Artistic Transfiguration
An Interview with Marcial Godoy-Anativia
NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ: Thank you, Marcial, for inviting me to participate in this conversation.
MARCIAL GODOY-ANATIVIA: A pleasure, Nicolás. I would like to begin by asking you generally about the role of religion and spirituality in your work as an artist. Could you talk about this?
ESTÉVEZ: Of course. Religion has had a central place not only in my artistic work, but also in my life. Practically since I can remember, since I was a little boy, I had the opportunity to experiment with the religious and with the spiritual in a very open way. All of this would translate into the artistic work that I did toward the end of the ‘90s. Let’s say in 1999 or 2000, with works such as La Papa Móvil.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: In your work, thinking about the work La Papa Móvil, one can see a trajectory that goes from a more ironic and critical beginning, like a secular critique of religion, to work that now looks more into the sacred itself, that works within sacred spaces, and that now does not have this ironic distance that characterized your earlier work. Can you speak to us a bit about this transition from the earlier works toward the more recent work?
ESTÉVEZ: Let’s see, 2001 was when La Papa Móvil was produced as part of a project that was done in Santo Domingo curated by Alanna Lockward. In La Papa Móvil I am commenting on the theme of religious processions, or working with the theme of religious processions, which are so traditional in Latin American countries and the Caribbean. But I am also commenting on everything that has to do with political caravans, which are very peculiar in the Dominican Republic—practically a carnival. And so I combine elements of both spaces…ritualistic, public, social, because they a have a bit of all of this. I believe that La Papa Móvil is a critique of the hierarchy within the Catholic Church. And in the place of the man who would be the Pope, I have a potato.1 All of this takes place in the streets of Santo Domingo, in three densely populated neighborhoods in the Dominican capital, and, if you can picture it, I go there distributing coupons for five pounds of potatoes, which can be traded in that night, after the action, at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo. So, it is an artistic process wrapped up in the artistic institution, and we have the political institution, generally speaking, such as the caravans, and all that. A religious procession, but the people are going to exchange their coupons in a museum space.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: And now can you tell us a bit of the transition toward the work now, in more sacred spaces, and the work that is now less critical from the outside, but that addresses the sacred from the interior…if you could speak about this.
ESTÉVEZ: Yes, and not only from the interior; it also has an exterior manifestation. I can give you an example of this in a few minutes. When I performed…when I finished performing La Papa Móvil, I began to understand that the theme of irony related to the religious could become very simplistic, at least for me. The performance or the action was very well received. It had an impact in the streets, with a public that generally doesn’t go to the museum or to artistic institutions. The performance made an impression. But I began thinking about how I can go about translating all of this anxiety that I have with religion to a purely sacred space. That seemed really difficult to me. But I had neither the vocabulary nor the tools to do this. We are speaking about 2001. In 2010, I began to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York in order to continue investigating the religious and seeing how I could translate all that information to the artistic work that I make, and vice versa. So there at Union, I had the great opportunity to study with some of the most brilliant minds in theology and activism and to create actions in the sacred space of one of the chapels of this institution. Prior to this, I also worked, for example, with In His Shoes, which is an action. I did not call it an action or a performance, but we are going to call it an action in this conversation. I called it an experience, through which I opened the channels for the Holy Infant of Prague to be incarnated in me, in Nicolás. I renounced my personality as Nicolás. All of this happens, of course, through a complicated process in which I travel, Nicolás travels from the Bronx, where I live, to Berlin. In Berlin Alanna Lockward strips me of my personality as Nicolás and this entity, this body assumes and is opened to the Infant of Prague, and so he is incarnated. The Infant of Prague travels from Berlin to the Czech Republic where he lives for some three or four days, interconnecting the artistic space with the religious space. The Infant of Prague goes in the mornings to mass, to his own church, where his own icon is, and in the afternoons he travels to an artistic event that happens in Prague—the event that summoned him, that invited him to create this experience.2
GODOY-ANATIVIA: One of the elements that also recurs in your work is the theme of belonging. Whether for religious reasons, or in terms of multiple citizenships, like your baptism in the river in the Bronx, in which you became a citizen of the Bronx. There is a series of works that uses the religious and the spiritual in order to highlight different forms of belonging, or to create spaces of transition that allow belonging. Could you speak to us about that?
ESTÉVEZ: Yes, this is very interesting because of the fact that I am one of those people that has always been an immigrant, not only when I came to the United States, but before. Part of my family is from Lebanon, and I grew up in the Dominican Republic, and I always belonged to a space as someone in-between, where I was indeed Dominican and was filled from day to day with all this culture from the island. But I also didn’t stop being part Lebanese. So you start to see a Dominican-Lebanese, who, when he comes to New York, is transformed into a Dominican York, that is a Dominican in New York, who begins to create a national symbol that identifies this fusion of identities. In 2002 he created the first Dominican York flag, trying to create a territory, a kind of platform from which I could personally articulate how I feel myself through all of those transitions. From Lebanese to Dominican to Dominican York. And eventually I move from the place where I lived for 14 years in Manhattan to the South Bronx, which is where I have been working, interacting with different communities, for 25 years. Now it is the place that I call my home. So the Lebanese-Dominican, Dominican York, eventually becomes a citizen of the Bronx, or a Bronxite, through a “secular” baptism, which refers to the whole issue of Jewish baptism, then Christian baptism, which gives a certain identity to the recipient. It is not widely known that baptism implies a death and a kind of resurrection. Or, rather, when one is baptized in the church, one dies and is born again as another person. This baptism in the Bronx took place in the river, in the Bronx River. But ultimately I realized that I cannot be from the South Bronx without also learning how to be Puerto Rican. How? I don’t know. So I have started conversations with artists like Papo Colo, with whom I am going to be conversing soon in two different places.3 This will be called “Becoming Puerto Rican,” in which I ask Papo how, in what way, what are the procedures, the gestures and tools that I would need to become Puerto Rican.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: And, somehow, there comes your capacity for transformation, for mutation, and for becoming, no? It has a bit to do with the religious in the sense of possible transfigurations, doesn’t it? Do you see that connection? Do you use those idioms to reconfigure yourself…the way in which the mystics and the religious change forms and transform themselves into other things?
