Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla has converted two rooms in Oslo’s Henie Onstad museum into a manifesto for the healing powers of art. his first major solo exhibition in Europe, explores how painting or installation can confront illness and trauma, while imbuing the exhibition center with a spiritual aura.
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Maravilla defines himself as an artist and healer. He transforms his childhood migration — he traveled overland, guided by coyotesfrom San Salvador to the United States—and the cancer he suffered as an adult in spectacular and hypnotic totemic sculptures (Disease Throwers)votive offerings (retables), graffiti (the Central American game of “tripa chuca” is drawn on the walls of both rooms) or sound baths. With the beauty of his material display, his musical performances with cancer patients, his discourse on spirituality and natural therapies, it is an ambiguous, fascinating and uncomfortable exhibition.
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That is one of the functions of art: to unhinge us, that is, to take us out of our usual framework, out of our comfort zone. But sometimes a poetics goes beyond the particular experience between the viewer and the work, and puts the institution as a whole in check. Given the predominance of minimalism —even asepsis— in current museum proposals, Maravilla and curator Caroline Ugelstad surprise with an atmosphere of intimacy reminiscent of a temple. As if the function of the museum was to heal our souls during the post-pandemic.
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It may be a correct intuition. With the confinements and restrictions, they have multiplied so much the consumption of anxiolytics like social conversation about our moods or our psyche. In this difficult panorama, the museum is revealed as a particularly safe physical space, which must promote activities that cannot take place digitally. Especially the living arts, which in the 21st century cannot be separated from the culture of therapy.
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We find the reflection of the mental tension of humanity at all levels of the narratives and arts of these times. the brilliant series Severance It starts with the protagonist crying in his car. Crying and anxiety run through the black shoots, the new essay by the Spanish writer Eloy Fernández Porta. Depression is tackled in other highly commented works and projects in recent months, from books such as Drugfrom Almudena Sánchez, to podcastsdocumentaries u plays. The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona is currently dedicating an exhibition to the avant-garde psychiatry of Francesc Tosquelles; and the National Museum of Qatar hosts a large installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist on mental health.
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Psychological and physical pain has become a trend in cultural discourses and industries. On the research the empire of pain, Patrick Radden Keefe has explored the archeology of Valium and OxyContin, the dangerous drugs with which the Sackler family built a pharmaceutical empire. The same opioid epidemic is portrayed in the series Dopesick. Both works make it clear that the medicalization of society is not the best answer to all our collective pain.
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in his essay fragile, the thinker Remedios Zafra speaks of a new anthropological culture, “the one that graduates new psychic and material thresholds for intimacy and citizenship derived from online life”. A new culture of mutual care and attention, to scare away the myths that “feed detachment as a norm” and to warn about self-exploitation in the network of creative professions. Museums and cultural centers meet all the requirements to be at the forefront of this reflection and transformation.
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World Health Organization predicts that in 2030 mental illness will be the main health problem in the world. Given such a horizon, it is not surprising that, after opening his exhibition in Oslo, Maravilla will now do so at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in English) in New York, where they have also scheduled its sound baths. The Salvadoran artist dreams of creating a network of spaces that are temples, museums and community centers at the same time. It is important, he told me when I interviewed him in Oslo, that there are valid areas for the cultivation of a secular spirituality.
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It will be seen if that long-term artistic project becomes a reality or not. Meanwhile, architectures and environments that favor well-being through culture already exist in most of the world’s cities: museums, bookstores, libraries, auditoriums, creation centers, galleries, theaters, art schools.
They may have to work even more actively to increase their levels of hospitality in a world that has become particularly hostile, while also being laboratories where formulas of provocation, discomfort, political incorrectness and intellectual challenge are tested. . To thus promote, by unexpected means, self-critical reflection. Because, as Fernández Porta or Zafra denounce, cultural works have fallen into the same dynamics of anxious hyperproductivity as those of the technological sector or the speculative economy.
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Only after deeply reflecting on our own wounds and shortcomings will we be able to design works, programs, cycles, exhibitions that help our communities address theirs. It is not surprising, therefore, that MoMA holds monthly meditation sessions at 7:30 in the morning. Or that the last extraordinary summit of the Inter-American Development Bank —which brought together conferences, round tables and performances on the post-pandemic— was entitled How to heal a wounded world.
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