GRANDMA PAQUITA AND THE WONDROUS LIFE PATTERN

Grandma Paquita at the age of 14

Lives are lines that criss-cross time and space; sometimes these lines meet serendipitously, sometimes they run along parallel lines that are never meant to converge. However, if we could observe these lines from above, we would marvel at the beautiful pattern they make.

View from the Tate Modern Members Room

Let’s take two moments separated by one thousand miles and nearly twenty years in time. In the first one there are two women sitting at the Tate Modern Members Room contemplating how the weak November sun sets behind St. Paul’s Cathedral. One of them is pregnant, but the baby is not the topic of their conversation. They are talking about the history behind her family, who left Indonesia after the independence war that followed the Second World War. It’s the most engaging story: a beautiful Indonesian woman had two daughters: the first one with a Dutchman and, ten years later, the second one with an Indonesian man. When the colonists decided to leave the country, the ‘pure’ ethnic Indonesians took revenge on those who were descended from the Dutch, because they had enjoyed privileges which they never had. Many people who had just returned from the terrible Japanese prison camps were interned again in Indonesia, especially those of Dutch descent. The government of the mother country made a decision: the Dutch descendents would be invited to move to Holland. However, the Indonesians would have to stay, however harsh their plight. This separated the two sisters for life.

In the second moment, the woman who was listening to the story is eighteen years younger. She is in the South of Spain, in her hometown, and she’s visiting her grandmother, who is very ill. The old lady lives with her youngest daughter, who is married to a Dutchman. All of a sudden, she looks restless, and asks her granddaughter to come nearer and whispers in her ear: “My darling, as you like travelling so much, I’m sure you’ll be able to lend me a suitcase. I am going to the USA.” The young woman thinks that her grandma is speaking nonsense, that this request is just another symptom of the dementia that has been taking hold of her life during the last months. She promises that she will bring her the suitcase, being sure that she will have forgotten by the end of the day. This day the young woman’s life will change forever, but I won’t tell you about this. Yet.

The two moments are connected because there are two parallel stories, the story of two sisters who were separated for life but stayed linked by an invisible thread. The first woman in the story is my friend the painter Marenka Gabeler. I am the second one. This is the story I told her that evening in the Tate Modern.

Grandma Paquita as a young girl

In every family there is someone who is the guardian of the stories, who keeps them and who transmits them to the new generations. In my family, it’s my mother, Paquita. She says it’s important to tell the children where they come from. When we were kids, she used to tell me “adventures” instead of fairy tales. The protagonists of these adventures were always members of the family: there was the one about how my uncle Juan Manuel ran away from the seminary several times (how my grandma thought he could become a priest is a mystery to me), the day my mum took a sun ray for the Virgin Mary, how la tata María cut the chickens’ necks and they started to run about headless... The stories went back generations until the middle of the nineteenth century, when my grandmother’s grandfather, a Frenchman, came to the South of Spain with Empress Eugenia de Montijo. This man spent all his fortune on gambling and having a good time, so there was no money left for the next generation, who had to earn their living as labourers. In fact, his son, my great-grandfather, worked in the building of the famous King’s Path which goes around El Chorro reservoir. Life was hard, my grandmother, another Paquita, was the oldest of twelve children of whom only five survived. My mum always said that the sadness of seeing so many of her brothers and sisters die in their infancy never left her.

My grandparents and their children. My mum is the one on the left.

A very important person in my grandmother’s childhood was her cousin Francis. They were like sisters, as Francis was growing up without her parents. Her mother was dead and her dad had emigrated to America. My mum told me that her grandparents almost did the same but when my great-grandmother, who was holding my grandma Paquita in her arms, saw the ship, she told her husband: “I don’t know about you, but I’m not travelling on that shell”; so all the family decided to stay.

One day, when the two girls were thirteen, Francis’s father returned from America as a rich man. I can imagine the shock of meeting a father you had never seen since you were a toddler. He suggested that he could take his daughter to Malaga to buy her some new dresses. The village where they lived is only twenty minutes’ drive nowadays, but then it took more than a day to get to the capital. So off they went, and they never saw Francis again. Her father put her on a boat and they sailed to America. Cruelty? Certainly. It was a great blow for my grandmother to lose her cousin. But with hindsight, it wasn’t such a bad thing for Francis to be taken to America: she went to the best schools, married a millionaire, had a good life. Paquita, on the other hand, went through the civil war and the post-war years in a country that was in ruins and, without international help, did not start to recover until the 1960s. On the bright side, all her six children survived, including my mum, who was always ill and spent months in bed during her infancy. According to what my mum says and as far as I remember, my grandma had a perennial smile on her face, which was one of her charms.

Grandma and her sisters. She's the smiley one on the left.

Despite the distance, Francis and Paquita kept in touch. She even visited Spain in 1942 with her husband, as you can see in this photo. She also sent parcels to her family, and this is how my mum received nice clothes and nylon stockings. But she did not return until both of them were old ladies in their late seventies, when following the American tradition, she decided to spend a holiday in the place she came from. I was living abroad then, so I never met her. My aunt Cristina says that her English was exquisite but she spoke Spanish with the broad accent of her village, which was very funny, considering she was such an elegant lady.

