I remember the day I first met Etti. I had walked to the Arsenale
in Venice to finally see the work she had spent almost twenty
days installing. At a time when everything was happening fast,
as exhibition walls were still being erected noisily, the image of
Etti slowly weaving hanging ropes into beautiful yet ambiguous
forms seemed so fascinating. She was totally immersed in her
installation, creating rooms and divisions out of the single space
assigned to her. Contrary to other artists who would arrive later to
conquer their spaces and turn them into stages, Etti was taming
the intimidating architecture by building her own little house.
Instead of a stage for the work, she was creating a work which
was a stage in itself. As the theatre of an autobiographical saga,
it was more a hidden laboratory than an actual stage: it became
the place where the artist could connect different worlds, link
personal identity with collective destiny, complex spirituality with
the emotional path and her collection of memories with reality.
The space Abergel created reflected this tension, itself a
combination of opposites: divided into completely different main
areas, the architectural skeleton of the work was a metaphor of the
conflict, division and dualism at the core of the artist’s practice.
A woman. Israel-born daughter of Moroccan immigrants in a
country whose strength lies in reinforcing a sense of belonging.
At the same time, she is a profound artist in an art world governed
by the laws of speed, often incapable of stopping and looking
twice in the same direction.
Etti Abergel’s work speaks of difference, contradictions,
unresolved identity and the need to control desires taking the
shape of objects undergoing constant metamorphosis. At the
same time, her work is about slowness as it acquires meaning
during a spontaneous and often unconscious process of creation.
Her multifaceted iconography results from a complex system of
associations taking shape gradually, moving constantly between
harshness and poetry.
All kinds of objects appear hanging from the ceilings,
like peculiar human organs or ambiguous ppendixes, which
at a second glance become autonomous forms paraphrasing
emotional states. It is about pain, about ties that need to be
resolved yet give way to new interpretations of the surrounding
world. The recurrent motif of the rope symbolically reflects the tie
of tradition, the burden or intensity of personal histories. But it
also becomes the inextricable material tie to the everyday reality
of things, challenged by the power of imagination. The plastered
items are metaphors for blocked actions, the inability of coming
to terms with the past but also of the will to remember things
as they were, prevented from becoming something else. Yet,
enveloped, covered or wrapped, these objects surprisingly defy
their immobility to turn into new and unexpected images, poetic
symbols which overturn the perception of space. A rough circle of
plastered little Arabian shoes; a net full of stones hanging from the
wall, suspended a few centimetres from the floor; a pile of debris
covered with “snow,” frozen in time; pencils turned into cords,
clustered or inserted in bottles of water; two armchairs “hugging”
each other, thus becoming something else. These metaphors are
resonance chambers, impossible images oscillating between
dreams and life, fiction and reality, imagination and the external
world.
Abergel’s finished work cannot be separated from the path
it travelled, so that one cannot talk just about her sculpture or
installation. The works are the outcome of an approach much
closer to performance, a process that can never be completely
pre-planned, but open to unpredictable internal and external
forces. The artist’s inner emotions merge with those sparked
by the specificity of the site’s context. Like “improv” actors, she
begins with an intention to become the witness to gestures and
images deriving from the site. However, although she improvises,
often in response to an impulsive need, her art is not created for
an audience but is rather a hidden and isolated process, a mental
creative process so inseparable from the physical creative act,
that beginning and end are not such easily defined concepts.
Beginnings often go back to a series of drawings that spark from,
while giving form to, her intentions. Drawings are Abergel’s
musical “scores,” imaginary structures which lay the foundations
for space continuing from them. From that moment onwards, the
space on paper and the real space overlap, intertwine and give
way to an infinite, often endless cycle: binding, covering, tearing,
breaking, plastering, wrapping, gluing, dropping, dripping,
erasing, hanging, taping, melting, tying, sewing are some of
the subsequent treatments of the material. It is interesting to
notice that verbs are much more necessary than nouns in the
description of her work: objects are only the consequences of
actions containing the power to shape mental images.
The fragment is a recurrent theme in Abergel’s oeuvre as every
object she uses and often harshly manipulates becomes a key to
unravel a conflictual personal experience. S a l i e n t provided a
good example of her approach. On one side, photographs, familiar
and everyday objects, pieces of furniture became complete stories
as portions of the artist’s interrupted narrative; on the other side,
a wall broken into many sharp pieces, testifying to an apparent
need to destroy. If in the more domestic space, the fragments
spoke ambiguously about household warmth, the challenges of
art history and the struggles of migration and integration, the
other space, more naked, neutral and yet connected, seemed
to talk about present and future. Although the former testified
to the need to combine memories into a unique direction, the
latter revealed in its fragmentation Abergel’s ultimate wish
to transform reality from a presently inadequate shelter into a
future protective shell.
Etti Abergel’s art struggles to find a definition of coming to
terms with a definition. It is a question of identity, the fragmented
self of someone that feels something and something else at the
same time, someone who feels in two intersecting parts, somehow
never intertwining. And it is also the contradicting identity of an
artist, a very interesting and very contemporary woman artist,
working outside of the apparently fierce commercial art market,
often forced to remain just a spectator of the inevitable power
systems which move, exchange and give a concrete value to art.
Abergel tries to merge different languages and attitudes of her
origins, her land and of being an outsider in her own word of
art. To be an outsider, I believe, is the best compliment for an
artist; it means that the need to create is independent from the
structured idea of art, that it is something in itself driven only
by pure emotions and thus able to convey always unexpected
messages. Art is about thresholds and Abergel manages to talk
about thresholds in a unique way, not merely by creating images,
but by achieving little revolutions.
Sarah Cosulish Canarutto, curator, has assisted Francesco Bonami at the Venice Biennale 2003, and has co-curated with him at the Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art. She is the author of two monographs, Jeff Koons (2006) and on Gabriel Orozco (2008).
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel