Sikán, Sarah and the Creatures of the Deep Sea

Belkis Ayón, "Untitled (Sikán with White Points)", 1994

 

MYTHS, FICTION, AND REALITY IN THE BALANZ COLLECTION

 

Jung believed that myths and dreams are expressions of the collective unconscious—that dimension which lies beyond consciousness and is shared by the experience of all people. In Jungian thought, then, we all carry within us the traces of foundational myths, which endow us with a shared, primordial experience that binds us together as a community.[1] Others, such as Joseph Campbell, have proposed that myths fulfill a variety of functions: mystical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical. The latter two suggest that myths are created by societies to respond to a particular need or historical circumstance—offering explanations that articulate a society’s ideas about the world and teaching us how to live within that worldview.[2] This raises the question: what is the difference between an inherited myth, created by ancestral societies and transformed over time by successive generations, and a contemporary myth? Moreover, what role does fiction play in all of this?

In 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien first published his poem Mythopoeia, a defense of fantasy as a tool for understanding reality—a kind of second cousin to traditional myths. From this emerged an entire narrative genre that gives free rein to mythopoetic fiction, bringing together elements from diverse origins—some ancestral, others historical, and some contemporary—to create its own fantastical and mysterious universe. This form of fiction, like others, can function as an allegory of the present, its power residing in its capacity to disrupt inherited myths and stories and the ways in which they shape our interpretation of the world. In all its forms—narrative, visual, and even musical—the fictionalization of other possible realities operates as a critique of power structures, social structures, forms of knowledge, oppression, violence, and discrimination. In its most compelling expressions, fiction can even become a tool for transformation.

The artists and works analyzed in this essay explore the visual possibilities of mythopoetics, reconfiguring ancestral and contemporary myths in order to investigate reality and imagine other possible worlds. Each, in their own way, proposes that where poetic functions intersect with the political—through the fictionalization of reality and the creation of new myths—new subjectivities and new ways of existing come into being.

 

Sikán

 

The origin myth of the Abakuá Secret Society—a religious and sociocultural Afro-Cuban society, ancient and strictly male, which provides mutual aid to its members—has as many versions as there are groups (known as Potencias, Juegos, or Plantes), and these have existed in Cuba from the late nineteenth century onward. Like all myths—especially those that give rise to and sustain the power structures organizing the life of a community—they transform over time, adapting to new climates and landscapes, as well as to economic, social, and political circumstances. The myth of Princess Sikán, a story that traveled on slave ships from Nigeria to the Caribbean island and was transmitted orally, was collected by writer and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera in books and articles that trace Abakuá myths, rituals, and traditions. With a tone of ethnographic surrealism,[3] Cabrera made public these secret myths from their origins—myths that had also been rendered invisible by dominant Hispano-Cuban culture, both in its colonial and Christian form and in its revolutionary and atheist one. Cabrera succeeded in bringing these narratives into the present, revealing both the complexities and contradictions they contain and the biased, prejudice-laden readings to which they have been subjected.

In the accounts collected by Cabrera, the central character is always Sikán, or Sikanékue, a princess and daughter of the chief of the Efor tribe, who encounters Tanze—the bearer of the Secret and a divine manifestation of Ékue—when she goes down to the river to fetch water. From one version to another, the landscape changes and the circumstances of the encounter vary: sometimes Sikán comes face to face with the fish; at other times she only senses its weight inside the jar. Sooner or later, however, the woman—accused of betrayal for having revealed the Secret—is sacrificed, if only for having been chosen by the fish-god to whom it revealed itself. In many versions it is Nasakó, the sorcerer of the rival tribe, who decides her execution; in others, it is Efik, her husband, or even her own father. Some accounts tell that Sikán was held captive in the forest and that the men sacrificed her at dawn the following day, or that she was tied to a ceiba tree beneath which her remains were buried. At times, the narratives recount that she is kept alive for days or weeks while the elders deliberate, consult the spirits of their ancestors, or read kola nut seeds.[4] Ultimately, the ethnographer writes, Sikán dies for having been the “true owner of Power,” which the men sought to appropriate and which they “strengthened by offering her blood, and so that it would never again fall into the hands of a woman, they forbade women from participating in their ‘games.’”[5] In this myth, Sikán becomes the Chosen One and the first initiate—both traitor and murdered Great Mother—only to be invoked and venerated for more than a century in every ritual of every Plante across Cuban territory.

