At the Threshold of Art and Life: An Interview with Carla Stellweg (the Artes Visuales years)

INTRODUCTION

Carla Stellweg's life began as an accident of fate. The daughter of European colonials in the faltering Dutch East Indies, she was born in an internment camp for women and children in Bandung, West Java, when the Japanese invaded (1942) and her pregnant mother and aunt were caught trying to escape to Australia. The time of her birth was a literal crossroads for the family: the men were taken as prisoners of war (to build a Japanese cross-Indochina railroad); the women and children captured, all facing the real prospect of an uncertain future after Europe had been destroyed by WWII; and, more pressingly, all fraught by the loss of a specific sense of place as Dutch nationals born to the tropics. Rather than stymieing her, the circumstances surrounding her birth and early childhood resulted in a productive ambivalence—being neither South East Asian nor fully European—that afforded her an incredibly open conception of herself and of others. Perhaps this fluidity has allowed her to crisscross a wide array of identities and roles during her lengthy and productive entwinement with Latin American art: writer, thinker, community organizer, activist, fundraiser, museum curator, gallery owner, collector, private dealer, scholar, and teacher.

By the early 1970s, there had been a number of important segues in the life of Carla Stellweg: Bandung, Singapore, The Hague, Mexico City, and New York. But with a young son to care for, it was also a time of reckoning and of striking a balance between the personal and the professional. "When one observes Christo's work," she had written in 1970 about the Bulgarian-born artist's environmental collaborations with Jeanne-Claude, his partner in art as in life, "one gets the sense that each new project draws him nearer to madness."¹ Perhaps the large-scale environmental projects that were then garnering the artists increasing international attention may have suggested to her a will to move away from a passive, unidirectional relationship with art. Their strategy, Stellweg continued in the critique, "could very well be read as an attempt to totally eliminate 'art,' in favor of … breaching through to life itself."² Maybe, just maybe, the liminality of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's production challenged her to entangle herself—in the manner that their wrappings often do around structures, islands, landscapes and buildings—in a similar space between art and life. For Stellweg, this sort of vital convergence arrived in 1973 with the establishment of Artes Visuales, the journal that she co-founded at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) and edited until 1981.

In June 2016, I was privileged to talk extensively with Stellweg about her remarkable trajectory in the arts. What follows is a fragment of that longer interview, focusing on the period from her arrival in Mexico in 1958, to 1981 when—after over a decade of toggling between Mexico City and New York—Artes Visuales folded and she (more) permanently put down roots in the United States.

María C. Gaztambide (MG):

It seems to me that your uprooted upbringing, which may have been a handicap for others, enabled you to move more freely within, outside, and between those places where you have spent the majority of your adult life. This brings me to the question of when and under what circumstances did your family arrive in Mexico.

Carla Stellweg (CS):

I had no idea Mexico existed until my father found a job post there. I mean, I saw it on the map, but I didn't know what to think. My mother was very deeply unhappy in the Netherlands, understandably. There was no way that they could go back to Indonesia. So, my father went to Rome, the headquarters of FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization), essentially a neo-colonial agency the United Nations had created post-WWII. […] As a matter of fact, there was an ex-colonial Dutch man who directed it, and [my father] told him: "My wife is totally unhappy and so am I. We want to go somewhere else, to a place in...