Green Pebble Magazine

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Ana Maria Pacheco: Talking Heads
By Ruby Ormerod
Green Pebble June 2009 issue

Photo: With permission of the artist

It’s not often that an ordinary person comes across a cabinet full of pale, disembodied heads, each gazing impassively at a large gold-plated Pecten Maximus, or giant scallop. It’s not often, either, that Ana Maria Pacheco incorporates text into her sculptures.

But given that this sculptor, who was born in Brazil in 1943 and has lived in England since 1973, is constantly searching for ways to stop the viewer in their tracks - to encourage them to consider issues that are both specific to Latin America and yet universal in nature - both the heads and text have become integral to the intention of her latest sculpture, Memória Roubada II, which will be on show at this year’s Salthouse 09 exhibition.

Memória Roubada II is part of a diptych which Ana Maria Pacheco started in May 2001 when she unveiled Memória Roubada, another polychromed wood and gold leaf sculpture incorporating a cabinet containing heads. Completed for Norway’s National Touring Exhibitions, this sculpture’s highly-animated, vivid heads react to a bright red heart impaled by six golden daggers. Here too there is text; on the cabinet doors.

‘Normally I don’t use text,’ Ana Maria explains from her studio in London. ‘I think it’s been said that when you use text, you don’t trust the image.’ She laughs at the notion. ‘In this instance, I thought it was important. It creates ambivalence in the work.’

In the case of Memória Roubada, the text addresses colonization’s violent undertones. In Memória Roubada II, by contrast, the text reads: ‘. . . And do not consent or allow the Indians who live on the said islands and mainland, whether already in our possession or to be won in the future, to suffer any offence to their person or their goods, but see to it that they are well and justly treated.’

These instructions were issued in the mid-1400s by Isabella de Castile, Queen of Spain and wife of King Ferdinand II of Aragon. They implore the colonists to be fair and evenhanded in their occupation of the Americas. Sadly, as history demonstrates, the colonization of the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese was anything but fair and peaceful, sounding an ironic note within a sculpture that turns numerous assumptions on their head.

It is unusual for Ana Maria - whose international reputation is built on deep, often dark, interpretations of folklore and myth - to incorporate anything as banal as a cabinet into her installations, and yet in both pieces of the diptych she deliberately introduces a domestic element to the composition. For each work she has taken a cabinet and transformed it into an oversized oratory; a devotional device brought to Brazil by the Portuguese which houses figures of saints for private prayer.

‘I have used a cupboard and taken it out of context by putting heads on the shelves,’ she explains. ‘That switches it to something else. You don’t normally have a cupboard full of heads but that was the intention, to make a switch in terms of the familiar and the unfamiliar.’

To differentiate the heads in Memória Roubada II from the animated, emotional heads perched on the shelves of Memória Roubada, Ana Maria has kept the latest heads deliberately small, pale and impassive, each set apart from its neighbour by its own unique, carefully-created bone structure.

‘They are more like automatons, they are detached.’

And before there is mention of a Freudian interpretation for the use of severed heads in her works, Ana Maria quashes any sexual references by stating, ‘The reason I use heads is to do with the separation between the head and the body. It’s an odd thing, but our society is still pervaded with this idea that we should use reason when making a judgment. By using reason, we can justify anything, including atrocities. I am much more sympathetic to Blaise Pascal, who said that great judgments and great thoughts come from the heart.’

And so Ana Maria Pacheco’s heads sit aloof, on shelves, in judgment of Queen Isabella’s well-intentioned but ineffectual words, and overlook a gold-plated giant scallop...

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