The two cousins reunite in 1942. Francis' American husband is on the left.

So this brings me back to that evening almost twenty years ago, when my grandma wanted to make the reverse journey and go to the USA to visit her cousin. One week later my auntie told me that she had received a phone call from America: Francis had died on the same evening Paquita had asked me for the suitcase. I don’t know if she somehow sensed her cousin was dying but the coincidence is intriguing nonetheless. 

Paquita died two months later on 31st december 1996.

Grandma with her two youngest daughters: Marilo (left) and Mª Carmen (right).

Marenka’s grandmother refused to go back to Indonesia. The two sisters reunited for the first time in the ninety-seventies. Marenka told me that her great-auntie had the power of seeing people’s spirits; my grandma certainly had a connection with her cousin’s soul.

And how did my life change on that day? After leaving my grandma’s house, I went out for the first time with a man I barely knew. My husband.

(Click here to see Marenka's project on her grandmother and her sister: Sister project And here to see a photo of them published in Marenka's website: photo)

THE DREAMY EYES OF THE REPLICANTS

From the end of November till the end of the year, the nights are cold and long. It is the beginning of the Christmas season and when you walk down the streets in the centre of London you can see that the shop windows have been exquisitely decorated with human-like mannequins. 

The settings themselves are works of art, the make-up daring and adventurous, and you can see a story behind each human-like doll.

For example, the decoration of the shop windows of a famous clothes department store in Regent Street is inspired in the icy beauty of the divas of the 1930s, with a hint at the African war masks in their make up. Their hairstyle, a Scandinavian version of Queen Nefertiti’s, is also worth noticing. 

But if you go beyond the aura of beauty and glamour that surrounds their perfect bodies, you can perceive the deep sadness in their eyes, and that is disturbing.

If you walk on and reach Kensington, the dystopian replicants created by Ridley Scott in 1981 will look at you from the windows of another famous department store.

 Here a combination of moving lights contributes to create a futuristic atmosphere in which the appearance of the mannequins changes dramatically every few seconds, and you can almost see Joanna Cassidy dancing with the snake. 

Their look is not sad anymore, but dreamy, as if induced by some kind of chemical drug.

Blade Runner has always been one of my favourite films and I have always had the feeling that the night of 2019 LA was as cold and damp as London’s December nights.

Photo: Lorenzo Hernandez                                        www.photolorenzohernandez.com

MARENKA GABELER AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF MEMORIES

Marenka Gabeler is a Dutch artist who has a special connection with the topic of memory and its loss. Today she invites us into her studio and tells us the secrets of her art.

The first thing you notice when you arrive is the luminosity of the space and also the noisy activity of the building site next to the studio. Marenka opens the door with a big smile on her face. She’s normally a person who is exquisite in the way she dresses, but today she’s wearing blue work overalls covered in white paint, which clashes amusingly with her pregnant figure.

She invites us for a delicious cup of camomile and spicy apple tea to help us recover from the December cold and starts showing us her latest work. She directs our attention to the wall at the bottom of the room, which shows a series of small portraits of little children who look at you with open eyes. They look a bit like cartoon characters, but each one has a personality of their own. When we ask her about their identity, she says they are Barnardo’s children. 

Barnardo's is a British charity founded in 1866 to care for vulnerable children and young people. Its founder, Dr Thomas John Barnardo, opened a school in the East End of London to care for and educate children of the area. Short afterwards, he founded a boys' orphanage and later opened a girls' home. By the time of his death in 1905, Barnardo's institutions cared for over 8,500 children in 96 locations.

Eighty of these portraits were exhibited at Lloyd’s club until 5^th December 2013. The pictures were displayed around a fireplace, an object that has special significance in Marenka’s work, as we’ll see later on.

I went to Barnardo’s archive to do some research and found the images of the children. There were thousands of faces looking at you from the past, and you didn’t know their stories. 

We also noticed that the portraits on the wall had been painted on pieces of board.

I like to experiment with different techniques; I started using canvas and then moved on to plywood covered in two or three layers of plaster, which is then sanded down, so the effect is smooth. I use different strategies because I want to show how the paintbrush can maybe symbolise what happens to memory when you try to access it, how we remember, how we forget. 

But now her bigger project is about her grandmother, who lives with Alzheimer’s. At this moment she is working on a series of paintings inspired by an old photo that shows her mother, her aunt, her uncle, her grandmother, and her grandfather. You can see this photo at Marenka’s blog: http://beppeproject.tumblr.com

The last time I visited my grandmother, which was last summer, we did different activities like sewing, cooking, playing games, and then we looked at a photo album to reminisce. But I think that, for her, looking at photos is not a good thing, as she does not recognise herself or know who is in the photo. And when she came to one photo in particular she said ‘Who’s this beautiful lady?’ That was the first time she did not recognize herself. It was another step into deterioration. It’s so sad, but she did not get depressed or anything, I just said ‘But grandma, it’s you, you were so beautiful...’ and she said ‘Oh, it’s just me’ and that was it. She is happy when my sister and I are there because we are her grandchildren and this makes her feel secure.

