Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

MEANWHILE THE flIRlS WERE FLAVINS: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons Michael D. Harris Artwork is judged according to its capacity to elucidate and contain shared histories, but also in its ability to determine, enact and formulate histories - pasts, presents and futures. Allen deSouza J miss Cuba, it is important for my work, it is important for my soul. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons T he art of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons should not be nestled into some stylistic territory such as post-modernism. She is a contemporary artist, but she resists containment in categorical ghettos and epistemological traps. In her life and in her work she has traversed liminal spaces, boundaries, and transformative bodies of water. She addresses displacement, exile, memory, and reclamation in her work. She is indelibly Cuban and that identity, given the geopolitical dynamics of the past forty years, and the long, sordid history of relations between the island and the United States, would seem to resist categorical appropriation by the West. Critic Luis Camnitzer points out that until very recently, there had been a consistent effort by the US media to levitate Cuba out of this hemisphere and to relocate it somewhere between the USSR and Rumania. With the changes in Europe, the location has shifted to someplace between China and North Korea. In spite of these efforts, Cuba has remained a part of the Latin American cultural family.4 Cuba's quarantine has turned the political borders of both the United States and its island neighbor transformational barriers. When Campos-Pons 5 United States and Cuba is 90 miles, but the ideological divide is immeasurable . It may function for some conservative nationalists as the metaphorical pariah Haiti (formerly SaintDomingue ) became for reactionaries and slave owners in the early nineteenth century after Toussaint L'Overture led the only successful slave revolt in the New World. Spring / Summer 2001 N k a • 4 9 Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing, 1 9 9 9 - 2 0 0 0 , M i x e d m e d i a i n st al l at i o n ( o v er v i ew ) . Triptico ( det ail) , 2 0 0 0 . crossed over to the United States in 1990, she tore herself from the tree, an When I was doing History of People Who Were Not Heroes. I think that the transparency is a very. very, very important concept. . . . Transparency is about memory. Also. I think that transparency [is] about displacement. When you are [an emigre] you are always in this space that is inbetween , in-between physical and not seeing, but they are there. act that made returns difficult and rare. But her roots are still in Cuba. She still is Cuban. Her emigration has only emphasized that fact to her, and the distance has helped her understanding of her Cuban foundations. She stated that, "During the time I've spent in America, I've thought a lot about what Cuba means to me historically, geographically and socially."6 Ulf Hannerz has argued that immigrants do not lose their native identity when they settle in the West. Asians, Africans, Latin Americans and West Indians in Europe and North America are usually considered in social science research only as immigrants to the metropoles. Simultaneously, however , they form extensions of their home societies, of which they often remain active members.7 Campos-Pons is from La Vega in Matanzas, Cuba. Matanzas province was the center of the Cuban sugar industry in the nineteenth century. Its population is mainly of African descent, and it has a rich history of resistance and communal effort. There were slave revolts there in 1825, 1835, and 1843. Some escaped and helped form maroon communities (palenques) on the northern coast, interior mountains, and southern swamplands of the province. Sugar was the center of Matanzas, its raison d'etre, and Campos-Pons grew up in an old, reconstructed sugar plantation barracks (barracon) on the old La Vega sugar plantation there. It was the same building where her great-great grandfather had lived, though she did not realize that it had been a slave barracks until she was older. The free blacks in Matanzas worked in...