Rita Segato: "Tàpies disobeys himself all the time"

BarcelonaA year after winning the first International Essay Prize "Gesture of Yesterday, Thought of Today," promoted by the Museu Tàpies and the UPF, the anthropologist and feminist activist Rita Segato (Buenos Aires, 1951) has returned to Barcelona to present the fruits of the award, the essay Tàpies and I. A reciprocal exegesis. In recent months, Segato has stirred controversy by stating that, in the wake of the Palestinian genocide, she considers herself "exhuman," as she herself recalls in the ARA, and emphasizes her desire "not to be part of this cursed species." Antoni Tàpies participated in the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine organized by the PLO in Beirut in 1978. Now Segato has found a similar longing to his "to go somewhere else" in some of the works that are part of the exhibition. Tàpies. The imagination of the worldwhich can be visited until January 25. "There's a desire to go out, an exercise in playing, in extracting oneself, in messing with the field." Thus, Segato has been able to verify once again the understanding he has with Tàpies, although he has no longer been able to include this discovery in his essay on the artist.“I’m not an art historian, but I felt an immense affinity with him. To write about him, I started from that initial affinity, which is his disobedience, his tremendous disobedience,” says the author, known for having written about “the ethics of disobedience,” which she sees as “a drive,” a drive.

“Tàpies disobeys himself all the time: he finds a format, a classifiable style, and withdraws. It’s a life in flight from any form of stability, permanence, and obedience, and from there I found that I understood him,” says Segato. All of this Segato embodies in works among which are Canvas painting (1962), a painting hung with the canvas against the wall; and Tribute to Federico García Lorca (1951), where there is "a landscape that commits suicide," while a winged bull flies towards the sky.

For Segato, this disruptive zeal is what keeps Tàpies relevant and makes his legacy fertile ground for imagining the future. "Two years ago, one of my essays was republished, The inaudible screamIn it, I say that after Gaza, agrammaticality—that is, the flight from all conventions—is the only thing that will help us try to find a new path for history, because history as we knew it is over. It is worse than the Holocaust, than the conquest, than everything. It is the end of a regulated history, in which there was a convincing grammar about the relationships between people and between nations. We will only find new paths by completely destabilizing the grammar in which we believed until recently.”

As the book's title suggests, the method Segato has used to delve into Tàpies's legacy is that of “reciprocal exegesis,” that is, a way of working that is like a “conversation.” “I am enlightened thanks to the author,” says Segato, who has also made use of what the philosopher Ignacio Gómez de Liaño calls “the tradition of thinking in images.”

"Docile in the domestic sphere, but unruly towards the world"

Segato's essay is filled with quotes from Tàpies's writings. "He was an intellectual in the best sense of the word. Painting was inseparable from deep reflection." She defines Tàpies as a "conceptual" artist and how he represents and fosters "defiance." "A good artist isn't someone who paints well, but someone who grasps a structure of the world and makes something of it. Tàpies does this and is constantly bought, captured. Power reacts to art in this way. The system, power, and the market devour everything; it's a constant dialectic," the author explains, "the market seeks, reveals, reveals, reveals, reveals, reveals, reveals, and ultimately imprisons him to silence him."

Segato also describes Tàpies as an artist who was "seemingly docile" in his personal life. "I emphasize the aspect of the house and the woman from whom he was never separated. Tàpies was docile in the domestic sphere, but unruly towards the world, and the world gradually captured him, as also happened with Picasso, who was explicitly a man of the left."