Beatriz Cortez
July 3, 2024
Beatriz Cortez shares her experiences creating her first piece in the Venice Biennale, a trip to the Arctic, Boston’s history of whaling, and more about her improvisational creative process. Cortez is one of 15 outstanding artists selected for The Triennial 2025, opening next May with art installations across the city of Boston. Learn more about The Triennial 2025 and its theme of The Exchange, developed by Artistic Director Pedro Alonzo and Curator Tess Lukey here.
Your work Stela XX (Absence) (2024) is in the Venice Biennale this year. Can you talk a bit about what led to that piece’s creation? This is the first time you have presented your work at the Biennale. How has it been received so far?
Stela XX (Absence) is the culmination of several processes. On the one hand, it is the last in a series that includes three other sculptures, all of them referencing Ilopango, a massive volcano that erupted in the 6th century in what is now El Salvador. The eruption dispersed particles of soil and ashes all over the planet, in what is known as Tierra Blanca Joven. These ashes took months to land. Throughout that time, they cooled the planet and darkened the sun.
This sculpture depicts the absence of the land that was sent elsewhere through this event, it depicts the void it left but also the way in which these particles continue to interact and coexist with us in our imaginaries. In addition, the back side of Stela XX (Absence) depicts a series of looted stelas in representation of the thousands of ancient stones that have been extracted from the Mesoamerican region and taken elsewhere to be in collections, in museums, in private homes. They too have left a void, a void that continues to hold a bond and a relationship with all of us.
When I was invited to the Biennale and to think about its theme, Foreigners Everywhere, I thought that bringing a stela to Europe was important, and that it had to be a stela for the stelas that are also foreigners everywhere, a stela to tell them that we miss them and that we think of them all the time, that their absence is a presence in our lives and in our imaginaries.
I have heard lots of great comments about the work and its installation in the beautiful Giardino delle Vergini, a garden where it is in conversation with the ground, the trees, and a space that actually looks like a crater.
I heard that you visited the Arctic in 2023. What was that experience like? How were you moved creatively by it?
Visiting the Arctic impacted me and my work enormously. In the areas that we visited, the Arctic is not inhabited by humans and so it is like visiting another planet or imagining the Earth at a time when humans are not here. But the Arctic has a history of colonization and whale hunting that is linked to the history of oil, so the remnants of humans passing through the planet are visible and painful to perceive, especially in that sublime landscape.
I learned about the ocean currents, the movement of matter, the self-organizing architectures built with ice, beauty made not for human eyes. I heard the popping sound of the air bubbles bursting out of the melting ice. These bubbles have been there, for who knows? Thousands? Millions of years?
I have been making some whale bones and I am currently making an iceberg as a result of that experience. Next year, I will also be making a work for the first Boston Public Art Triennial. For this work I have been studying the history of oil, and the near extinction of the whales in the name of fuel.
Can you talk more about your interest in the history of whaling in the 19th & 20th centuries in Boston?
It all happened as a process. I first visited a historic site, along with my shipmates who were also part of The Arctic Circle residency. It was a historic whaling station where one can still see mountains of whale bones, and be a witness to their near destruction for reasons linked to capitalism, greed, as well as the consumption of energy and fuel. I also had the opportunity to see many whales and to hear their song, thanks to my shipmates who were working with sound and had a better hydrophone than I did.
I came back from that trip and read about Roger Payne and the history of his recordings of humpback whale songs. I read about the Voyager program, how the Golden Record was sent to outer space, and I read that it contained lots of sounds of machines, the sounds of modernity, the sounds that we consider developments for humanity, sounds that were made by machines that required whale oil for lubrication. I found it interesting that the Golden Record included a recording of a humpback whale song. I also found it interesting that it did not include almost any recordings from Central America, not our languages, not the sounds of the rainforest. None of the sounds that are the soundscape that I consider home. Of course, I also learned that it was narrated by someone who later was accused of having links to the Nazis. I thought this portrait that humans sent to outer space was very appropriate. And so, I began researching the history of the oil industry. I would like to learn more about kerosene and petroleum next.
You aim to navigate and represent simultaneity in your work, bringing different temporalities — including the future — together. How will different temporalities be present within your commission for The Triennial 2025?
My work engages with technologies that are both new and obsolete. The messages that it carries come from a past or from a future, but more importantly, allow us to imagine our ability to transform the past, the present, and the future. Therefore, the simultaneities in my work exist not only in terms of temporalities but also places, they invite us to imagine this place in other temporalities and to coexist at once here and elsewhere.
Considering how essential time and memory are to your work itself, I’m curious to know how you approach your creative process. What sort of role do you find time, memory, and future imaginaries playing as you create your own work?
Time is central to my work and memory is an ideal time machine because it allows us to not only travel to a past moment but to reimagine it, to narrate it to ourselves and to others in different ways. My creative process is an effort to tie together many layers, many threads, lots of different narratives that I have been able to research, and multiple voices and histories that I have collected from archives and from life. The most important element to that creative process is improvisation. I know what I am making and what I want to say with my work, but I don't always know how I will make it or what, exactly, it will look like. This is one of the reasons why I hardly ever draw my works. I only draw them in the air and with my welding machine.