Linking Lives Exhibition: Interview with the Artist. Miriam Poletti.
After being part of Linking Lives exhibition, curated by Irene Sánchez Gómez, Miriam Poletti reflects on her art in an interview with Myriam Martínez Gómez.
Miriam Poletti “[I] come from a working class family and [I] consider myself a working class artist. It’s definitely a part of my identity”. “From a practical point of view, I think I will always have to have a job. Obviously, it would be nice to get more money from the art I’m doing, but it’s important to do the work anyway; and maybe even [it’s better to] not be attached to funding all the time – it makes you more free, in a way, to express yourself”.
Miriam explores notions of tenderness, fragility and sociality on both a communal and individual level. Her work ‘A THOUSAND GESTURES’ was created in close collaboration with the artists in residence at GlogauAIR between January and March 2024. Its aim is to make the public imagine the body as a collective entity that we can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct together. People who came to BARDO’s Linking Lives exhibition were challenged to see themselves as a group instead of singular individuals, a community represented as a single body composed of multiple elements.
Her artworks question the idea of authorship and encourage a sense of shared ownership. Her workshop ‘A THOUSAND GESTURES: SEWING CIRCLES’ allowed visitors to add their own contribution to the installation. BARDO became an opportunity for confrontation and collective work. The bodies that animated the space during the sewing sessions left a trace of themselves until the conclusion of the exhibition, and the fabrics will then be used for other projects, accumulating interventions from different people, in a continuous evolving process.
This outlook “started from a frustration that I had about the art world. I think the contemporary art world is very elitist, it’s exclusive. It’s trapped in this academic language, and it really makes people feel out of place. If you didn’t study art, if you’re not part of that world, mostly you’re scared to enter a gallery. You think ’this is not created for me and I don’t feel welcome at all’, and I really was frustrated about that”. “I’ve been in academia, I’ve also been trapped in this circle. But at some point I was really tired of it, because it just felt like the wrong approach. I think art should be open to everyone, so my goal was to create a work for everyone who just wants to engage with it. The idea started from that, and [then] participation became a big point. I really tried to open my workshops to everyone, regardless whether they are artists or not”.
“Besides being an artist, I’m also a writer. I’m a programmer. I’m an activist. And all this stuff really reflects on me, and also on my work”. “It depends, but I like to write fiction. It’s very much related to the work I’m doing – it’s about the body and about discovering one’s own identity”. “I think about bodies in ways that are not typical, I’m imagining bodies that are not contained in a shape”. “I believe that the topic of my work it’s intrinsically political. It’s all about touch. It’s about intimacy. It’s about care. It’s about cooperation, creating shared spaces and encouraging closeness in a world that values individualism so much. So I don’t really separate my political work from my artwork, the two really go together”.
“Also – through all my life, really -, I’ve always thought art itself is always political. The artists who fool themselves into thinking they’re not making political art are just benefiting from the status quo. They just don’t want to engage in anything new, and it’s obviously easier to just make a nice painting and sell it. But then again, we have to redefine what ‘art‘ is and what it means for us”.
“And there’s this term, ‘emerging artists‘, that I find problematic in a way. You can work for many years, but if you don’t have a solo show in a big gallery you’re still ‘emerging‘. At the same time, you reach, I don’t know, 30 years old, and you’re not young enough to be an ‘emerging artist‘”. “And obviously it’s also very much excluding people from different backgrounds: if you are emigrating somewhere, you need many years to just get a stable income, so maybe you’re not creating art. Or if you’re a mother and you have to take care of a child, you might ‘lose‘ years for exhibitions. It would be nice to just approach art in a different way [without so many constricting notions].”
To do so, “Now I want to expand further the interactive part of my work. I would like to keep pushing the boundaries, and work with musicians, for example, dancers… And see how they can influence my art”. “I don’t want to put myself in the center of the work or the attention in general. I really like to create moments that are shared, not to have this stage approach where people just look at things happening: I want them to make things happen”.
“At first I was doing a lot of photography, printing (I studied printmaking, actually)… It was very two-dimensional and just hard to look at, so over time I felt it wasn’t enough. The body was still the background of my work, but then I felt the connection was not there yet. It was just an image, and I wanted to go a bit further. So I became interested in tactile experiences, and I started to explore different artforms, like sculptures and so on“. “At some point I just naturally found printing on fabric and making these soft sculptures. And it just felt the right medium to use. It’s really the softness that I was looking for”.
“I think my process is very practical. I work with materials that invite contact- caresing or squeezing them – and I tend to avoid working alone”. “At the very beginning of my work, I was really drawing inspiration from feminist theory and queer theory: Rosi Braidotti, Carla Lonzi, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler… I mean, this definitely is still part of the background of the work – but now it’s started to develop. I get inspired mostly from real life situations, from the connection with people, and then I just imagine new ways to interact”. “The physique it’s really on our screens right now, we consume so many images of bodies. I just wanted to go back to the [real] physicality and explore the touch and the feelings, the presence with materials. It was important for me to bring back this being present”.
And that requires places where association can flourish. “It’s very important to support local spaces. Berlin really has a lot of places that are more welcoming and I hope we will be able to keep it that way, although we are in a difficult period. There have been budget cuts in the cultural sector, and because of it spaces that have been doing amazing work for the last year unfortunately have been closed, so I think it’s on us now to really do this work and keep going even if it’s hard”. “I’m still a privileged person in Berlin: I have an european passport, I’m not struggling as much as other people, and I feel that it’s really somehow my responsibility to be here and make sure that we are not going to lose this kind of culture”.
Regarding BARDO, Miriam says: “I tend to collaborate with spaces that align with my values, I always consider the background of the space and what they are doing. I am very selective when I am doing some work. Recently, I got invited to something and they told me I couldn’t be openly political, not to speak about certain topics, and I rejected the offer”. “If I create a community in an art space or if I create it in a political environment, it’s the same logic”.
“I have an exhibition soon, from March 17: ’WHEN THE BODY IS QUEER, I FEEL FREE’, a group show about, well, queerness. We are planning to do a narrative space that starts from the world we’re living in, a normative world, and then following the exhibition, the public will enter into a softer space, a possible future”. ”And a project called ’UNMASKING’ – supported by Amnesty International and Arts Rights Truth – that examines the legal and practical implications of the Vermummungsverbot (ban on face coverings) in Germany, particularly in the context of Palestinian solidarity demonstrations”. It aspires to make a tangible impact by providing local activist groups with practical tools to protect their privacy and safety during demonstrations. The masks developed will serve as functional resources and as symbols of resistance and will be effectively used during demonstrations.
Miriam’s art, like the skin, is an archive of contact histories, records past encounters with others while remaining adaptable; something that could keep us separate from others, mediates our relationship with the outside world.
Myriam Martínez Gómez
