Tania Astapenco es la entrevistada por Shirley Rebuffo en este nuevo capítulo de la serie dedicada a artistas uruguayos. Tania crea piezas escultóricas con un estilo muy definido, llenas de emotividad y sentimiento, cada una de ellas fruto de un largo y meticuloso proceso que involucra una variedad de materiales y técnicas.
Un artículo con una completa selección de su obra presentado en dos posts: el primero con texto en español, y este segundo en inglés.
Tania Astapenco is interviewed by Shirley Rebuffo in this new chapter of the series dedicated to Uruguayan artists. Tania creates sculptural pieces with a very defined style, full of emotion and feeling, each one of them the result of a long and meticulous process involving a variety of materials and techniques.
An article with a complete selection of her work presented in two posts: the first one with text in Spanish, and this second one in English.
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Tania Astapenco Arechavaleta
(Montevideo, Uruguay, 1963-)
Tania trabajando / at work
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on April 5, 1963. She is a teacher by vocation and profession. Drawing and other plastic expressions are present from a very young age, since she grew up in an artistic environment. Her father, Pedro Astapenco, was a plastic artist. His mother, Josefa, a fighter woman, was an artist of life, displaying all her creativity in everyday life.
It is in the 90's that she discovers her passion for clay, means and end to express herself, developing a process of research and permanent search in the creative act with ceramics.
She likes to accompany her works with poetry, with literature, in this way she relates the art of the word expressed by poets with the vitality of concrete work that she thinks. "Everything that happens to me in life, I pour it into clay," she says.
"Hiparquía / Hipparchia of Maroneia"
Pasta de arcilla, papel y chamote grueso, monococción, óxidos /
clay paste, paper and coarse chamotte, single firing, oxides, 56 x 48 x 20 cm.
Hiparquía fue una filósofa cínica griega. Considerada una mujer libertina y contestataria, fue en realidad una mujer que supo querer su libertad.
Hipparchia was a Greek cynical philosopher. Considered a libertarian and rebellious woman, she was actually a woman who knew how to love her freedom.
"Hiparquía / Hipparchia of Maroneia" (obra en proceso / work in progress)
"Yo, Hiparquía, no seguí las costumbres del sexo femenino, sino que con corazón varonil seguí a los fuertes perros. No me gustó el manto sujeto con la fíbula, ni el pie calzado y mi cinta se olvidó del perfume. Voy descalza, con un bastón, un vestido me cubre los miembros y tengo la dura tierra en vez de un lecho. Soy dueña de mi vida para saber tanto y más que las ménades para cazar."
"I, Hipparchia, did not follow the customs of the female sex, but with manly heart followed the strong dogs. I did not like the cloak fastened with the fibula, nor the shod foot, and my ribbon forgot the perfume. I go barefoot, with a staff, a garment covers my limbs and I have the hard earth instead of a bed. I am mistress of my life to know as much and more than maenads to hunt."
"Hiparquía / Hipparchia of Maroneia" (obra en proceso / work in progress)
Interview by Shirley Rebuffo
Shirley Rebuffo: When did you decide to accept ceramics as a form of expression?
Tania Astapenco: I came across ceramics in Monica Mederos' workshop, many years ago. Since then I have been looking to say things through it. I always liked drawing and the possibility of expressing myself with different materials. The encounter with clay meant a very important change in my life and that's where we are. Clay is a primary, warm, noble material that enables me to "speak" with meaning and to "travel" in the subject matter. When I consider that I have arrived, I let it dry and another process begins: that of thinking and exploring how to continue with my work. I like Violeta Parra's phrase... I feel identified:
"Creation is a bird without a flight plan, which will never fly in a straight line" said Violeta Parra Chilean singer-songwriter, painter, sculptor, embroiderer and ceramist.
In that journey I try mixing pastes, I incorporate different elements such as sand, chamotte of different sizes, paper... they add to the clay "body" and different textures that come into play when I model or work the bas-relief. Everything can become a tool... the main ones are my hands of course, but also, from a small stick to the most sophisticated one can come into play in the dance of creation. Working with ceramic sculpture has been a great challenge and continues to be so.
It requires commitment. Experience and craft as tools to express. I am constantly striving to learn about ceramic work in order to be able to express myself. From chemistry to physics. Ceramic work is complete. We find knowledge in primitive cultures that we admire and to which we turn, perhaps, for their authenticity, for the virtue of the simplicity of the techniques and forms.
"Hiparquía / Hipparchia of Maroneia"
SR: Who are your references in art?
TA: I think of art as a human activity that seeks ways to intervene, to transform. In fact, every human being intervenes, changes and generates changes. It is almost inevitable. To abstain, to inhibit oneself from the world around us, as ways of existing, also generates changes. I understand art as provocation, interpellation of emotions. It's a journey... that sometimes can be alienating...
