Inner Constellations: Ma?mouna Guerresi Photographs - monograph

Inner Constellations: Ma?mouna Guerresi Photographs
Introduction by Rosa Maria Falvo, published by Glitterati Incorporated, New York, September 2015

INNER COSMOS
When I first met Patrizia Ma?mouna Guerresi back in June 2006 at a photography biennale in Brescia, northern Italy, I was struck by the intensity of her artistic commitment. Her images spoke far beyond anyone's descriptions and explanations, even the artist's own. She had constructed an entire life, and not only an acclaimed career, from one essential, liminal purpose: to bravely bridge the contemporary chasm between artistic motivation and spiritual significance. All of which is based on the creation and translation of environments that hold a strong mystical charge, exalting the reticent, often feminine, and even strangely familiar yet intriguing nature of her subjects.

As a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist 'Ma?mouna', implied also in her adopted Islamic name, is a harbinger of blessings with unique sensibilities, expressed in an ecumenical spirit. Her subtle narratives on the beauty of racial diversity and multiculturalism come from very personal junctures in her life. Born among the hills and olive groves of Pove del Grappa in Vicenza, Italy, in 1951, to a decidedly catholic family (her uncle was a missionary and her maternal aunt a nun), their home was frequently populated by guests. Her parents invited African clergy members to watch films and look at photographs about the missions. And she was fascinated, as she has often told me, by this natural propensity for cultural inclusion, facilitated no doubt by a sense of a higher collective purpose. Even as a young girl, she easily related to the kind of universalism inherent in "one who is to witness across cultures", as Dr. Thomas Hale, Jr., American physician and author said of his 25 years of missionary work in Nepal.

Later Ma?mouna's precious intuitive leap into the art world also came quite naturally. Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she turned to photography, alternating with periods of painting, drawing and sculptural work. Inspired by the conceptual experimentation of the Body Art movement in Europe in the 1970s - pushing against the physical and mental limits of self expression to challenge, shock or move audiences - Ma?mouna‘s early works focused on the relationship between nature, people and mythology. She was often the protagonist in her shows, identifying herself with characters in Greek mythology – particularly Daphne, who was transformed into a laurel when Apollo touched her navel. The artist was subsequently invited to present her work at the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986 respectively), the Rome Quadrennial (1986), and Documenta K18 (1987) in Kassel, Germany. After much critical attention and several trips to sacred sites in Africa, she became interested in Islamic mysticism as a source of inspiration for her work. And in 1991 Ma?mouna's life and art practice took a defining turn, channelled by her conversion to Mouridism and her second marriage to Sherif Assane, a Senegalese national. This was the beginning of her distinctly syncretic approach to religious, cultural and other conflicted social and psychological frontiers. Over the last two decades her creative commitment has focused on empowering women by reinforcing the intimate contexts in which shared human values and conditions can be felt and celebrated. Her extraordinary 'giant' spirit guides series offers viewers a truly unique perspective on the relationship between women and society, particularly in North African and most recently in South Asian realities like India and Bangladesh.

Based on the teachings of its founder Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (1853–1927), a Muslim Sufi religious leader and poet in Senegal who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, Mouridism emphasizes spiritual development through hard work, prayer, meditation, and Qur’anic study. Bamba's vision of Islam was one which has at its very core the precepts of non-violence and social responsibility. Ma?mouna was adopted into her African husband’s community through ceremonial baptism and she has since established dual citizenship, living and working between Verona, Milan, and Dakar. Her two daughters from two different marriages - Marlene, her firstborn of European Christian descent, and Adji, of African Islamic descent - are often featured in her portraits and their sisterly bond bridges the conventional borders of nationality, religion, ethnicity and culture. Indeed, the artist is the first to point out that her daughters quite literally personify the metaphor of two worlds, where similarities instead of differences are honoured in familial union and reunion.
This is evident in her Ma?mouna's Family photograph, where she has specifically positioned herself in the centre as the mother of two cultures. The image is part of a larger series that explores the unifying potential of relationships in a constant search for resolution and reconciliation.

If art is a form of psychological nourishment, holding a promise to inner wholeness, as Susan Sontag described in her diary in 1964, then those artists who are impelled to recreate spiritual impulses to feed this 'internal necessity' - as the inimitable Kandinsky put it - quite literally enable audiences to experience art as a kind of spiritual satisfaction; something even cathartic for the 'communal' soul. For Ma?mouna, ethnicity is sheer clothing to a more substantial and even determinant essence residing by definition in every individual, regardless of identity. Space, both personal and collective, physical and metaphysical, therefore becomes the very medium in which to express and protect this essence. And the artist's truest ambitions are realized introspectively, making contact with a transcendental self from which both she and her viewers may regain a sense of sacredness, despite the pressures of the outside world. The structured discipline of this process is emphasized in her carefully crafted studio ensembles. Indeed, we can safely say Ma?mouna's narratives feed off her poetic, theatrical method. And she is simultaneously focused on both, just as a film director would in creating a scene. Tacit yet eloquent in their facial expressions, her figures, mostly friends and family, are subject to a nameless, camouflaged symbolism. Props such as robes, bubbles, spheres, cloaks, steps, wheels, trees, hands, tables, doors, milk, and light all support the stage setting and 'architecture' of these larger than life 'spirit guides', which emerge as archetypes in a cyclical symmetry of metaphors that are all the artist's own. They can be decoded as symbols of sacred space or "temples of the collective soul", as the artist sometimes describes them - reminiscent of the Madonnas in Classical art - and they are all attributable to the Islamic and even pre-Islamic pantheon, as their names connote, but the overall experience and aesthetic effects are very personal, both for the artist and her audience. Even the costumes are made of fabrics that Maimouna collects throughout her travels, and occasionally they are made directly on site, as in the case of 'Adji Baifall Minaret'. This large multicoloured patchwork robe - typical of Sufi in Senegal and Sudan - was produced with the help of several Sufi African women in situ. Each of its 99 individually hand-stitched pieces represents the 99 names of Allah in Islam and pays homage to the collective 'humility' - a struggle to extinguish the separate self before a divine presence - shared as women and as mothers.

So these photographs are deliberately generic, but at the same time showcase Ma?mouna's extended multi-ethnic kin and ultimate eventual numinous purpose. There is empathy, collaboration, and confidence between the artist and her subjects. In front of her camera, as I have playfully experimented in her studio, the models lose their individuality and become spiritual actors and even embodied symbols. The human body itself is considered a nucleus in a much larger cosmological system. Not a 'prison for the soul' in the Foucaultian sense, but more like Plato's notion of the soul as spiritual substance conjoined with a material or physical 'encasing' body; a place housing a higher awareness and the very conduit for natural and cosmic forces. Hence the primordial feminine aspect of Ma?mouna's imaginary. Women's' bodies are inextricably linked to creation, whether natural or metaphorical. Her work seems to me more about mysticism than any singular religion and aims to restore those elusive moments of 'sacredness' in our frequently dehumanizing and fragmented contemporary world. Here we can appreciate the potential healing powers of feminine energy, reclaiming our universality and creative origins. Occasionally children appear in her scenes, reminding us of the necessary imprinting and educative role of women. Presented as a kind of free flowing visual epic, the viewer is left to read their own meaning into her imagery and meditate on its potential to mesmerize us. As if her figures were speaking directly to each one of us, even with their backs turned or their faces fully covered; while dreaming, suspended, levitating, or emptied, in domestic scenes or floating amid mountains and volcanic rocks, these are not ethnic landscapes by a social investigator, but rather spiritual ones by a visual poet.

Paradoxical themes, mirroring the duality in every aspect of life itself - black/white, man/woman, parent/child, large/small, empty/full, light/dark, within/without, purity/impurity, animate/inanimate, perfection/distortion, seen/unseen, and so forth - are not only consistently addressed, like in some kind of medieval mystery play, but they are juxtaposed to choreograph the concept of ego annihilation. For Sufi the persistent longing for inseparable, divine union - Tawhid (oneness of God) - and the elimination of the dichotomy between subject and object is the ultimate goal, however extravagant for mere mortals. This implies that all phenomena are manifestations of a single reality - Wujud (being) and al-Haq (truth). The essence of God/Being/Truth is considered devoid of any form and quality - unmanifest - and yet it is inseparable from every form and phenomenon, either material or spiritual. So everything in the human dimension also exists in its absence. Our ability to let go of all notions of such duality (and therefore of the individual self) is the challenge set in Ma?mouna's own 'mission'. Cultural cliches and race and gender biases are shaken and often outdone by her imagery. It is the healing potential of bringing otherwise disparate groups of people together that interests her most. And her 'visual sets' create the backdrops and pretext for the mental stillness required to achieve it. Here is an artist who constantly invites us to feel further and to look deeper - past skin colour, religion, and social conditioning - into new paradigms for coexistence. She leads us through apparently simple notions of dimensionality into the exquisite complexities of life from within. Her oeuvre is like stellar constellations, where larger-than-life figures, ‘containing’ the universe, aspire, in purpose-built, minaret headgear, to extend their earthly consciousness towards the heavens. Even her terracotta carpets, strategically placed in several installations, symbolise our relatively tiny ‘life size’ existence; that personal prayer we perform between birth and death, sung on a small and uniquely individual human platform. And like celestial bodies, people experience patterns of proximity to one another, which must be navigated through an inevitable process of maturation. Ma?mouna reminds us, that on a spiritual level each of us is a universe unto ourselves, with its own inner cosmos; that we are distant, shielded, and enclosed in our own reality; and that it is only through enlightened interaction with others, whether consciously or otherwise, that we can hope to embark on our path to inner peace.

? Rosa Maria Falvo
Milan, March 2015