My mother has taken some photos from the album to make copies and I think that the gaps in the album represent what happens in your mind when you have Alzheimer’s. Then I got to this photo. As you can see, the album has onion skin paper sheets to protect the photos and with the time the sheets have become wrinkled, the pattern is similar to a spider web, but more chaotic. So, if you cover the photo with the sheet, you see the image through a veil, which may very well symbolise the confusion experimented by the person with Alzheimer’s.

Marenka shows us another wall covered with small pictures that represent the fragments of this photo. They are displayed with no order. One of the paintings represents a face, another one a hand, another part of a jumper...

I decided to cut the photograph into pieces and paint the different parts, as if it were a puzzle. I didn’t want to copy it exactly as it was, but much more simplified and childlike, reducing the detail, mimicking how the memory works, remembering only the generalities, and then sometimes going into detail. Also, as you can see, I didn’t use the fragmentation of the spider web in all of them. I started painting just the photos and then I thought that I could use it. Then I started experimenting and, for example, in this piece, which is a hand, you can also see a landscape or in this other one, which is part of the jumper of the boy, you can see the sea, the horizon or the sand. And the latest ones are almost like sketches. So, as you can see, slowly, a lot of things are happening in my painting.

Also the way I displayed the different pictures on the wall has changed. At first they formed a straight line, like a cinema screen and then, this morning, I thought I could show it like a puzzle, so I rearranged them.

At the bottom on the right, there is a piece that is just red paint. We ask her if it has symbolic value.

I am not sure yet. I would like to research the role colour plays in dementia, because they suffer blackouts, but there are also periods of aggression.

Maybe I need to paint the same topic over and over again, because one of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on my grandmother is that she tends to tell the same story all the time; she asks a question, you answer it, and she asks the same question again, you answer it, and it goes on and on and on and it’s really difficult. She does not realize she’s asking the same question, which is ok, but for us it’s really tiring: you try to give her a slightly different answer each time, or you try to divert the conversation, but she keeps on repeating the same question. So this is why I think I should repeat the same image instead of doing different images. For example, I paint the same face, but I paint it differently, because this is how the memory works: you remember, but you remember it slightly differently every time.

I started working with memory in 2011, coinciding with my grandmother’s illness and the passing away of my other grandmother, who I was really closed to. She was Indonesian, and I started to remember the stories she had told me from when she was little in Indonesia, and I made a book.

But this relationship with memory had already started a few years before, when she did a project about masks for her MA at Royal College: http://www.marenkagabeler.com/the-mask-project.htm

I was interested in facial identity and I decided to make a cast of my face in plaster and make a mask. I just left holes for the eyes and the mouth and I wore it for two weeks to experiment what it was like not to have any facial expression, how it affects communication and how it makes you feel. I kept a diary. From then I started painting the experiences of the performance. And the final piece for the degree show was paintings inspired on masters like Velazquez, Goya, Vermeer, but transforming them somehow and I placed them surrounding a fireplace. That was the first time I used the fireplace as a motif in my work. And I think using the fireplace linked to the memory because it is the place where we reminisce. I think it’s Bachelard who writes about the person who sits in front of the fire and the memories come out and come back, like a star shape. Also, it’s common to find photographs of your family on the mantelpiece, which are also memories of the past.

At the moment I am also participating in a group exhibition at the Cello Factory. I am showing one of the pictures of the masks. As for my next exhibition in Amsterdam at the beginning of January, which is a solo exhibition, I am going to show the installation of the eighty faces, but it’s quite a big space, so I am thinking of showing some of the paintings I am working on now.

I always feel curious about the working routine of writers and artists, how they manage to shape their inspiration, so I cannot help asking Marenka about it.

I don’t have a very strict working routine, I have to work to earn money, then I am doing the RYCT course with Pam Schweitzer, and of course, as I am pregnant, sometimes I am just too tired. I am also decorating the house... so I come here when I can, basically. I prefer working in the morning, when I feel fresh. When I was younger, I used to paint all night and sleep during the day, but now I am more traditional.

Now that I am pregnant, I feel more relaxed. I used to be anxious, but now I accept t inspiration as it comes. I don’t know if it has something to do with the baby, but now I know that the baby is coming and I only have a few months left to paint. Then I will have to look after the baby and later on, maybe in four or five months, I will be able to paint again. Maybe I’ve become less ambitious.

Some people have asked me if I have painted about my pregnancy. Actually, in the group exhibition I am taking part in at the moment, which shows the work of women artists, there is a beautiful painting of a belly containing another person. But no, I haven’t. At the moment, even if, of course, I am thinking about my baby, I am focused on my grandmother and the topic of memories.

Marenka is intelligent and beautiful but, above other things, has a magic aura about her that makes people relaxed and happy. I notice this every Monday when we go to the RYCT training. Her art will probably be one of the most interesting outcomes of this project.

http://www.marenkagabeler.com     

Photos: Lorenzohernandez                              www.photolorenzohernandez.com