There are searches on the way through art and for art. A permanent reflection, a decisive and conscious act capable of reproducing things, constructing forms, or expressing an experience, a feeling with an aesthetic sense. When I work it is a dialogue, a conversation with the clay that confronts, resists and also lets itself go, and sculpture emerges, conceived as an art of solid forms, of mass related to the occupation of space. The play with light also appears (it takes shape) that contributes tonalities and makes expression possible. The tool, the handprint, however small it may be, somehow expresses a language. Just as the absence of matter, the empty space also says. It is interesting to challenge with forms in space.
That is why I feel that my father is a very strong reference, a very committed artist, understood as an expression of social realism. I am very impressed by Picasso and Guayasamín, who said: "In spite of everything, we have not lost faith in man, in his capacity to rise up and build; because art covers life. It is a way of loving".
I also marvel at Yepes, Giacometti, Rodin...
"Hiparquía / Hipparchia of Maroneia", experiencia táctil / tactile experience
The usual "no touching" prohibition in Tania's exhibitions does not exist. The visitor can touch the works, they can be felt, palpated, enjoyed by touch, the different textures can be explored and recognized. The shows are visited by people with visual difficulties, but also by people who do not have these handicaps. They can experience what a blind person feels when perceiving art through their fingers. An intelligent way to bring different realities closer, break barriers and perceive different sensations.
"Mujer llora pájaro / Woman Cries Bird", plato, esmalte, esgrafiado, óxidos / plate, enamel, sgraffito, oxide
SR: Modeling with your hands, seeing with your hands... they are a link with a special audience. Tell us how the process of your series "Birds in the Head" began.
TA: At the moment of working there is a prevalence of emotion, of feeling... it is the journey that constitutes creation. Ceramics involves all our senses. Sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste.
I not only look with my eyes; my hands have been transformed. I can read the clay with them, they give me information about textures, consistencies, humidity, volumes, shapes. The hands have memory of what they have experienced, memory of having touched, memory of having perceived the surrounding world. Their contribution is very valuable: the curves bring me caresses... strength is expressed in the depth of the line, the cut, the blow of a wood on the clay.
The ideas fly permanently over my head, in those moments the desire to undertake several sculptures arose with force, several works .... the birds fluttered.
I worked as a workshop leader conducting workshops with clay with the participation of young people who visited the Museum of Memory (MuMe). Awareness workshops where we met with our body memory, with our feelings. That workshop was an invitation to work with our eyes closed. The experience was very significant and moved me as well. Both initiatives and experiences came up almost together: "Birds in the Head".
And so I decided. I proposed and convened in the Cultural Space of the Gaucho Museum that blind and low vision people visit the exhibition "Birds in the Head". A great support from Cristina Lampariello who joined the Fundación Banco República to this initiative, from the colleagues of the ceramics workshop of the MuMe, from Karina Tassino, from my family, from organizations such as UNCU [National Union of the Blind of Uruguay], Braille Foundation, workshops and schools joined us with enthusiasm and participated with us to carry out this initiative. It is an experience that marked my life. A before and an after. The exhibition was also held at the Thematic Pole of Las Piedras, at the Cultural Space in San José, at the Artigas Theater in the city of Trinidad. All the experiences were very impressive. Playing, all of them. A proposal that includes all of us, those who can see and those who cannot.
There is such a thing as haptic sensitivity (from the Greek "haptikos"). To touch, to grasp, to hold. This practice, which develops from the earliest years of our lives, allows us to recognize objects and environments quickly. Haptic perception is a very complex system through which the receiver gives content to the information that reaches his brain from the different senses. Why is it that if in our beginnings as humans we appeal to all the senses, later we separate them? Today we live in a visual world above all things. Going back to the beginning, to be able to transform, to change through art.
"Azules / Blues", dibujo sobre pasta de papel, pigmentos / drawing on paper pulp, pigments
"Parto / Birth", greda, chamote, totora, óxidos / clay, chamotte, cattail, oxides
SR: Your works have messages. In this series, you also move us from the earthly to the mystical, from the girl to the mother, but they all have a common point: affection and emotions. Could you refer to some of the works?
TA: I'm going to talk about "De tus abrazos" (From Your Embraces). That sculpture comes from the love of a couple. The embrace is very supportive, very sustaining, it gathers from pain to the most carnal joy, like that of a birth. The idea begins to take shape from the beginning when I prepare the material, when I begin to knead the clay. I needed a clay with structure, one that would sustain, so I mixed it with irregular porous brick chamotte.
