A Disrupted Inheritance

“Face to Face” with Paola Martínez Fiterre

We take nothing with us when we leave this world, not even our bodies. Nor is much promised to us in life, despite our best efforts to build something that lasts. The Lord giveth, and He taketh away. 

This was never so clear to photographer Paola Martínez Fiterre than when a three month vacation to the United States became more than two years of exile from her native Cuba, a separation which continues to this day, as a result of tense US-Cuban relations. Thinking she was soon to return home, she left behind her camera, the props from her studio (which she had been using to make “harmless” still life photography), and her journal. 

Though she was newly stranded in the United States, ostensibly with nothing of her practice within reach, the artist did not see herself as empty handed. Piece by piece she began incorporating her body into her photographs, and it was in a hand here and a foot there that she unleashed an “explosion” of work she could not have anticipated. (She even admits she was tiring of photography before she came to live here.) No matter her location, what would always remain with her was her body, its context, and her memories (however imprecise they could be). These became her new materials, and photography quickly became her journal—a way of documenting a new life in a new country. 

Before these self-portraits “I had never turned my camera to me,” Martínez Fiterre remarked, but photographing herself was her body’s “natural response to those [unfamiliar] places, trying to get them to feel like home,” as if envisioning herself as part of the space was instrumental to her feeling so. In one photograph, she holds a lamp between her legs while standing in a hotel room on one of many trips she made to Washington D.C. in an attempt to secure her green card. In another, she lies in a fountain at a residency with her legs draped over its lip. Often, she engages her feet—she photographs them on tiptoe, pointed like a ballerina’s, or sometimes with toes folded under the balls of her feet. In the delicacy with which her toes engage her environment she communicates the fragility of her situation.

One look at her oeuvre, however, and it is clear that Martínez Fiterre is far from dainty. She has been known to position her painted breasts touching shattered wine glass stems or pose as the Olympia with wads of yarn-guts spilling from her womb, and she is often flagged on instagram for revealing her nakedness, a hypocrisy of American values of freedom not lost on the artist whose memories of Cuban censorship are still fresh.

“If you could translate this in words,” she says, gesturing at her work, “it would be a journal” whose pages vacillate between vulnerability and resilience, ease and anxiety. 

* * *

Salt in the wound of separation, Martínez Fiterre was at risk of losing her Cuban citizenship in June, as Cuban law stipulates any citizen who has been absent from the country for two years will be stripped of this diplomatic identity. As she was applying to her green card, the artist could not leave the country, and though she applied for an extension from Cuba, she was nearing its end. With the threat of statelessness looming, the artist kept true to form, and her citizenship status immediately became one of her materials, as in when she pinned images of her family to her chest with acupuncture needles, in a performance which she called “Recuérdame,” or “Remember Me,” performed at Pen + Brush in September. 

Memory is often at the forefront of the artist’s thinking and is especially poignant when it is imperfect, a rarity of an era in which most information is just a few taps away. The physical separation from her native island often causes her stories to double up on themselves, or sometimes skip ahead, distorting the original content. The physical touchstones of her life—her journal, her old work, her home, and her family—dwell almost in another plane of existence and can only be referenced through the distorted, often unreliable lens of recollection. 

In a rare sculptural series titled Diary (2018), Martínez Fiterre embroiders her memory of the contents of her Cuban journals on maxipads. Of course, the lines she remembers—or thinks she remembers—are snapshots pulled from a morass of associations, non-linear in the way that memory can be. They are often lines of visceral emotion, the types of feelings that are rooted in the sensory, as when she writes, “I remember the smell of my mother’s tears” (“recuerdo el olor de las lágrimas de mi madre”). With red threads she embeds these words in the cottony thickness of maxi pads, as if they are the off-shedding of lifeblood. 

While she embroiders a memory, she is also attempting to embroider a memory of a text which itself recalls a memory. These works address not the memory she still carries with her, but whether the system she used to pin it down can be trusted. In possibly misquoting herself, she exposes the faultiness of human systems—whether writing or lofty concepts of nationhood—and the ways in which they break down. 

When I ask about the elements of craft that find their way into her work, like the scraggly knitting she uses as a prop in one photo or the embroidered phrases, she acknowledges that, like memories, the circumstances of her life have kept her from accessing a world of perfect knowledge—in this case, the skills necessary for making.  

“[The tradition of craft] is something that is passed through generations, but it wasn’t passed to me,” she bemoans. Instead, while in the United States she has done her best to recall what little she was taught by the women who are still in Cuba. She purposely avoids online how-to videos, which would be only a false inheritance. When embroidery or knitting do show up, they are placeholders, nods to a lineage of which she has been deprived. 

In photographing herself, what Fiterre has inherited is the robust tradition of Cuban women self-portraitists, which includes Ana Mendieta, who is the most frequent—though not the most apt—comparison made to the artist. More appropriate would be to link her work to that of Marta María Perez Bravo or Cirenaica Moreira, who use their work as a log of their experience. 

“I keep them close to me,” she says of these women, and in that statement I am reminded of the artist’s remarkable ability to cope with her situation and the way she keeps her family close, despite their distance. 

At Pen + Brush in September

This story, however, has a happy ending (at least to this early chapter). Paola received her green card in October and will be headed to see her family for Christmas. With another radical shift on the horizon—one in which she must balance life in Cuba with life in the United States—one can only hold her breath to see how the next page of her journal is written. 

More on Paola here.