAMesa: Finally, what are you focusing on now and what's up next?

Lucía Pizzani: I am currently working on some projects for the next year that I cannot reveal yet. However, I am increasingly getting involved with plants. As you mentioned before, my experience as a migrant has made me look into the past and explore what happened through colonial trade and the routes people and plants took together. I have found that plants are a great way to discuss these topics. I am currently working on a commission for a garden and even sowing some corn in my studio. I am just at the start of new things and making a new group of sculptures with human scale. I have also been producing these big totems with black clay. All of this is about what will happen next year. Oh, I will also be going back to Venezuela to do some projects there!

LATAMesa: Where in Venezuela?

Lucia Pizzani:In Caracas and Margarita Island. I'm going back to El Cercado. They just founded a school for ceramics. Some artists have been going there to work, and I want to collaborate with the community. This collaboration is scheduled for the summer of next year. I’m so looking forward to this!