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María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban artist currently working in the United States. Since assuming primary residence in the U.S., Campos-Pons’s work has received increasing attention, but it is clear from the reviews of her multi-media art installations that her work lay somewhere beyond the easily categorizable in a world where even art—once the domain of radicals and non-conformists—has increasingly become commodified and codified. Her work is at once interpreted as political and apolitical, and its cultural context is often elided to fit categorizations of women’s art or even of Black art to which we have become accustomed. Eduardo Costa, art critic for Art in America , writes that she “handles video with skill and imagination, experiments with nontraditional art materials and designs her own screens on which to project her videos. She creates spectacular installations with all these elements . Still, the value of her effort certainly lies somewhere beyond the vocabulary of contemporary, issue-oriented art” (149). Miami Herald art critic Helen L. Kohen has described her as a “privileged member of the ‘80s generation of artists, well travelled, much honored. Though her paintings were often ironic commentaries on pop culture, the subject matter was apolitical. She was in Cuba” (5G). Cultural critic and performance artist Coco Fusco has written that “Living abroad has brought into sharp relief her experiences as an uprooted black Cuban woman, and has compelled her to consider the oral and performative traditions that constitute primary carries of black identity in the diaspora,” adding that in her installation The Seven Powers Come by the RECOVERING ORIGINS A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons 205 Sea, Campos-Pons “makes a politically charged statement about Santería.… the piece [calling] upon viewers to take into account that Santería, embodied by those Seven African Powers, is inextricably bound to the history of slavery” (106–7). I found the fact that all three of these reviews should reflect such disparate notions of Campos-Pons’s art compelling. Having met CamposPons in the spring of 1998 when we were both invited to speak at Loyola CollegeinMarylandforacolloquiumonwomenoftheCaribbeandiaspora (along with Maryse Condé and Rosario Ferré), I knew we would have much to talk about. In our presentations, both Campos-Pons and I spoke of the importance of Caribbean women’s (self)-representation, and of the role of ritual space in sustaining the viability of those representations. By the time I had a chance to take a look at her installations, mostly through reviews of her work and images found with those reviews or on websites, I realized that the art of Campos-Pons must be noted because it obstructs the forgetfulness inherent in official versions of history. It is art that makes use of memory in order to reconstruct history and validate the lives of those who have been marginalized in history. Her work posits a complicated view of politics: whether or not one considers the work apolitical or political depends primarily on the positionality of the viewer. If anything, Campos-Pons’s work provides viewers with an opportunity not only to confront alternative ways of viewing history and the present but also alternatives to the social positions they might think they occupy. What I was most interested in discovering through this dialogue was how Campos-Pons defined her own work, its purpose and materials. The basis for our discussion were five pieces, all belonging to different parts of a trilogy Campos-Pons has been building since the early 1990s. The three parts of this trilogy are History of a People Who Were Not Heroes, Spoken Softly with Mama, and Azúcar. Belonging to the first part of the trilogy are Tra… (1991) and The Seven Powers Come by the Sea (1992). Unfolding Desires (1997), When I am Not Here/Estoy Allá (1997), Umbilical Cord (1994), and Sustenance (1998) belong to the second. Azúcar remains a work in progress, and includes an installation piece entitled Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing (1999). From the photographic series When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá, I chose to centre on a self-portrait entitled Untitled Blue where a woman (Campos-Pons) stands with her head down, wearing a sleeveless blue cotton dress accented with white, and holds six hollowed, wooden boats against her body with clasped hands against a blue background. From there, my attention was captivated by Umbilical Cord, which makes use of seven photographs of women from Campos-Pons’s family...

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