Ana Gallardo (Rosario, Argentina, 66 years old) explains, sitting at the cozy communal table at Planta Alta, a residence for artists located in an old apartment next to Madrid's Plaza Mayor, that she has never been worried about commercial success.
Her thing has been to create networks with other women.
Next to her, María Us, a Guatemalan Kaqchikel with long silver hair, nods, with whom she will perform today an overwhelming
performance
to evoke the hundreds of women disappeared in what is so euphemistically called “armed process.”
Gallardo has achieved the dream that was taken from his mother: to have an artistic career, an internationally recognized name and to finally exhibit in Spain, where the Dos de Mayo Art Center (CA2M), in Móstoles, which dedicates a retrospective to him until on July 7.
Her work, however, is very far from the floral still lifes that her mother practiced: she has been willing not to enter the most commercial circuits in exchange for being radically feminist and addressing taboos that the patriarchal gaze vetoes.
More information
Ana Gallardo: Job insecurity turned into art
Ask.
How did you realize that you wanted to make female aging and menopause a central theme in your work?
Answer.
Well, I started menopause very young, at 45 years old.
I went to have a test done with my primary gynecologist, convinced that she was pregnant, because she had also started dating my current partner.
Then she looks at the results and tells me: “You're already atrophied.”
A doctor who was not a young woman either, without empathy, told me that: “You are already atrophied.”
I left there desperate.
At that time she worked in Argentina, in a gallery for young artists.
And I still considered myself young!
That I still had a chance to have a career!
Q.
And did that phrase change your perception?
A.
I began to realize the level of violence that even the gallery owner exerted on me.
I was an artist and at the same time his assistant, both things, and I realized that for him it was like a project.
The young man took an old one to experiment.
And that's when I realized that I had to get to work on it myself.
I said to myself: where are the women in the art world?
And the old ones?
There was not.
Ana Gallardo poses at an artistic residency in Madrid, on March 7, 2024.Andrea Comas
Q.
Neither on the side of the dealers nor on the side of creation?
A.
There wasn't.
You saw only men all the time, young and old.
The recognition was for them, for “the teachers.”
We had to do very hard work to be recognized.
I think, for example, of Lidy Prati, who was the one who discovered Kandinsky to Argentine artists, but it was her partner, Tomás Maldonado, who was left with the glory of having been the great introducer of abstract art in Argentina.
Then, when he separated from her partner because he abandoned her for a younger assistant, he left art.
There was no way for them to recognize her trajectory, but the narrative that was established is that what moved her was her spite because her partner had left with her secretary.
It has taken years to dismantle that narrative.
Q.
In the eighties you belonged to an artistic generation, the Group of X. Did you feel that contempt?
A.
In the group there were many men and many women.
But it was them, especially three, who were truly successful.
We, even until the end of the 90s, did not exist.
There was a very famous critic at that time who every time he named the group in the newspaper he avoided the women.
I had to call him one day: “But do you know who the Group of X was made up of?”
Q.
It's as if they were invisible.
A.
Of course, they don't see us.
Of course, they don't see us.
They do not see what has no power.
They were divine, beautiful, young.
We are pregnant, single mothers, carrying children, working at anything and they, of course, are leading. And that is what men and the art system see too: that which shines because they have imposed it.
It is a closed circle.
And we were out, out, out, out.
They were divine, beautiful, young.
We, pregnant, single mothers, carrying children, working at anything
Q.
That's why you always say that you are interested in failure.
However, isn't this exhibition in Madrid a triumph?
R.
More than as a triumph I see it as a right or revenge.
It seemed important to me that María read her text in Spain.
It is a
performance
that revolves around the names of the missing women in their country, which are not mentioned.
She realized it by looking for her sister.
In the books that existed as a result of the Church's research there were no proper names.
And she did not understand the reason for that anonymity, which is like a form of silencing.
We have both talked a lot about the fact that the history of their country that is read outside of Guatemala is written by Guatemalan women who have studied in the United States and obtain funds to make those publications.
They are women who are sometimes even leaders within revolutionary movements.
This story needed to be told from a different point of view, outside of the hegemonic narratives.
Q.
Are you worried about being accused of cultural appropriation?
A.
The line in this project is very difficult, of course.
I am constantly on a border from which I can fall.
But I think I am saved because I am not talking about her or the drama in Guatemala.
I'm talking about me.
I mean, we're both talking about ourselves.
I didn't go looking for María to talk about communities or revolution, but because of the relationship that exists between our biographies.
We are weaving stories.
Q.
I saw that in a recent gratitude list you mentioned the nuns of Torrelavega who raised you during your childhood...
A.
My mother was from Santander and wanted to be an artist, but they didn't let her, they only allowed her to make still lifes of flowers but to exhibit, not to mention.
She met my father, who was a poet and from Granada, at a Menéndez Pelayo conference.
He was determined to emigrate to Argentina and she ended up leaving with him.
But the relationship was a failure.
My mother died when I was seven years old and they left my sister and me with some Mexican uncles who took us back to Santander and put us in a boarding school.
Those nuns were very mean to us because we were orphans and also migrants.
I was very rebellious and the level of abuse, violence and punishments I received were tremendous.
But I thank them because they made me stronger and forced me to think things that I would never have thought.
My art is my defense tool against pain and for me there is no forgetting or forgiveness.
When the erudite, intelligent, academic, patriarchal art system tells me that art does not heal, I think: “Go fuck yourself.”
Q.
Is your art revenge?
A.
The education we have been given gives revenge a very bad reputation.
Or envy.
As if they were not natural things.
I envy all the time.
To the artist.
To my best friend who is doing better than me.
But that doesn't mean it's going to hurt them.
On the contrary, what I do is go through that emotion and see what I do with it.
Resentment is an emotion that this society generates in a very harsh way.
If I am an orphaned girl who, from one day to the next, no one explains to me what is happening, they put me in a place I don't know and they mistreat me, that generates resentment.
But art serves to heal.
When the erudite, intelligent, academic, patriarchal art system tells me that art does not heal, I think: “Go fuck yourself”;
like this in Argentine.
If you cannot use artistic practice as a space for healing, you are making a small product that is aimed at a market that does not want conflicts.
Spot.
It is an option.
It is an option in a hegemonic, patriarchal, sexist market that I never entered because I was a woman.
Q.
Would you be afraid to live in Argentina right now?
A.
It wouldn't scare me, but perhaps it would generate more hatred in me than I already have.
Last year I went ten times and each time I went I had divided feelings: I wanted to stay to fight the president, but at the same time, his arrival to power is democratic.
And, on the other hand, I went to Mexico because in Argentina I couldn't make a living from my work.
And in Mexico yes.
The market swallows all dissent and appropriates them to turn them into consumer products, but we must fight the same.
Q.
Do you think that female old age can be redefined in a more positive way?
There is hope?
A.
In Argentina, the number of women's groups, especially during the pandemic, that came together is impressive, from the old women's revolution to 'Sister, let go of your belly'.
There is a feminist revolution happening in all ages and straight men are afraid because they themselves have dark stories and they don't know what to do with them.
They feel violated and that is what makes the right have gained as much power as in Argentina.
Mostly men voted for Milei.
Q.
Is the topic of feminism being commercialized?
A.
The market swallows all dissent and appropriates them to turn them into consumer products, but we must fight the same.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_