In 1985, at the age of seventeen, Belkis Ayón encountered for the first time the mythical narratives collected by Cabrera. At the time, the artist was taking her first steps in the Fine Arts academy as Cuba was beginning to feel the coming crisis. Guided by curiosity and intuition, Ayón immersed herself in the secret and forbidden (for women) world of the Abakuá. Positioned within the context of her own atheism and her condition as a Black Cuban woman, Ayón recognized the potential of these myths, stories, and traditions to account not only for the long history of social fragmentation—of race, gender, and class in Cuban society, forged by colonization and sustained by the various regimes that governed the country—but also, in her own words, to give form to the “questioning of the human, that fleeting feeling, the spiritual.”[6] According to researcher and curator Cristina Vives, the artist extracted from the Abakuá tradition a series of principles and values upon which she founded a new imaginary—one that investigates not only the specificities of the male brotherhood, but also the realities of contemporary Cuban communities, declassed workers, marginalized voices, and oppressed women.[7] Through images of pain, sacrifice, and justice, Ayón constructed a universal visual discourse on the human condition.

Her works—mostly large-scale collographs in which she works across the full spectrum of greys, blacks, and whites—are vast material and temporal palimpsests. Within each image reside multiple times that project themselves in different directions into the present: the non-time of myth; the time of African ancestors and the formation of traditions; the time of travel and the displacement of people and religions; Cuba’s colonial past; and a convulsed present. For years, Ayón tirelessly explored the figure of Sikán, while simultaneously exploring herself through her—Afro-descendant women and Cuban society as a whole, which at that moment was suffering the economic and political blows brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union. From the earliest sketches, figures with gazes that pierce the paper, yet without mouths—silenced like Sikán—speak of her struggle to exist.

The work Añoranza (1998), part of the Balanz Collection, depicts a group of figures gathered around four central circular forms—possibly vessels or drums, or perhaps allegories of all that presents itself to us as sacred. Some of the figures are completely covered in symbols, while others bear markings only on their skulls. One holds a candle in their right hand. The image represents an Abakuá ritual, likely the initiation of a group of neophytes. This work, belonging to Ayón’s final and most fully developed period, abandons the meticulous details that characterized her earlier years in favor of more abstract and open narrative forms. In doing so, the artist succeeded in rendering stories of injustice, suffering, and sacrifice without time or place, anchored in her own conditions of existence. In Añoranza, the artist no longer distinguishes gender or race; Sikán is no longer Sikán, nor is she Ayón—she is simply a powerful, timeless figure. Against a deep black background, bodies are synthesized into universal forms, giving rise to fluid, porous configurations that merge in a cultural and spiritual syncretism.

In the series Via Crucis (1995), the artist undertakes a conceptual and material investigation of the syncretic possibilities of encounter and interweaving between the traditions of the Abakuá society and Christianity. That year, Ayón was invited to present an exhibition at the Church of Saint Barbara in the German city of Breining, a setting she used to stage her works in a manner that evokes architectural and sculptural forms of European religious painting. In this series, Ayón reveals, on the one hand, the vast universe of references she drew upon to create an iconographic system for the Abakuá faith[8]—ranging from Byzantium to Christianity and even science fiction—and, on the other, articulates some of the ways in which ancestral religions adapted during colonialism in order to survive censorship and annihilation.

In Via Crucis, the artist replaces Christ with Sikán across the fourteen stations of her life. In works such as Untitled (Sikán with White Points) (1994) and I Always Return (1994), which represent Stations 12 and 6 of the Christian Stations of the Cross respectively, and which are part of the Balanz Collection, we see how Ayón overlays, weaves, and reconstitutes fragments of codes from different spatiotemporal, cultural, and religious territories in order to construct a new cosmogony. The artist thus creates a contemporary myth and ritual, dense with time and imagery—a fiction to confront the conflicts and obstacles of her present. These images also possess great depth and a multiplicity of textures, which the artist achieves through an ancient and rarely used printmaking technique.

Collography consists of the meticulous application of a variety of materials onto a rigid cardboard base—a kind of collage—which is then inked and run through a press. This technical and material complexity proved to be the ideal vehicle for creating works charged with the responsibility of housing within themselves a collage of myths and rituals, times and landscapes, which emerge from the deepest layers of the work and slide toward the future. In Ayón’s practice, technical and conceptual research merged into a unique and polyvalent language—composed of multiple layers of objects and meaning that together give form to a world dense with histories and realities. Ultimately, Belkis Ayón’s practice maintains a critical function insofar as it distances itself from the myth-as-system it has revealed as such, opening a portal toward a reconfiguration of the very notion of myth and its transformative potential.

Sarah

 

Just as Ayón created iconographic collages from religious images of diverse origins, Argentine artist Laura Códega (b. 1977, Buenos Aires) explores the connections and articulations between discourses, images, and objects that emerge from the past: religious texts, Greek myths and tragedies, philosophical doctrines, pirate songs, folkloric tales and popular traditions, fables, and jokes. Through them, Códega traces the origins of the paradigms that govern our contemporary existence and extracts the ideas, values, and principles that persist—those that structure our thinking and our society, our ways of knowing and coexisting, and the processes of subject formation that shape our identities. While her inquiries simultaneously traverse the universal, the local, and the fictional, her focus lies on the marks these narratives and images have left on Hispanic America and Argentina, and on the ideologies they carry. Through a wide range of techniques and materials that intertwine—and merge with themes and images to form works that capture archetypes and propose new speculative mythologies—the artist reimagines the past in order to think the present and produce other possible futures. For Códega, art is that which breaks the myth only to reassemble it as a collage in the best surrealist tradition.

In the series América negra y bruta (2018, Mite Galería, Buenos Aires), Códega embossed and painted aluminum and cardboard to bring into the present the visions held by colonizers of what they expected to encounter in the Americas—deformed and monstrous images that anticipate, even before the ships reach shore, the violence embedded in the notion of otherness and its use as a weapon for domination and subjugation. Códega devours these images in order to return them to us as regurgitated presences and reincarnations in the present: the brutality of an inherited and perpetuated otherness. In the series Minerva (2012), Códega drew with lemon juice on paper and then revealed the images through the action of heat. Revelation—embodied by citric acid in conjunction with fire—unveils a mythological universe inhabited by animals, gods, and anthropomorphic beings who encounter and elude one another amid the ocher phantasmagorias of oxidation. This is the fictionalization of a myth that might have been and was not, or perhaps a myth that will come to be in the not-too-distant future. In these works, what rises to the surface are the threads that lie beneath our feet, beneath our skin, and within our unconscious—a murky substratum of the reality we inhabit.

In Sarah (2013), a large painted and pyrographed cowhide that is part of the Balanz Collection, Códega draws upon the canons of Renaissance painting, the tradition of painting saints, biblical narratives, anatomy lessons and their illustrations, Hindu philosophy, astrology, and the arcana of the Tarot. On a hide measuring 200 × 100 cm, the artist assembled a constellation of icons and beliefs as ancient as the techniques she employs. This conjunction of material, technique, and image brings forth ideas, objects, and memories that reside in the deepest layers of our collective unconscious and in the least explored recesses of our anatomy. The exhibition in which Códega first presented these works was titled Médium (2014, Galería Otero, Buenos Aires), and brought together a series of works in which the artist herself acted as a mediator between inheritances we neither see nor are able to name, and that which we do see and feel on a daily basis. Códega thus proposes the possibility of channeling the past and its multiple versions—those we know, as well as those that have been marginalized, rendered invisible, or simply destroyed or forgotten. In Médium, Sarah hung on the wall opposite Saturn (2013), made using the same technique. Within a small white cube, the Roman god of agriculture and harvest—who devours his male children in order to retain the power ceded to him by his brother—was set in confrontation with the beautiful and irreverent prophetess, wife of Abraham, to whom God grants the ability to conceive her first child at the age of ninety. These are two stories that follow opposing paths, yet meet in their equally powerful narration of the trajectories of power and of human nature in all its brilliance and all its darkness.

 

 

The image of Sarah is surrounded by a series of symbols of diverse origins, arranged around her body according to its anatomy and her chakras. Like a Renaissance saint or a Tarot arcana, Sarah floats amid pools of color and a constellation of mysterious icons that weave curious and unexpected relationships with one another. At the level of her head, among yellow, ocher, and lilac pools, surrounding the crown and third-eye chakras, an eagle hovers on the right, clutching a serpent in its talons—an ancient Mesoamerican image associated with human sacrifice as an exercise of power and domination. Just below the eagle, Códega placed the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which represents Christ’s divine love for humanity and his promise of salvation through sacrifice. In this convergence of East and West, of ancestral forms of knowledge and traditions with Christian imagery, some of the tensions and displacements proposed by the artist are condensed: a series of crossings that create a new altar for contemporary life, a paradigm detached from colonial modernity and its politics of otherness.

On the left side, between the Solar Plexus and the root chakra—between survival and ego—we find a triquetra, which in Celtic tradition alludes to triple dimensionality but also symbolizes life, death, and reincarnation. Below it appears a knot, a symbol of entanglements and bindings, followed by a green frog, a symbol of abundance in Feng Shui. An opaque and cumbersome amalgam, perhaps echoing that dark, sticky core of the world that we sense but cannot quite name.

Thus, Sarah—with her monumental body in the manner of Mantegna, surrounded by the most improbable of attributes—presents herself with exposed viscera, a cluster of grapes at the root chakra, the site of sexuality, and her child between her knees. Images, symbols, and attributes coexist within a fantastical cosmos, rife with tensions and incongruities, yet also giving rise to new perspectives, myths, and ways of existing in the universe. A contemporary mythopoiesis that offers us possibilities for a reorganization of the world as we know it.