Isabelle Albuquerque

Interview by Wallace Ludel

In 2020, the Los Angeles-based artist Isabelle Albuquerque held her first major solo exhibition at the downtown LA gallery Nicodim. The show, titled Sextet, debuted six sculptures from her ongoing series Orgy for Ten People in One Body. Talking to Isabelle, most of our conversation revolved around this suite of sculptures, each of which begins with a cast or 3D scan of Albuequerque’s own body before being crafted and manipulated through an array of materials and processes. The sculptures populate the gallery space, relating to one another and to the viewer, and they posit wide-ranging questions into the nature of identity, sexuality, personal and classical mythology, transubstantiation and spirituality, among a litany of other unanswerable probes. The title, Orgy for Ten People in One Body, (or “the Orgy” as Albuqurque often refers to it) also offers a number of paradoxes, and in these conflicting messages is perhaps the singular message of a cosmic permeability, arrived at through transmissions into the gap between our desires and our realities. These are spaces of constant contradiction; there’s humor and sadness, the grotesque and the beautiful, all in such proximity that one can scarcely be discerned from the other.

Wallace Ludel (WL): Are you calling from your studio?

Isabelle Albuquerque (IA): Yeah, do you want to hear the history of the space?

WF: Absolutely.

IA: It’s a very beautiful place and it used to be where the Pee Wee Herman illustrators worked. The gallery Skibum MacArther also used to be in this space. And I’d been here and fallen in love with it when my friend Tano had his studio here many years ago. I actually got the keys to the space the day that my family’s house burned down, like the exact day. The house had all the art from four generations of women in my family and losing that at the same moment that I started working here was felt deeply. It’s really a sacred space for me. It has a loft bed which is like a little cave for sleeping and dreaming.

WL: Were you living in the house when it burned down?

IA: I wasn’t living there but my mother and my sister were, and my sister was nine-months pregnant with her son. They had to leave within an hour. They grabbed a few journals but lost almost everything else. The only thing that survived were a few bronze heads. I have kind of a unique family. The matriarchal side is from Tunisia in North Africa. My great grandmother sang and recorded Malouf which is a kind of classical Andalusian music which uses the voice in a very guttural and expressive way. My grandmother was a lesbian writer who mostly wrote erotic plays under a male pseudonym. My mom is an artist and my sister is a contemporary dancer, and all of our objects were in the house, including my mom’s studio, her archives, all of her writing, drawings, paintings etc. Before the fire, I’d always been kind of an ascetic, not too materialistic, but I’ve since become almost a material fetishist; I love physical materials now. So much of what was lost in the house changed my relationship to objects and the power they hold. But it also changed my idea of the body, because all that was left was for us was what what we held and hold in our bodies.

WL: Wow. So do you live in your studio now? You mentioned a loft bed.

IA: No I don’t, though I did sleep here last night—a ritual that I do weekly. I have a lot of beds here because I think about beds often in the context of my work, and I’m really interested in plinths, which a bed can function as. One of my favorite sculpture is Bernini’s bed for the Sleeping Hermaphroditus; I just love beds as sculptural objects. Last month I did a show called Sextet, which was the first six sculptures from a series called Orgy for Ten People In One Body, that I am currently working on. Several of these sculptures lie on beds. I have a few of the works from the show back at my studio before they ship out, and it’s been really nice to live with them for a while and to sleep alongside them here.

I’m now working congruently on the next two sculptures in “The Orgy.” I’m in what I call the drawing phase. I have mirrors set up and different kinds of backdrops and I use photography to draw with my body and kind of find the form. All of last year, with the first six sculptures, I was living in an architecture where Bataille, Julia Kristeva, and Audre Lorde meet around ideas of eroticism, and that’s very much in a house of power, deep knowledge and death.

WL: I don’t know Kristeva?

IA: Oh my gosh you would love her work. When we were talking earlier, I was thinking about her ideas around sacred art, which is art made for the dead, not the living. And I think it’s true, whenever you see sacred art you think, what makes it sacred? Why does it feel this way? And maybe it’s because it was not made for us to see. It’s like we are witnessing something beyond the earthly human experience.

Orgy For 10 People In One Body: 1, 2019

Cast Bronze, saxophone

80 x 42 x 40 in.

