She looked for a shop window on Jiménez Avenue, dressed in a blue gown and went behind the glass so that pedestrians on one of the busiest streets in Bogotá could see her and receive her message. María Teresa Hincapié amazed the rollers in 1989 with an imaginative and unexpected performance with which she wanted to launch the big question: what does it mean to be a woman?
For three days, eight hours each, he was in that cupboard. She swept, cleaned, combed her hair, put on makeup, wrote messages with lipstick on the glass, erased them, covered the glass with newspapers, pierced them, poked her mouth, her eyes... Showcase is one of the great works of this unclassifiable Colombian artist. The Macba bought it in the last edition of Arco and now it is part of the permanent collection of the Barcelona art gallery.
The acquisition of Vitrina has been the excuse, although no excuse was needed, for the Macba to promote a major exhibition on María Teresa Hincapié (1954-2008). If this were a principle of infinity , curated by Claudi Segura (Macba) and Emiliano Valdés (Museum of Modern Art of Medellín), it will be on the bill from tomorrow until February 23.
The difficulties of transmitting the essence of the ephemeral work of a performer to the public were not few, but the curators have overcome this hurdle with photographs, videos, slides, Hincapié's manuscripts, archive material and visual testimonies. In addition, they have sought the support of other artists who fell in love with the Colombian art.
The work of José Alejandro Restrepo, who collaborated with Hincapié, is present in If this were a principle of infinity. And also that of the Colombian artists María Jose Arjona and Mapa Teatro and that of the Cuban Coco Fusco, who were entrusted by Macba to develop their own works for this exhibition in order to establish a dialogue with the work of Hincapié.
A work that navigated between the ephemeral nature of its proposals and the sacred. Ephemeral as is the art of theatrical representation, which he learned with Juan Monsalve and Jerzy Grotowski. Ephemeral as the body is, which Hincapié took to the limit in the exercise of experimental theater after practicing butoh, nō and traditional Indian dances. And sacred, because the artist sought the mystical through her perishable work.
In 1995, María Teresa began to walk. The first step of 550 kilometers traveled in 21 days was also the basis for one of her most ambitious leftovers Towards the sacred. She walked from Bogotá to San Agustín, she toured guerrilla zones, she ate seeds and an unrefined sugar they call pandela and looked for answers to the questions that arose about loneliness, about the divine, about the feminine...
That journey directed Hincapié's poetics towards the sacramental. The artist bought a farm in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. It was a secluded place that could only be accessed on foot. It was a magical enclave, located next to the sacred settlement of the Kogui Indians, who feel they are children of the Earth. She there she started a village-school, a residency for artists who shared the desire to want to express themselves through their own body.
It was the high point of the career of this artist who left Armenia, her hometown very young, feeling that it was too small for her, and settled in Bogotá where she got married, had a child and worked in a bookstore until, by chance, she entered the theater group Acto Latino and found his calling.
Hincapié died at the age of 54, a victim of breast cancer, but her art, despite its ephemeral nature, has been preserved. His work was exhibited at The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Maiami in 2010 and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2017. Now, it is also available to the public in Barcelona with this Macba proposal, which includes talks, seminars and projections on the Meier façade.