The journey begins. There the hands come and go with memories that are in the middle of everything, the memory is "kneaded". The hands feel, feel again those hugs, the ones we have given and the ones we have received, and even more: the ones we have yet to give. It takes days... I move forward and I need to leave a little. I have to "separate" from the work from time to time, to see it "from the outside" and also because it is necessary to loosen the tumult of feelings. I return to it with new airs, a freer head and I touch it, I look at it. I make decisions intervening in that game between volume and form. I work taking pictures to achieve something like the outside look, the objective look.
At this point in the process, the instruments begin to play a greater role; I resort to **stecas and metal spatulas. Any object in the environment becomes a tool, even knitting and sewing needles participated in "From Your Embraces".
When I decided that I was already in the last stages of the process, I faced the task of hollowing it out. Section it to empty it of material, to ensure that there are no air bubbles, to generate those chimneys for the circulation of heat. Reattach it. I leave it and I do not intervene any more. It has to be left to dry for many, many days.
The firing of the piece, the color, another decision to make. I prepared the glaze so that it would convey the sensation of the bone, of the calcareous. I studied a little more and made the previous tests to know if it was in the right way. And now, ready to receive the heat, with oxides and glaze, it went to the kiln with days of drying and hours of firing, generating temperature plateaus. All night by the kiln. A childbirth. Sculptures have their stories too.
"La caverna / The Cave", esmalte, óxido, ahumado / enamel, rust, smoked
"Esta obra fue realizada en el 2020, en plena pandemia. Mi idea fue transmitir el encierro, la incertidumbre. Pensé en el estado en que nos encontrábamos todos, o la mayoría, con relación al conocimiento de la verdad o a la ignorancia. La existencia de esos dos mundos en el que estuvimos sumergidos todos (el mundo inteligible y el mundo sensible), tal cual lo explicaba Platón. El juego de la hoguera y las sombras."
"This work was made in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. My idea was to convey the confinement, the uncertainty. I thought about the state in which we were all, or most of, us in relation to the knowledge of truth or ignorance. The existence of those two worlds in which we were all immersed -the intelligible world and the sensible world-, as explained by Plato. The game of the bonfire and the shadows."
"Cara / Face", impresión con óxidos sobre pasta de papel / printing with oxides on paper pulp, 29 x 30,5 cm., 2019
"Pájaros que erizan… / Birds That Bristle...", escultura monococción, óxidos y esmalte /
single firing sculpture, oxides and enamel, 89 x 30 x 16 cm.
SR: What social situations condition you when developing your work?
TA: We are social beings, we are nothing without other people. Life situations, our own and those of others, cross us. The human is above, the human condition and affections. Reality hurts, it also generates joys, it crosses us, I cannot think of it in any other way, I live it that way. As a woman I place myself in the lives of many women in history, it is impossible not to look back and recognize, recognize ourselves in them, in their struggles, it is born... today and the future are built... my work navigates through those seas.
SR: What place do you assign to the poetic dimension in what you do?
TA: A very important place. Poetry inspires me. I find myself in it and it is part of my work, it opens my head, my heart, it makes my hands move in the clay. I am not a writer, but I write on sheets of paper the ideas that come to me along with the sculpture and I often accompany them with the written word.
"Cabeza abierta / Open Head", pasta con chamote, esmalte monococción /
paste with chamotte, single-firing glaze, 70 x 26 x 30 cm.
"Momentos... / Moments...", pasta de arcilla y papel / clay and paper pulp, 50 x 30 x 36 cm.
SR: And there is the philosopher Hipparchia who has crossed epochs with her strength to be part of your play with a staging. What is the challenge of doing this kind of work?
TA: I was captivated by the character of Hipparchia. She is considered one of the first women in human history. She decides to risk everything to be authentic, true to herself, for love in the broadest sense of the word. The process she undergoes is like a metamorphosis. Courage, the ability to risk for something she wants and considers fair. I wanted to revive through clay what she lived and represented. The challenge: to find the plastic way to revive it through sculpture, so that I can see her, the time, the process. To bring her to today. A journey, a challenge to myself.
SR: How do you feel when you finish a work and see what you have created, translating what is in your brain into something three-dimensional and palpable?
TA: It's a journey, a flight. I live with a lot of intensity during the whole process. When I understand that it's over, that I'm going to leave it, another one begins: looking at it from a distance, "cold". Sometimes it surprises me. The human being surprises.
"Momentos... / Moments..."
"Espera / Wait", plato, texturas, esmalte y óxido, composición con hierro /
plate, textures, enamel and rust, composition with iron
SR: In the process of creating a work there are several stages: there is the solitary artist in front of the worked clay, but still without form. How is that process that continues and ends in a work of art?