WL: Like the art you might see in a sarcophagus— something meant to guide the dead through the afterlife?

IA: Yes. I think the first six sculptures in The Orgy were born of this desire for continuity. We die, so we are not continuous entities, but we do have moments of continuity and I often think that the desire for sex is deeply related to the desire for continuity. The moment of orgasm as a moment outside of beginnings and ends when the boundaries of our bodies become less distinct and we are continuous with another person or maybe multiple other people and maybe even a new person that is being born in that moment. I think that the desire to make art can also be so much about this desire for continuity.

In Orgy For 10 People In One Body, each person or sculpture is so much about the time in which they were made, and many were made during the pandemic when death became less of stranger to all of us. They’re very much about this, and now I’m kind of moving into this new zone, where I’m still into the Bataille but also maybe reaching towards Rachel Cusk, who writes more around pregnancy and birth. There’s this Bataillan idea that obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized or stable individuality. So, I’ve been thinking about what that means for a woman’s body—in all its innate instability. Through periods and pregnancy and childbirth. I’m really at the beginning of these next sculptures in The Orgy, but I think they’re going to be exploring this idea of obscenity as like a nonessential self or a nonessential body.

WL: How do you think your work navigates this question of identifying or not identifying with the body? It’s a conundrum I think about a lot. There’s a kind of transubstantiation in the work, and it wrestles with the limits of the corporeal. It also plays with how gender has historically factored in here.

IA: I think about this a lot too. I’ve always loved nudes. My favorite books have always had nudes, and I’ve always loved nude sculptures. There are several nude sculptures that I visit again and again over decades. But it was always a little troubling to me that they were all from one perspective—not that I don’t love that perspective, I do—but with this work I am trying to relocate the emanation of desire. I think a lot of times throughout art history, especially with women’s bodies, the desire is projected onto the object or body, but I’m really interested in the kind of desire that projects outwards from inside the body. I think this is related to what some medieval saints and mystics referred to as the inner eye. I love all gazes, I’m not against the male gaze, but this particular emanation of desire is not about that, it’s a different kind of gaze that comes from within. It’s a gaze that’s mythological, matriarchal, and personal. It’s a gaze that reaches from inside and directs itself outward.

"I think a lot of times throughout art history, especially with women’s bodies, the desire is projected onto the object or body, but I’m really interested in the kind of desire that projects outwards from inside the body."

WL: Has making these altered how you relate to your own body?

IA: Completely. When I was a teenager, I had an unusual development where I only grew one breast, and half of my body was very different from the other half. It was intense for me. I had back problems and underwent surgeries. I had trauma around the body, and I just kind of shut it down, alienating myself from my body and the bodies of others. Just a few years ago I started doing therapeutic work around the body, gender etc. and I really saw my body for the first time, it was no longer just a blur beneath my head, and that was when my initial work around “The Orgy” started to happen. It was kind of a wonderful sexual awakening at a much later age, and all of this work has been so healing. I’m a pretty shy person and this was a closed down area—I didn’t really know my own body—and the level to which I’ve needed to learn it to make this work has been profound. In understanding my own body and its boundaries, I feel close to all other bodies and their boundaries.

All of the sculptures in “The Orgy” are life-sized except for one which is half-height, and making that one was particularly healing. I started looking into ideas around sympathetic magic, and how for centuries humans have made representations of ourselves at a smaller scale and then enacted either harmful or healing actions onto these smaller representations of a person to affect the actual person. I had the small sculpture at my home for a long time, I slept with her for months, I sang to her and caressed her wooden skin. It sounds odd but it’s on a continuum of how humans have healed ourselves and others for millennia. And it worked! I didn’t consciously set out to create a space of healing, but this work has been incredible in that way.

WL: I had a funny experience with that sculpture—I saw how the hand is placed on the chest and I thought that the figure was embarrassed, the way one might make that gesture when they’re flushed, and it was much later when I realized that she was masturbating with the other hand. Then I thought I had read it totally wrong, then I thought again and realized it’s about the coexistence of both seemingly contradictory things and the simultaneity of pleasure and displeasure, or maybe pleasure and vulnerability.

IA: My favorite thing about sculpture is that from every perspective it can be something different. This is something I am always striving to communicate. I love containing multiplicity in a single object.

