“I love intensity in every sense”
Leo Babsky: Tell us a little about yourself and how you feel about life in Buenos Aires right now?
Lucila Sancineti: Summer in Buenos Aires is an event that a lot of people look forward to and I absolutely dread. It feels like being crushed by the hot sky or something… So right now I’m focusing on some computer-based projects and planning next year’s activities. My sculptural pieces need long periods of production, since I shape materials from scratch with slow, repetitive and meticulous processes so that they gain corporeality and feel organic. This is why I like to use this time of the year when activity slows down to pause production, design new pieces, and think how to continue. I also like to read and do research, so that is how I hope to spend the summer.
The rest of the year Buenos Aires is as intense as it comes. I love intensity in every sense -intense friends, intense places, intense artworks- so being here is amazing, but quite maddening as well… I think this is also because of our current sociopolitical situation, which is depressing to be honest. Even though this is a global feeling, and the rise of neoliberal far-right -even fascist- governments is deeply concerning, in Argentina it is heightened by the fact that our current government seems to have unwavering support regardless of all their horrible policies.
LB: You teach literature in addition to being a visual artist, what books have been important to your practice and what are you reading now? More specifically, I read that you enjoy the works of Ursula K Le Guin and a strong influence is science fiction or science fiction horror – what resonates most for you from that genre?
LS: I have a BA in Literature from the University of Buenos Aires, and a huge part of my path as an artist has been conjugating this literary and intellectual world with my material-based practice. When I was younger I thought all my areas of interest were unrelated, but now I see that my career in Literature has shaped my way of thinking, how the world or reality folds and unfolds for me, and this deeply influences my artistic practice. I feel that I walk back and forth between two languages, like there is a traffic of influences between them. For example, when I’m working on a project, more often than not I start with a word or phrase that can lead to a metaphor or idea,which then guides material research.
For me Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror are infinitely more interesting in presenting us a lens to explore reality than other genres that deal with things in a “realistic” way. I think that Realism as a genre has stopped being a meaningful tool for us to grasp and narrate ourselves, and how we experience things. This “epiphany”, so to speak, came to me while reading both Ursula K Le Guin and Donna Haraway, because of how they understand narratives as devices for rethinking contemporary issues. I’m drawn to narratives that explore otherness in identity, how the world can be shaped to be a very strange place and how we can interfere in that shaping. My latest readings are centered in New Weird, particularly Latin American authors working in this tradition, such as Ramiro Sanchiz or Juan Mattio.
LB: The way in which your sculptures fold, layer, drape, caress and envelop suggests concealment yet also constriction and I am interested in the undercurrent of threat implied in your works – ‘omnivorous’ is a word you have used before …
LS: From the beginning of my practice, surface has worked as both a metaphor and a material research. A surface can be an apparently empty and flat space, but with infinite possibilities when folded, wrinkled, pleated. It becomes an extension that touches itself from within. I work with translucent surfaces that, like skin, cover and veil. Something capable of concealing while simultaneously allowing what lies beneath to be seen -a slanted way of showing-. And as a porous border, that delineates while also enabling contact, exchange.
In this sense, the idea of the omnivorous was interesting for me, but not particularly connected to threat. Instead, it comes from a book of essays by María Negroni, Galería Fantástica, where she mentions “an omnivorous passion for surfaces”. This phrase resonated deeply within me, and the image of a hunger for all types of surfaces made me think about how they draw you near, even lure you, because you feel compelled to touch them. And coming into contact produces something both ways, there is an affection, a contagion. So perhaps there is an underlying threat in this contact with otherness, in a way. I see it more as a tension.
LB: This push / pull is also evident in the element of tactility – glossy ceramics and shiny fabric invites touch yet there is the invisible wall of ‘don’t touch’ that surrounds all art. How do you play with this dichotomy?
LS: I always feel happy when the reaction of those who encounter my work is to want to touch it, which is a very intimate way of interaction. Sight proposes an interaction of distance, while touch necessarily implies proximity, and if I’m present I always encourage people to touch the pieces. Most of the time the gesture is a soft caress, as if they were petting a tiny creature. Touch also favours other senses like smell or hearing; when you caress a surface, you make it sound -a very soft sound sometimes-. I have always been interested in the tactile aspect of my pieces, in how they produce a desire to be touched, which plays with the prohibition of touching works of art as it generates some sort of forbidden desire. If someone dares indeed to touch the pieces, there is satisfaction in this silly secret action of breaking the rules. Moreover, in an installation, the moment your body enters the space and interacts physically with the pieces is another form of touching and being touched, of entering into contact. This is also why my pieces never fall too far into the gore, are never too disgusting or disturbing. I want them to remain attractive, allowing a sense of unease to coexist with the allure of something “beautiful”.
photo by Giula Gr
LB: The idea of the fold or crevice leads me to an eroticism that I feel pulses through your works, is eroticism an area that resonates with you and what are your favorite erotic artworks or artists?
LS: I don’t know if I think of my work in terms of eroticism, but more like a haunting. There are artworks or artists that haunt me, and inhabit me so that I can’t stop thinking about them. Louise Bourgeois and Magdalena Abakanowicz are such artists, as is Georgia O’Keefe. There are also crevices, holes, folds and spaces to “get in” so to speak in their artworks, that one could say are “feminine” shapes, perhaps, but this is not really what interests me. Instead, the fact that I find these spaces at times immensely comforting and at times very disturbing. I guess that double feeling is what keeps me there, hooked, with a physical connection even if I have not seen some of their work live. I feel there is a relationship between this feeling and what David Cronenberg has called “body beautiful”, playing with the idea of “body horror”, the body as a space of infinite potentiality.
