Carlos Bunga: "The maternal body, even when violated, is a language of resistance"

LisbonFor Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976), a Portuguese artist living in Barcelona, the first home is "pregnancy." He explains this in the major exhibition at the Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon dedicates until March 30th to it, entitled To inhabit contradiction. The maternal womb is "an organic space, that breathes, that protects, that contrasts with the hostile world," says the artist. But the circumstances of her mother's pregnancy were not simple; they were marked by her escape from war-torn Angola. Her mother went into exile pregnant, with a two-year-old daughter in tow and a bag of photographs to "preserve her memories." Upon arriving in Portugal, they lived in a prison converted into a shelter for refugees and poor families, and later in a temporary neighborhood that lasted longer than expected. Bunga's mother was illiterate, and to support her family, she worked as a prostitute.

In one of her most intimate works, Bunga revisited three portraits of her mother taken in the area where she used to work—Cais do Sodré, a Lisbon neighborhood—and enlarged them. In these images, her mother appears as a strong and attractive woman, yet also fragile. Upon seeing these photographs, Bunga interrupts the tour, takes her phone out of her pocket, and speaks up to read a manifesto about motherhood, about the body as a "political territory," as the agent that carries "the memory of resistance." "The female body has always been a battleground," Bunga warns. "It has been traversed by power structures, social norms, forms of institutionalized violence [...]. When I look at my mother, I understand that motherhood breaks down the unjust boundaries between individuality and collectivity. The maternal body, even when violated, is a language of resistance capable of challenging the world and transforming the thread's gaze with every gesture, every word." Thus, through art, Bunga transforms her mother into a "contemporary Madonna," an image "of all mothers, of all women, and of all those bodies that are always, even in moments of growth, a battleground susceptible to being violated."

Barcelona, ​​arrival point

Bunga says his work "is much closer to a bird building its nest than to an architect building a house." But a few years ago his life took a turn: he moved to Barcelona for love, and his two daughters are Catalan. He used to say he had his studio in the museums where he exhibited, but for the last five years he's had a studio in Mataró. The opportunity the Gulbenkian Foundation has given him is magnificent: Bunga has filled the gigantic hall, designed by the British architect Leslie Martin, with a forest made of dozens of cardboard columns, evoking the trees outside, flanked by works from throughout his career and another group of pieces from the center's collections. "When Paula Côrte Real [the landscape architect responsible for the museum's garden] asked us what we were looking for, we replied that we were interested in works that were porous, elastic, slippery, process-centered, elusive, transient, unresolved—works that would make us feel more like a garden. And that's why Carlos introduced this idea of ​​the urban forest into the exhibition," explains Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto and curator of the Carlos Bunga exhibition, which is supported by the Institut Ramon Llull.

There came a point when Bunga was no longer satisfied with conventional painting and decided to expand it with a highly personal language that blends sculpture and painting. At times, Bunga seems like an alchemist, someone with an unrelenting desire to experiment with all the materials at his disposal and transform them. "My training is as a painter, but painting led me to a state of frustration," says the artist, as a video shows him cutting a hole in the wall of a ruined building until he manages to squeeze through. "In that frustration, I started looking at ruined buildings when I went out in the city, and I began to see those buildings as paintings that were real," Bunga explains. The dialogue between this video and a work from the Gulbenkian is a revelation: a series of four photographs by the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida in which she can be seen passing through a translucent canvas mounted on a frame.

One of Bunga's first works on the tour also recalls the mother's escape from Angola: it is My first home was a womanwhere the protagonist has a hut on her head, and her hands and feet are those of animals. She also has a stamp from a colonial magazine. These figures with a house on their head are repeated in the "nomad" sculptures. And for the first time, she has made one of an animal, specifically an askal, a Filipino street dog, because "it survives and adapts." "The nomad is a figure who lives in the future. This person of the future is multiracial; they are Black, they are white, and they are also neither Black nor white, they are both. They have no gender. They are someone who accepts contradictions, that polarized thing; they adapt. They have that capacity for survival. It is difficult to define with traditional, classic concepts," says Bung. Further on, you can see a model of house number 17, where they lived, made with a cereal box and photos of the interior, a kind of portrait of the mother, filled with religious figures, pin-up posters, and dolls. And at the top of the room there is a video where you can see Bunga smashing a light bulb with a hammer, putting it back together, and making it shine again.

The Gulbenkian Foundation was created by the Armenian-born oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, who was the richest man in the world when he died in 1955. It has often been said of the institution that it is like the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. Currently, the historic headquarters is undergoing renovations, but a year ago the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma inaugurated the renovated Martin Hall and a large, multipurpose pergola, reminiscent of traditional ones. engawa, which connects the existing building with a new garden.