I RETURN TO ABU'S POEMS

Mi abuela materna nació en septiembre. El 11 o el 13. Nunca nos quiso decir la fecha exacta porque - como muchas - no le gustaba revelar su edad. Llevo días recordándola porque me voy pronto de la isla.

Ella no está, pero quedan sus cartas, telas, libretas ilegibles. Queda la vajilla: regalo de bodas. Queda la bandera americana: símbolo de duelo y milicia. Tela alias abuelo. Muerto en el Bronx, un día de acción de gracias.

Regresar a ella y su historia es cosa de maniáticas. Es cosa de belleza. Y, digo también belleza porque mi abuela lo fue siempre. Hundida en su belleza anduvo por décadas. Listo el pote de pastillas en la mesita de noche. Lista su garganta para tragarselas todas. Y así crecí, cerca de ella. Ahora que tengo que empacar lo mío con lo suyo lo veo más claro.

El año pasado, mientras estuve en Cambridge, despojandome (presentando mi tesis) del libro de Irene Vilar y su abuela, me tropecé con un oasis. Mejor dicho, un beso tierno. El año pasado fue también de mi abuela. Ella murió repentinamente, y yo comencé a escribir un poemario sobre lo que no fue, sobre la isla, la muerte, y por supuesto, sobre la belleza.Por casualidad, ¿escuchan a Aute dentro de sus cabezas mientras leen la palabra belleza? Yo sí.

Como les contaba, el beso me lo dieron en el Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts y mientras observaba el trabajo genial de Agnes Varda,  Les Veuves de Noirmoutier. Evoco ese momento hoy, para seguir descifrando ésto que llaman poesía.

EXHIBITION: AGNÈS VARDA: LES VEUVES DE NOIRMOUTIER

March 12 - April 12, 2009

Opening reception March 12, 2009

following Varda’s 6 pm Carpenter Center lecture

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will present the first exhibition in the United States of artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda’s recent work in video installation art, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier), a powerful work about widowhood and mourning, the personal and the collective, virtual and actual temporalities and spaces, as well as the displacement of the cinematic in the gallery space (as spectatorship and montage). In Varda’s own description, the work “evokes old paintings – polyptychs or pictures edged by a predella. The central subject, women in black on the beach, is surrounded by fourteen short video profiles, accounts of the state of widowhood.”

Created in 2004, The Widows of Noirmoutier was also exhibited as part of Varda’s solo show at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and is organized for the Sert Gallery by Dominique Bluher, Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies. In conjunction with the retrospective and video installation, Varda will give a public lecture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts on her work as a photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist.

“There are more widows than widowers in the world, and there is a tremendous number of them on the island, if I judge according to my neighbors. I had the idea of bringing some of them together on the ocean’s shore, dressed in the required black, that cliché of our collective imagination regarding the wives of sailors and fishermen, and to place 14 short profiles of the women around this central image, enshrined in TV monitors instead of frames. I could not have shown so many faces at once in a film. The multi-screen configuration allows the experience of the collective and the individual at once.”

--Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda began her career as a still photographer working primarily for Jean Vilar at the Avignon Theater Festival, and later at the National Popular Theater at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. In 1954 she made her first feature, La Pointe courte (1954), one of the key precursor films of the French New Wave. Varda has been making films for over fifty years: among her best known works are Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961, Méliès Prize), Le Bonheur (1964, Louis Delluc Prize, Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival) Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985, Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, Méliès Prize), and Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). Her latest film, Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008) premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008. Her first video installation, Patatutopia, was selected for the 2003 Venice Biennial. In 2006 Varda had a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art contemporain in Paris, L’Île et Elle; her latest video installation, Hommage aux Justes de France was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication as a tribute to “The Righteous of France” and installed at the Panthéon in 2007.