In a more traditional erotic sense, my favorite creatures are vampires. There is this novel by Octavia Butler where she makes explicit the erotic feeling of the vampire bite, by imagining a sexual and co-dependent relationship between the vampire and its “prey”. In fact most of her stories incorporate the erotic experience as central in an encounter with otherness. Going beyond the initial reactions of fear and disgust, characters find immense pleasure in the contact with alien bodies; a contact that can at first be forced, or based on mutual need.
LB: There is this question of ‘freedom through restriction’ in your works that I find very interesting – the ambiguity of whether your works are cocooning or constricting. I’ve read you talk about McQueen and Schiaparelli redefining the shape of the body – freeing us from our perception of certain configurations – yet those designs could also be very restrictive to the natural flow of movement …. Can you talk a little about this?
LS: The idea of an absolute lack of constriction, and a “natural” movement is somewhat of a myth in my opinion since, being socially adapted bodies, what is “natural” is already sifted through culture, social ideas, etc. I’m more interested in understanding cultural devices as part of nature, and in this sense a garment is to the body as tools to the hand or speech to the tongue. There is not a previous, essential state of purity that is lost or modified, but bodies and movement and relationship to other bodies -human or non-human- are produced together with these devices.
The question that guides my latest work has to do with the relationship between the body and what covers it: how a garment adapts to our morphology or viceversa, and how bodies might change when in contact with other shapes. At first I had a more shape-less approach, but then I started to think about mutated or speculative shapes that maintain basic parameters of a body (symmetry, limbs) but that are not recognizable as a specific body. A shape, an outline, always defines, constricts. But it also allows for specific movements, certain interactions that might not have been possible before. In this sense, fashion has always operated through constriction, annulling what it classifies as abnormal, deformed, etc. However, a garment also allows for different expressions of the body, and how we perceive it: how we perceive gender, movement, a human shape. I’m interested in this aspect, in garments as potential devices for us to reevaluate our bodies, even linking them to other non-human morphologies which allows for a sort of inter-species perception of what makes a body: instead of well established and delimited outlines, can they be open to flux, contagion, mutual change?
LB: This dual interest in fashion and insectology takes us to a darkly beautiful future of avant guard, haute couture clad, female dominant and gender diverse worlds – Do you see your practice as a form of quiet resistance to attacks on female and trans rights and bodies?
LS: As I was mentioning before, the pieces from my latest project “other crusts” imagine the skins/dresses of hybrid bodies. By crafting what look like haute couture pieces for human-sized, insect-like creatures I try to play with the idea that people are not so distant from other species as once was thought. We know now how insects, plants, are also capable of human-like processes akin to communication, thought, play… and also how we are made of communities of bacteria, how we live parasitically with other species, how we need to recognize our co-dependence. I draw inspiration from Haraway’s notion of “cyborg”, which transgresses boundaries and proposes unexpected couplings. But I am also inspired by the idea of shedding skin, of moulting. In this sense I think my practice asks about fleeting entities and identities, the potential of that which is not fixed.
Shifting bodies -female and trans bodies but also those differently-abled, old, sick, etc.- have a history of being rejected, feared, because of how they evidence a deviance to the imposed normality of what is understood as a body (male, adult, healthy, fixed, closed). A few years ago, a colleague and I organized debate workshops on our platform, Esio Trot, where we examined the figures of monsters as devices of declassification. In my work, I also explore how these “abnormal” entities open pathways to break away from the imposed, allowing us to imagine and embody other ways of being, of living without the “infection of purity”, as Xenofeminists would say. The Xenofeminist notion of using technology to re-engineer the world to our advantage is central to my procedure of de-forming fashion patterns sourced from old magazines to create these new, or other, morphologies.
LB: Going back to Argentina, tell me about some Argentinian artists that are doing exciting things? What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you in Buenos Aires?
LS: There are a lot of amazing artists I admire working in Argentina right now. I’m mostly drawn to people who work with sculpture and installation, so for example some established artists who I admire are Miguel Harte, Nora Correas, or Mercedes Azpilicueta, who really push the boundaries of material in their sculptures and installations. In particular Nora Correas and Mercedes Azpilicueta’s works have been very influential because of how they work with textile in a sculptural way. There are also a lot of artists that are my contemporaries that I admire, like Renata Molinari, Faktor, Aurora Castillo, Valentín Asparella, Alejandra Mizrahi or Manuel Brandazza, to name a few. All of these artists engage in deep research that I believe is in dialogue with contemporary thought. In particular, last year I got to know Renata and Aurora’s work more in depth, in their exhibitions at Moira and NN. Other exhibitions I found very interesting lately were Lucrecia Lionti’s show at Malba, Florencia Sadir at W-Galería, and Eduardo Basualdo also had an amazing show at Ruth Benzacar Gallery, where he displayed a huge piece crafted in a specific type of paper he works with.
LB: You recently started working with Intemperie, one of my favorite Argentinian galleries, do you have any exciting projects coming up with them that you would like to tell us about?
LS: With Intemperie we are evaluating possible projects for this next year… one idea is to organize an exhibition in London to show my textile pieces. This is almost a secret! But I am very excited about what we can conjure together. There are also some projects of group shows with other artists of the gallery, whose works are amazing so that will surely be interesting.
And right now, I’m working on a publishing project that I have been wanting to do for a long time, since I did my research with fashion magazines from the beginning of the XXth century at the National Museum of Garment here in Buenos Aires. I have an archive of digital collages and fashion patterns, and I am working on micro-essays that address questions around body technologies, the garment–skin relationship, and the porous boundaries between the self and the alien. It is still very raw, but I’m eager to investigate graphic and printmaking techniques that are new to me.