WL: That’s what poignancy really is when you boil it down, right? The coexistence of conflicting emotions, like happiness and sadness in a single moment.

IA: Exactly. And your reading of the small wooden sculpture is totally on. When I was developing it, I was looking at a lot of modesty poses from the Greeks and elsewhere, so that was definitely there. But yes, she is also masturbating. It’s funny in person, she’s shy and powerful at the same time, and that’s the thing that really works about her. Both and more, I hope.

Sextet (exhibition view at Nicodim Gallery)

Foreground: Orgy For 10 People In One Body: 6, 2020

Resin, mica laced Lexus body paint

65 x 18 x 18 in.

WL: There are two sculptures you’re making me think of. The Charles Ray sculpture of the family, where the parents are scaled down and the children are scaled up so everyone is the same height...

IA: He’s a master of scale. Did you know that all of his figures are 30% larger than the actual body? He does this because the living body feels that much larger as a result of our movement. I love that piece.

WL: That makes me think of the Italian Futurists.

IA: In what way?

WL: Their whole thing was capturing movement, a dog with a dozen legs or a cellist playing his instrument with spider-like arms.

IA: Yes! So Charles Ray adds mass to capture that, and it works.

WL: The other work it reminded me of was Janine Antoni, who I think is really special. I specifically thought of Lick and Lather, which is probably her most famous work.

IA: I know the work but not the process behind it.

WL: She cast herself in soap, then bathed with her likeness until its features began to be less articulated. Then she cast herself in chocolate, and achieved the same process through licking the sculpture.

IA: Oh wow. It’s transmutation. That happens in Felix Gonzalez Torres too! In both Antoni and Felix Gonzalez Torres the work is edible.

WL: You mean his candy portraits?

IA: Yes, and how the viewer can take something edible away from it.

WL: I think in his Portrait of Ross, one of the candy sculptures, the work begins as the exact weight his partner Ross was when he was diagnosed with AIDS, so the candy losing its mass mirrors Ross’s rapid weight loss from the disease.

IA: And it’s so erotic! I had two of those candys saved for years. I finally ate them, and oh my god. It was so erotic.

WL: And Christ! The transubstantiation of Christ as the wafer. In Christianity, taking communion is literally eating Christ so that you can meld with him. “He that eateth my flesh dwelleth in me.”

IA: Exactly.

WL: Can you tell me more about the drawing phase that you alluded to in these works?

IA: It’s mostly photography, it’s like Butoh dance, where you develop the move over months and months. Or even Voguing. I’m taking photographs the whole time, it’s often nude and it’s the most intimate part of my process that I generally don’t share with other people. It’s the forming of the idea. And a lot of the times there’s poetry or writing connected to it.

WL: Are you taking the photos yourself or is a photographer in the studio with you?

IA: I do it alone. So much of the work is done in collaboration with other people, but the drawing phase is solitary. I really want to capture the moment, so I work on that initial phase for as long as I can. I used to be a performer, which I loved, but performance is such a short event in time. I love the possibility of sculpture as a long event in time. I’m still looking at sculptures made thousands of years ago and it makes me feel less lonely to be in direct communication with people from different times. For example, I’ve been very comforted by work made during the plague since quarantine began.

"I want all the bodies in 'The Orgy' to be as accurately human (in their beauty and horror) as possible, so they can honor this particular time when we are changing so much. And with all this change and as we move forward, it’s so important for us to hold more complexity at once, it’s like a survival tactic."

WL: Can you tell me about the title of the series? Orgy for Ten People in One Body.

IA: I was definitely thinking musically. I love “music for 18 musicians” or “six marimbas” and those ways of thinking about music. It’s about phasing, like in “six marimbas,” there are people playing six marimbas at the same time and these notes being played on top of each other create new notes. I always call it creating babies. So I loved this idea of all different materials phasing. Each material representing a different note or tone. The wood phasing with the rubber phasing with resin or bronze. I know it’s working when I see them all together and I hear music. It’s similar to the idea of simultaneity that we talked about earlier too. And of course, the idea of an orgy in one body brings up a lot of issues, which I’m continuing to try to understand.

WL: The harmony of contradictory forces. That really shines in your work.

