On the Art of Alchemy and Unfolding Desires: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons

To encounter María Magdalena Campos-Pons is like encountering her work. Whether it is one of her paintings, sculptures, videos, installations, performances, or a combination of these artistic disciplines, the senses are stirred, awakened, engaged. She speaks not just through visual signifiers but in multilayered, textured ways that synesthetically express the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that have made many of her memories materialize into works of art. To “capture” the atmospheric way that Campos-Pons talks in relation to the world around her and to her work is impossible––it exceeds the confines of this particular format.

Stemming from the particularity of her own experience, Campos-Pons’s artistic production has been referred to as autobiographical, and the subject of identity frequently and persistently emerges. Yet her inquires and engagement often extend past the space, place, and time of her particular body. Campos-Pons, who grew up in the former slave barracks of a sugar plantation in the region of Matanzas, Cuba, has throughout her career interrogated her family’s past in relation to Cuba’s sugar industry. Addressing subjects like the repercussions of colonization, forced migration, and barbarous labor practices—overarching narratives that informed the encounters between her Nigerian, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestors—several of Campos-Pons’s works touch upon the harrowing ways that the transatlantic slave trade and Chinese-indentured servitude [End Page E-1] made the cultivation and harvesting of sugar cane in the Caribbean possible. Bringing to the fore the disregarded histories of the people and cultures that converged to produce one of the first ingredients of globalization, Campos-Pons does not focus on this marginalization/erasure; rather, making use of memory, she draws attention to their enduring presence. This aspect is most evident in her performances as she calls upon and welcomes ancestral spirits to join her, her body becoming a site of encounter between those that came before and the audience. Less evident but equally as pertinent are the ways she addresses the performativity of materials. By centering, for example the materiality of sugar, her artistic labor becomes a mediation on its production; the process of making alluding to sugar’s arduous history and its poetic resonance.

I was grateful for the opportunity to meet Campos-Pons, as I am currently working on a dissertation that interrogates what sugar performs in cultural productions and site-specific landscapes. Taking into account the impact of this material as a “tastemaker,” I delve into the production and consumption of sugar and what our tastes for this “sweet” commodity elucidate about practices of racialization. I wanted to learn more about how Campos-Pons portrays her proximity and intimate engagement to sugar and its production. Of particular interest is her use of alchemy—a word, not incidentally, that came up quite a bit throughout our conversation—as an artistic strategy. For example, how alchemy is practiced conceptually to transform a material that has caused so much insurmountable damage, and how it informs the multisensorial aesthetic experiences that she creates in her art works. This strategy disrupts the tyranny of the visual, the sensorial hierarchy influenced by the Aristotelian model in Western aesthetic theory that has conditioned perceptions in the spaces that exhibit art—a scopic privileging that has also contributed to the objectification and subsequent racialized violence inflicted on those that have historically labored to produce sugar. As Campos-Pons’s work exhibits, alchemy occurs when the senses are awakened to the vitality of materiality—that is, that materials like perceptions are malleable—a practice that when deployed reorients our tastes for an ingredient that has turned bodies and sites into ruins. Therefore most of the pieces selected for the interview reflect these interests.

The following conversation took place in April amid the COVID-19 quarantine. Below is a transcript of that interaction edited for length.

SLC:

I thought we could begin by discussing the particular way you center your body in your artistic practice that includes painting, sculpting, video, photography, installation, and performance—am I missing anything?

MCP...