Natuka Honrubia

Home, sweet home
Mar Menéndez & Natuka Honrubia

Gen.
3 ¹ Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ´You shall not eat from any tree in the garden´?” ² the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; ³ but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

M.M.:
I believe that this Sagunto project is the first time you have worked with installations. Correct me if I’m wrong. How about if you start by talking about your previous works and how you feel about this new challenge?

N.H.:
The first of my works that could be considered an installation was a large-scale drawing, 13 x 4 m, for La Gallera in Valencia on the occasion of a collective exhibition, “Assujetissements”. The drawing took up one of the walls of the first floor and depicted the hatching of an egg from which hundreds of sperm cells with female mouths grafted into their heads came exploding out.

I did the second installation a few months later when I was invited to take part in “Llocs Lliures X” an art project in Jávea (Alicante). I covered the façade of one of the houses in the old town centre with mice and nipples. How would we react if, when we woke up one morning, we discovered that our house or one of our neighbours´ houses was teeming with these creatures?

My project for Peregrinatio is my first installation in a religious space. The main challenge has been to feel able to intervene in this space without its symbolism repressing my ideas or inhibiting my work.

M.M.:
What do you think of the space? Did you choose it?

N.H.:
Yes, I chose the chapel. I chose it because of the way I reacted to its space. I was seduced by its darkness and poor state of conservation. On the altar there is a beautiful, clean-lined and well-lit sculpture representing a victorious Saint Michael with Lucifer at his feet. My attention was drawn by two notices asking for donations to help with the restoration of the chapel: one on the standing lamp-holder, and the other one, translated into four languages, is found on the main door over the slot for leaving donations.

My installation project could give beautiful objects to the chapel in the hope that the chapel would accept and welcome my donation.

M.M.:
The inscription that forbids evil from entering fascinates the artists that exhibit at San Miguel. I don’t know whether you know the previous projects: Fernando Sinaga (Peregrinatio 2006) included a clock as a vanitas and Javier Velasco (Peregrinatio 2007) took his inspiration from the “Fallen Angel” by Bellver. Where is evil in your project?

N.H.:
I only know Fernando Sinaga’s project from the pictures in the catalogue. I saw

Velasco’s work when I visited the installations last summer.

Evil doesn’t come into my project. The inscription over the door is not what attracted me when I chose the chapel. When I started to think about the installation, I began with my reaction to the space and the first thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t want the installation to be about death, or suffering or pain. It took me several weeks to find out what installation I wanted to create. At the beginning, all the ideas I had had something to do with interventions on the façade of the building. I couldn’t get my imagination to cross the threshold into the chapel. The connotations of my work throughout my artistic career made me feel inhibited when thinking about exhibiting in a religious setting. I felt blinded. It was then that the inscription on the door and the slot for donations came in extremely handy. I had to do my work, to free myself from the fear of offending, from guilt feelings or a guilty conscience. If Lucifer was not allowed into the chapel, I would be able to work enthusiastically and bravely, with nor fear of sin or death. It was then that I started to enter the chapel in a narrative way, remembering children´ stories and treasures hidden in enchanted places. I thought about chocolate coins that I could put through the donations slots. The prize that awaits us is great! The chapel’s walls could guard wonderful cakes, tempting and beautiful to look at. The viewers can only look at them through the glass and the bars of the window: they can’t be eaten, they can’t be touch. “Ye shall not eat it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Genesis 3, 3). I wanted my work to be an allegory of life, on being alive and the gift of life.

M.M.:
You also use other parts of your body: mouth, tongue, nose, fingers... that oddly allude to the senses (sight is missing): but may be what is repeated most are the fingers. Is there any reason for this?

N.H.:
The people who view the work are (represent) the sight.

There may be a completely unconscious reason to explain why I use fingers more often than other parts of my body. I don’t know. It just happens. There is no hierarchy among the elements or the shapes. What I use and how I use it responds only to the requirements of the work during the creative process.

M.M.:
I don’t know if you are familiar with Clésinger’s work, “Woman bitten by a snake”, which caused such a scandal in its day because the artist took cast of the model. And in your work, those cakes that are topped with a nipple are somewhat “aggressive”, even more so and maybe even a little “scandalous” when one knows that it is your own nipple. How do you see it? Do you look for that sensation in the visiting public?

N.H.:
The scandal caused by Clésinger’s work was an orchestrated social and artistic scandal. I’ve never intended to cause a scandal. I don’t make casts of parts of my body in order to freeze their fixed image on another medium. Art gives us the freedom to recreate and reinvent ourselves. It helps us to know ourselves. We can subject reality to objections and fight against impositions and definitions. Last year, in some notes about my work, I wrote: “My hands and my fingers, my breasts and my nipples; my ears, my noses, my eyes; my tongues, my mouths and my smiles. I do what I want with them. To make you desire them and care for them; to make you kiss them and touch them, look at them and bite them. To make you visit them, to make them visit you and so that you play with them how you want, when you want and as for me, I want it as much as you do.”). My desires, fears, anxieties, beliefs and ideas are reflected when I create a piece of work. Those of the viewer are projected when he or she looks at it and interprets it in their own way. The nipple is a prominent part of the breast. It’s only a nipple. The feelings that it evokes when we look at it aren’t an inherited characteristic of it, they are subjective. I can’t specify them or limit them.

M.M.:
How do you think it will be seen in Peregrinatio? What do you think the public reaction will be?

N.H.:
I don’t know how it will be seen. I always feel uneasy when I talk about my work, especially now, when we are having this conversation week before I finish the piece in my studio and travel to Sagunto. When I finish installing it in the chapel, then I’ll know how I see it. Between the opening and the closing dates of Peregrinatio I’ll know how the public has seen it. I’m curious to see my reaction, their reaction. I haven’t work with a preconceived idea of the public that’s going to visit the project. It may be very varied.

When I started working on the project and surfing the Internet, I found a website for the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary. I read something that I’ve remembered several times as I work in my studio and tried to imagine the piece in the chapel: “Be careful, we should not content ourselves with devoting ourselves to works that give us fame and prestige in the eyes of others while we left our senses drift towards evil, sensuality dominates us and bad habits take over our way of working. It will be a fatal error”. I believe that artists and the public can both approach the projects exhibited in Peregrinatio with an open mind. I am responsible for the work that I will present and in it I have tried to be consistent with my ideas and feelings. Maybe I have committed a fatal error. Let the work of art be the one to invite us to look at it and interpret it. Let us understand it and react to it however we want.”

Translated by Communiqué, S.L.