IA: Thank you. I work with Artificial Intelligence in my day job, so sometimes I think of this work as like a response to that. We are moving away from our bodies in a lot of ways. For example, if I had a child they would be much more different from me than I am from my mother. Humans are changing at an exponential rate and we are already merging with other kinds of intelligence and sentience. So, in some ways I’m trying to capture the human body as it is now in this time of great change and tumult, but the way that our bodies are in this moment is almost a memory already. Like young people aren’t really having sex the way other generations have and I often track cycles of sexuality/shame and violence in history as a way to understand people in their moment. I want all the bodies in “The Orgy” to be as accurately human (in their beauty and horror) as possible, so they can honor this particular time when we are changing so much. And with all this change and as we move forward, it’s so important for us to hold more complexity at once, it’s like a survival tactic.

WL: I think it’s a fundamental need. There’s a saying that happiness exists only where there is denial of nothing, and to deny nothing is to be open to hell, really, because hell is all around us. But so is heaven. And either you get both or you get neither, it’s a package deal.

IA: That makes sense to me. Sometimes in this work I’ll even use beauty in a subversive way, as a means to survive against pain and suffering. Especially this year, which is a time when we’ve had such a collective suffering. In another context, a single-person orgy could be a meditation on loneliness, but this is the first time in my life I’ve ever felt a pain and loss without an associated loneliness. It was very different to not be alone in the suffering.

Orgy For 10 People In One Body: 4 (Side View), 2020

Rubber

43 x 22 x 22 in.

WL: It sounds like you’re touching on beauty’s proximity to its antithesis. How close beauty is to the grotesque, or how close suffering is to joy. They’re neighbors.

IA: There’s a subversive function to beauty sometimes—it can be a survival tactic to sustain life in the face of chaos or depravation. That’s something that’s tricky with the body of course, but it’s something I’m exploring.

WL: How can it be a survival tactic?

IA: Creating beauty can be healing. We sometimes shun it in art now, and it’s not the only way, but it can help us survive. I think that’s why I get so fetishistic about the materials. I read recently that if you go deep inside yourself, you’ll find the twin of every person in the world. I think there’s something really real to that! Somehow beauty can touch on that too; the way that we respond to it sensually or the way that it moves us. There’s something eternal and connecting about it that I still don’t totally understand, but I’m trying to.

It’s in Felix Gonzalez Torres, the way he uses beauty is so eternal and connecting, as opposed to say the way advertising uses it. Beauty is a technology that religion of course uses in powerful ways, both negatively and positively. It’s a technology that can be subversive or subverted, and I’m trying to use it in a subversive way, but maybe that’s where that fine line is.

WL: I want to ask about your relationship to material, because the reverence is very apparent. And I also wanted to ask about this relationship between vulnerability and power, because the work is really vulnerable, but it also feels authoritative in a way.

IA: I’m so glad that’s coming across. The power part is really important to me. I’m very interested in reclaiming erotism as a source of power and information within our lives. The first sculpture, the bronze piece, is based on the myth of Leda and the Swan, do you know it?

WL: Only a little bit. I know Zeus came to Earth as a swan, and then had sex with Leda. I’ve heard mixed reports regarding if the sex was consensual. I think it’s the Greek equivalent of the Christian God impregnating the Virgin Mary.

IA: Yes, and Leda then lays two eggs and one is Helen of Troy, which in many ways begins Western culture, thought, and art. So Western art begins with a rape, which in this case is mythological but in many other cases is not. I wanted to recreate that rape and have this moment of penetration and violence; it’s a part of sexuality and we can’t pretend it’s not. I wanted that to be present, but the female body in this reenactment is also really powerful. And the saxophone that represents Zeus almost becomes her phallus; she takes the violence enacted on her body and integrates it into her body as her own power.

I do hope to flip the script on the power dynamic that we usually see when sexuality is portrayed in art and film and everything. I just find it so false and it’s not how I experience it at all. It’s so boring. Not that there isn’t power play, of course there is. In one of the sculptures in “The Orgy,” I am on all fours and I remember being very worried about making such a submissive pose, but then it ended up being really dominant at the same time, again like what we were talking about before, how submission and dominance are best friends. You can’t have one without the other. Nudity is that way too; in many societies for a long time if you took your clothes off you were ready for sacrifice, whether it was for sex or to be killed.