ESTÉVEZ: Of course, and perhaps in a more literal way, and maybe not alluding directly to baptisms and all that, but rather to a performance,4 as I called it, that I realized recently in the context of the carnival in the Dominican Republic, but also outside of it, because it happened in a museum that was closed to the public and that the people could only access through the back door. So there I made an action. To close a closed carnival, a kind of closet, to which the people could go to embody characters that would represent in some way their taboos, their desires, their passions, and all that. There the theme of transformations is of vital importance, just as in others of my works. This type of transformation to which I refer is a mental, spiritual, corporeal transformation, like those that happen in Vodou possessions, for example, in which just one person or one horse can embody different spirits, or loas. And that was made very evident in this performance, even though we were not performing a Vodou ritual. But in some ways the people that were invited to participate in it could embody many characters or entities in a period of several hours. The same happens with the idea of baptizing myself, with the idea of trying to become Puerto Rican, and the theme of all that is transformation. And yes, like you say, transformation plays a vital role in religion. How do we achieve transcendence? How do we achieve evolution? That would be a topic for another conversation.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: And maybe to conclude, finally, in this space of transitions and transformations and with all the input and elements that you bring to your work: What is the role and where does the experience of sexuality fit in? Both yours and in general, within this conversation.
ESTÉVEZ: Two years ago, I said in a panel on gender, focusing on the region of the Caribbean, that my first introduction to the theme of queerness was at the Vodou altar, because it was there, as a boy, where I could see how a man could be possessed by a loa or by a masculine or feminine spirit. There were no borders there. This was before I began to articulate all of this through queer theory. And through “Queer is this or that.” Maybe I didn’t have the vocabulary to express all this, but I already had the experience because I had seen how one could transcend all these kinds of barriers within the religious context.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: And it allowed you that consciousness also. Tell us, in what way did it contribute to your work?
ESTÉVEZ: In the religious?
GODOY-ANATIVIA: This knowledge of the queer, as you call it, these capacities to transcend established genders and sexualities. Did they also have an impact on your work?
ESTÉVEZ: I would say yes, because it gave me a lot of freedom to experiment. For example, this past year I worked on creating a cleansing of one of the most important courthouses of the South Bronx. And when we think of the job of cleansing, a woman that cleanses a place with herbs comes to mind, but it is not always a woman that deals with the spirits. And I believe that all these religious elements have permitted me to enter, to embody, and to experiment with different roles that go beyond those I have been assigned by society as a man, an immigrant, a person of a certain age. Of middle age. And to enter, to play with what would be the cleansing of this courthouse, or to give a sermon within a purely artistic context, in a space of art, or to transcend expectations and to dress myself completely in gold and pedal a bicycle in the streets of Santo Domingo. I don’t know how many men could have, for example, the freedom to make this type of action. Or to dress up, and not only to dress up, but to invite the Holy Infant to possess me and to give substance to all this through clothing for those who saw me. They are things that would be practically unthinkable to do in the society in which we live, but they can indeed be done in the artistic institution or the space of art. But remember that these actions, the majority of them, took place in the streets, in the day-to-day. I don’t know if you can imagine a man of forty and some-odd years embodying the Holy Infant of Prague, who was something like seven years old. And playing with age, gender, identity. The Holy Infant of Prague was a gift of the Spanish monarchy to the monarchy of what is today the Czech Republic. The Infant of Prague has blonde hair, but I have black hair; the Infant of Prague has blue eyes, I have black eyes. So I play with all of this. And a forty-year-old man transforms himself again into a boy. Coincidentally, a woman that encountered the Infant of Prague in the Czech Republic says, “Ah, but this Infant of Prague is older.” Because the icon is of a little boy.
GODOY-ANATIVIA: OK, thank you very much for your time and for your ideas. We’ll keep talking about this soon.
ESTÉVEZ: Thank you, Marcial. A pleasure.
Translated by Kerry Whigham
Notes
1 Translator note: In Spanish, the words for Pope and potato are the same: papa.
2 Specifically, Estévez is speaking about the Prague Quadrennial.
3 Papo Colo and Estévez met through Skype. Colo was on Wall Street and Estévez was in the South Bronx. This talk was organized by Casita Maria as part of the exhibition Performing the Bronx and Other Home-Based Actions, curated by Christine Licata.
4 Estévez is referring to C Room. This performance was presented at Museo Folklórico Don Tomás Morel in Santiago, Dominican Republic, as part of En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, a traveling exhibition curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson.