In the Palacio de Cibeles, in Madrid, there is a naked woman. The woman is made of Carrara marble, like one of those Greek Venus in temples and textbooks. But she is a real woman. A Granada woman, artist and real. The woman is bald, her body on the edge, swollen, painful and deteriorated. There is no left breast. In its place is a scar that looks like a black hole violently absorbing an entire galaxy. The left arm floats in the air, fist up, like Tommie Smith on the podium in Mexico 68. “When I finished the hardest part of my breast cancer treatment, I asked to have a 3D cast of my body. I have not touched anything, it is what it was. I am the work.
Marina Vargas (Granada, 1980) received the news on November 18, 2019: “You have breast cancer.” She had been exhausted for a while, sleepy, but she thought it was stress from work. “You don’t think it can happen to you until it happens to you,” he says. Shortly after, the covid crept into our lives and she, like the rest, locked herself at home. «I lived the cancer confined. They operated on me in the middle of a pandemic. It was a tough process. And so, trapped between the bug outside and the bug inside, she looked for confidants in the only place that always remains: art. He met Hannah Wilke (1940–1993), an American artist who photographed the entire process of her cancer, right up to the end. «His last work was titled ‘Intravenus’. My sculpture is also named in homage to her. Ironically, ‘Intravenus’ comes from intravenous, which is where the food that the patient needs to live arrives; and Venus, the goddess of love.
–
Vargas, together with his version in sculpture, at the CentroCentro in Madrid. /
–
—
Vargas is a versatile artist who has been exhibiting groundbreaking works for twenty years in the most important galleries in the world. «Art has always been a social tool for transformation. However, in women there are not so many references. If it is already difficult to find women with a powerful visibility, being a woman, an artist and a patient are three stigmas ». She, who has used her body as a working tool in other collections, decided to do it again to make the disease visible. «’Intravenus’ wants to give a voice to the patient, make the processes visible, break the canon of the body that we see in classical culture. I had broken the canon. The asymmetric was me. And I wanted to emphasize one thing: cancer is not overcome. You are going to live with him your whole life. And one in eight women suffers from breast cancer. All this should be more normalized.
The sculpture, which is exhibited until January in the CentroCentro gallery, located inside the Palacio de Cibeles, in Madrid, tells on its marble skin the hardest moment of Vargas: six chemotherapy sessions, radical mastectomy of the left breast, emptying lymph nodes in the left arm, fifteen radiation therapy sessions, a month of rehabilitation to lift the arm and a daily pill for ten years. “The raised arm is a nod to feminism, to activism, it seemed to me the body posture that most summarized this treatment. Because I work on the disease as an artist and as an activist. There have been many, many, women who have contacted me who experience similar processes and were afraid to say so, to labels, to be stigmatized ».
–That raised fist has been the beginning of a community. Vargas’ next step is to create ‘Arte y Cáncer’, a platform where people can speak and face the situation without taboos. «Art is not only creating objects, but generating thought. It is a tool for social transformation. And I want to help in the same way that artists like Wilke helped me to look at myself in the mirror, to recognize my body … That sculpture – he strongly maintains, pointing to ‘Intravenus’ – will no longer be me. I have registered a fingerprint. But I will change. Now I am in reconstruction ».
Vargas is convinced that the image given of cancer is not real. He thinks that it is necessary to give a voice to the sick, to those who really suffer from it. To real women. “Since I’ve been through this and others have not succeeded,” he ends, with a breathless sense, “we are going to leave a grain of sand.”
– .