WL: And for the vast majority of human history there was a good chance that the woman would die in childbirth, so that was just part of it. That sacrificial quality, and that proximity of death to birth, that was just baked into the cake.

IA: So in some way bringing yourself to sexuality was bringing yourself closer to death. I never thought about that. I was studying all these fundamental sexual poses throughout time, and so many are linked to birth poses. Orgy For 10 People In One Body No 2, the work with the candle, is both a birth pose and a sex pose simultaneously. Everyone thinks that one’s so vulnerable, but to me it’s very powerful. I was with my sister when she was giving birth and that was one of the poses she utilized through much of it. That was right after the fire. I started the drawing phase for No 2 a few days after seeing her birth, which was so soon after the house burnt down. We have a Jewish background too, so there’s the idea of women lighting the candles (Shabbat etc.) to keep the vital flame going in it as well.

Orgy For 10 People In One Body: 3, 2020

Solid walnut carved at half scale from 3D scan

30 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 5 3/4 in.

WL: Back to Leda and the Swan for a second—why is the saxophone the stand in for the swan?

IA: Well for one, a saxophone looks so much like a swan and sounds so much like a swan and even has a beak. For one year of my childhood when I was 8, I wouldn’t let anyone take my photo and I hardly spoke, but I played the saxophone, which is so funny because there’s nothing louder or less unseen or unheard.

WL: And when you’re bad at the saxophone, those are particularly horrible noises.

IA: And I never got good! But I always wanted to make a sculpture around this saxophone. Later, as I was thinking about the materials, there were a few themes that emerged and one is that each sculpture has a wedding ring on, and this was kind of a strange thing to realize but my father is like an anti-capitalist, anti-materialist to an extreme, and throughout my life he has only ever owned three objects: one is a wedding ring, one is a saxophone, and one is a computer he built from scratch. I usually think of this work as so connected to the lineage of my matriarchal side, but these three super charged items for me from my father’s side are a part of this work too. All three of them show up. And the saxophone for example—it’s a hilarious object, there’s so much humor in the work too.

WL: I’m glad you said that. It is really funny. And that’s back to the coexistence of contradictions, the relationship between humor and severity. The transcending that happens when the two intermingle is kind of the sparknotes version of Lorca’s concept of deunde. Okay, this might be the last question—you said your favorite sculpture was Bernini’s Sleeping Hermaphriditus, why is that?

IA: That’s going to touch on so much of what we discussed.

WL: I thought it might.

IA: So the figure is an ancient Greek sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus sleeping, and then they commissioned Bernini to make the marble mattress over a thousand years later. First, I love that from every perspective it’s a completely different sculpture. Hermaphroditus is male from one perspective and female from another, sensual from one perspective and sleeping from another. And the time shift between the figure and the mattress coming together in one object, it’s not chromonormative.

WL: What was that word?

IA: Chromonormativity. It’s like normative time. I think art can be a big fuck you to normative time. That piece is really not chromonormative because the sculpture was made so long before the mattress. Sculpture is like a time travel machine that can capture a moment, and one of the reasons I love the materials that I use is that they can exist in multiple time frames. That’s what I love about sculpture—it can hold multiple planes of time in one object, and that object can then travel across multiple planes of time.

WL: How do you think your work strives to do that?

IA: It goes back to what I was saying about the internal gaze. If you can somehow go internal with the gaze there’s a way you can touch upon something eternal in humanity. I never think of my body as just existing in this moment, it feels part of a long DNA strand of thousands and thousands of years. And it is! In a way, capturing one moment in time connects it to every moment forward and after.

WL: It’s an endless singularity, right?

IA: Yeah it’s an attempting to be continuous, as is an orgy, there’s no beginning and no end in an orgy. It’s striving for continuity. Which I think all art does. In so many ways it’s why humans make art, right? And maybe why we have sex, too.

Wallace Ludel

Wallace Ludel is an artist and writer. His writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Cultured, Elephant, Narrative, No Tokens, Sporklet, Triangle House Review and elsewhere. He is also a weekly contributor to The Art Newspaper. He received his MFA from New York University where he has also taught creative writing. He is at work on a full-length collection of poems.