Museum Spaces in Palliative Art: Mariana Otero's Histoire d'un secret

Histoire d'un secret (2003) is an intimate documentary by Mariana Otero about the death of her mother, the artist Clotilde Vautier.¹ Clotilde died when Mariana was five-and-a-half and her sister Isabel was seven. We discover in the film that the children were told that Clotilde was not dead but in Paris. Later a further fiction surfaced, that Clotilde was dead, and that she had died after an appendectomy. In reality, Clotilde died of peritonitis and kidney failure after a home abortion. Histoire d'un secret pieces together this story, exploring in retrospect the children's sense of these inter-layered secrets, the reasons behind the family's choices—in the father's words, their "erreur épouvantable"—and a broader set of questions about pregnancy, reproductive rights, poverty, and taboo prior to the legalization of abortion. In the following pages I explore the use of the senses in the film, its focus on the bodily, on touch and tactility, and specifically its construction of spaces draped with meaning, a kind of sensory installation. As the film explores a memorial process, the conjuring of sensory relations and the dressing of spaces offer nonverbal, emotive ways of living a relation to Clotilde. This pursuit of an ongoing relation to the missing mother is part of the palliative function of the film, its means of managing loss. In particular the film illuminates the meanings of space in mourning and, in so doing, designs a move from interior, domestic space to public spaces of exchange and exposure.

Palliative art

With the term palliative art, I refer to works that explore diverse ways of approaching mortality forged through artistic practice. Such works offer unorthodox alternatives to the trajectories of mourning (and melancholia) explored in psychoanalytic theory and practice whilst also, unlike deconstructive approaches to mourning, seeking creative modes of relief or reprieve. I would place Histoire d'un secret in the company of other works by female artists, such as Sophie Calle's Pas pu saisir la mort (2007) or Alina Marazzi's Un'ora sola ti vorrei (2002), that use the visual arts to open questions about responses to death and, in these specific cases, about a mother's death.² This palliative art examines mortality and in so doing seeks to explore the possible expression of feeling, distraction from loss or continued relation fostered through creativity. I fashion the term from the medical concept of palliative care, an approach to medicine that, in the current (and contested) World Health Organisation definition, "improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual."³ Palliative care may be seen as unique in its embrace of the physical, the psychosocial, and the spiritual. Indeed it is this attention to the bodily, the sensory, bound up with the affective, in palliative care that I import into this discussion of Otero's explorations of mortality.

If management of pain is the immediate physical imperative in thinking palliative care, accounts by palliative care workers lay emphasis on the importance of physical tending of the dying, on the effect of touch and affective contact. Marie de Hennezel, the psychologist and palliative care worker who has contributed most to current popular awareness in France of the demands and rewards of end of life care, writes emotively on this issue. Describing work on the palliative care service with a patient, Bernard, she writes:

Hier, par exemple, nous lui avons donné un bain. Oui, une heure de bien-être pour ce corps engourdi, raidi avec l'immobilité, si maigre, si décharné. Une heure d'affection et de tendresse partagée avec Michèle, l'infirmière, et Simone, l'aide-soignante. Avec quelle infinie douceur nous avons entouré ce corps enfin abandonné avec confiance dans la chaleur du bain! Trois femmes aimantes occupées à cette tâche sacrée entre toutes qu'est le soin donné au...