TA: In general it is a long process; very nice to live in all its stages, although sometimes it can happen that it comes out as if by impulse. You lose track of time, that happens to me quite a lot. It's a lot of enjoyment, but also very moving, exciting.
SR: Do you sometimes let yourself be guided by chance?
TA: Sometimes yes, there is a lot of playfulness and there chance intervenes, but it doesn't always necessarily end up in a concrete work, there are comings and goings. The exercise of breaking and starting again is good.
"Mujer / Woman", máscara / mask, rakú, 48 x 40 x 14 cm.
"Mujer con sombrero / Woman with a Hat", hierro y madera / iron and wood
SR: What is your greatest weakness when facing a new creation?
TA: I don't know if there is a bigger one. There are, there's no doubt about it. One of them is that I face a lot of emotions, and I don't know if I will be convinced in the end. I am facing myself. Like everything in life, it has its contradictions. It's good, you have to develop courage.
SR: How much time a day do you dedicate to ceramics?
TA: I am a woman with many roles: I care about my roles as mother, companion, grandmother, teacher. I put a lot of energy into everything and I enjoy it a lot, like in ceramics. My grandchildren talk about their sculptures in their grandmother's workshop. The work in the workshop is almost daily: sometimes it's for a while, sometimes it's the whole day. Ceramics is not only manual, it requires study, thinking, organizing with materials, systematizing experiences. It is not easy with so many loves... heh. It is a challenge.
"Soñadora / Dreamer", pasta con chamote, monococción, óxidos y esmaltes, composición con hierro y madera /
chamotte paste, single firing, oxides and enamels, composition with iron and wood, 56 x 23 x 10 cm.
"Niña volando / Flying Girl", impresión con óxidos sobre pasta de papel /
printing with oxides on paper pulp, 33 x 32 cm.
SR: Tell us something about the different techniques you use.
TA: The main thing for me is the material, the clay. To express with it. I like to work with all types of clay and prepare different types of clay. The techniques of ceramics I put them fundamentally at the service of expression. Knowing them allows me to provoke the desired effects, sometimes contradicting the way they should be applied. I like engobe, palletizing, working with oxides, pigments, glazes... all of them.
SR: Are you working, or would you like to work, on any future projects?
TA: There are always projects on the go. My birds are always fluttering around. There is a project that captivates me: "With my feet on the ground" I will take it forward... Now I am preparing an exhibition that excites me.
I feel committed to human rights and I am also convinced of the role that art plays in social processes. That is why I am participating in a collective project to build a memorial together with Julio Carné and Octavio Podestá. Remember that, during the years of State terrorism, there was a clandestine torture center in our country, the "300 Carlos-Infierno Grande" where more than 600 women and men were kidnapped and tortured. Why? So that these events do not happen again, for a never again, never again to human rights violations. It is that... to look at what happened in history to understand and build together a better future.
"Madre Tierra / Mother Earth", mural, cerámica, adobe / ceramic, adobe
SR: Finally, tell me an anecdote that you think would be interesting to include.
TA: In one of the activities I did, together with those who joined the experience so that blind and low vision people could get to know the "Birds in the Head" exhibition, many things happened that could be shared for a long time. I will tell you one of them. An incredible woman who seemed to scan with her hands the sculptures and the bas-relief plates was accompanied by a great friend Gabriela Rodriguez to whom I gave one of my works. Gabriela came up to where I was and asked me: "Tania, did you make a bird in "Enchantment to the Soul" (that's the name of the work)? Yes, I answered her. Gabriela had never realized that it was a bird. Celeste, that woman I met that night and who could not see with her eyes, had discovered it.
Tania con / with Domenico Presutti frente a "Madre Tierra" / in front of "Mother Earth"
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About mentioned artists:
Astapenco, Pedro Miguel: MNAV
Giacometti, Alberto: [Todos los enlaces / All Links]
Guayasmín, Oswaldo: [Aniversarios (XXIV)]
Picasso, Pablo: [Todos los enlaces / All Links]
Rodin, Auguste: [Todos los enlaces / All Links]
Yepes, Eduardo: Wikipedia
¡Muchas gracias por la entrevista, Tania!
Thanks a lot for the interview, Tania!
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Shirley Rebuffo has a Degree in Library Science and a Degree in Archivology by the Universitary School of Library and Related Sciences (Montevideo, Uruguay), Technician in Museology by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (Anthropology option), Object, Symbol and Spance in Curatorship Applied Museology and Social Museology - Concepts, Technics and Practice (Campo Grande, Brazil), Coaching (Campo Grande, Brazil), Strategic Planning (Campo Grande, Brazil), and Art and Painting student under Master Eduardo Espino.
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