Selva Aparicio

Interview by Monica Uszerowicz

The Spanish word “selva” translates to a dense gathering of trees (a jungle, specifically, or a forest). The multidisciplinary artist Selva Aparicio grew up in the woods outside of Barcelona, Spain, observing the earthly cycles of life and rebirth among the leaves and soil. Today, she makes work that tenderly and earnestly explores death, birth, the ways we mourn and the ways we live—the intimacy and fragility of our existence and how we remember and memorialize it, too. In Aparicio’s hands, her chosen materials—shells, lettuce, women’s hair, insect wings, seeds, human cadavers, but also concrete, wire, and wood—are not curiosities but collaborators, necessary storytellers that reckon with loss, transformation, and both the hegemonic power structures that might cause mass death or pain and the quiet, small rituals through which we cope with all of it. In light of her inclusion on the Short List for the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, we spoke about her practice, her particular fascinations, and her recent exhibition, “Ode to the Unclaimed Dead,” which was on view at the Chicago Artists Coalition from February 25 through April 7, 2022.

Monica Uszerowicz (MU): Where are you now, and how are you feeling?

Selva Aparicio (SA): I’m in Chicago, where I’m based most of the time. I try to be in between Spain and Chicago, but since the pandemic, it’s been almost impossible. It’s been crazy to juggle everything as an artist, but I’m also a mother, a daughter, and a partner. With the nature of my work—the installations, the way I collect materials—it’s a lot at once. Sometimes it can get very overwhelming.

MU: I’m curious about your upbringing and your relationship with nature, what you observed growing up. Your name is very poetic as well.

SA: Everyone in Spain thinks it is my nickname because it means “jungle,” but it is the name my mother gave me. Because her choice wasn’t acceptable in Catholic Spain, my mother had to go to the registration office, where a priest was called in to resolve the situation. She was given the option to add either “Maria” or “Virgen” in front of the name to make it legal. As a compromise, she chose Maria. My full name is Maria de la Selva—Mary of the Jungle.

MU: Wow. But you are Selva.

SA: I’m Selva. I grew up in a very special environment. My house is a boat-shaped house—built by a person who loves sailing—in the woods of Barcelona, in a neighborhood with a very complicated history. Before the Spanish Civil War, there were very few Catalan Modernism houses. It was a place for the high society to have their summers outside of the city; that was when there was no train, no bus, no nothing. They thought nature would cure you; they built a sanatorium there, and a huge casino as well, which was architecturally insane.

But, after the war, they destroyed most of the buildings. Some are still there and nature has grown onto them. As a kid, it was amazing to explore, to find these rooms and tile pieces from back then. We have a lot of wild boars, but they are slightly domesticated because they eat garbage left by people, so you can really get close to them. I was always inspired by the way nature reconquered that land. The neighborhood became the opposite of what it had been before—basically, the land was free, so if you built your house there, it was yours, and there was a lot of squatting. My parents came there first as a community of hippies. Slowly, everybody started to go away, but they stayed. Nature was always there for me.

MU: I'm fascinated by how you found remnants of the communities who’d lived there before. I am curious if you made art when you were little and when you started thinking about life cycles, in the way that they show up in your work today.

SA: As a kid, I was very exposed to death. At that time, a lot of my neighbors passed away from AIDS. There were also many dead animals in that neighborhood; I was telling my friend that the life expectancy of a cat there was two years, maximum. I guess as a kid, you’re thinking about this from a curious perspective rather than an emotional one—even finding a dead cat and seeing how it looks inside.

I didn’t grow up with my father, but he teaches with cadavers a lot, and I’d see them whenever I’d visit him while he was teaching. In America, the cadavers used for science are usually embalmed, but in Spain they often freeze them. I don't know if they do it everywhere, but the ones that he worked with were frozen. If you are teaching a class, for example, about mouth surgery—he specializes in zygomatic implants—they will put only the heads on trays. It’s very visceral. People fly from the United States to take those classes because when the body is frozen, it’s closer to what a real surgery would be like, rather than a cadaver with embalmed skin, which becomes more like plastic. It’s pretty intense to see them there, as they defrost throughout the day.

"As a kid, I was very exposed to death. At that time, a lot of my neighbors passed away from AIDS. There were also many dead animals in that neighborhood; I was telling my friend that the life expectancy of a cat there was two years, maximum. I guess as a kid, you’re thinking about this from a curious perspective rather than an emotional one—even finding a dead cat and seeing how it looks inside."

Ode to the Unclaimed Dead, 2022

Unclaimed plywood casket covered in dandelion seeds Casket

79 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 16-3/4 in.

Photo by Robert Chase Heishman

MU: Were you making artwork when you were little, too? I’m thinking of the way children imagine things, and you had so much to take in.

SA: Definitely. I consider my mom an artist, too. She wouldn’t say that, but I think she’s an artist; all my life, she was a weaver. She was always very open to participate and explore with me, or let me do things that I was curious about. It was a freestyle education. I also grew up with my neighbor, who was a painter. He made everything from scratch: his own paint, his own canvas, everything from zero. I did a lot of drawing and painting, and then I started doing more sculpture as an older kid.

My mother was also always inviting everybody to live in our house, mostly unhoused artists or travelers, so there was a lot of artistry around us. There was a group of musicians from Easter Island, called Varua. They ended up living in my house. One of the members, Tito Hotu, was a stone-carver; he taught me stone-carving and it was amazing. They have an album on Spotify now, with a song dedicated to us. I remember the day they arrived, Tito was carrying a Moai, the statues of Rapa Nui. But it was made of carved wood, a huge log on his shoulder—no biggie! My house is on a hill—from the street to the actual house, it’s seven floors without an elevator. It was raining and he was carrying the log and he thought he was going to sell it in Spain, but he never did. So, he gifted it to my mother for her hospitality. It’s still there.

MU: I love that these memories are still there, in your childhood home. You have a more recent show, but I wanted to ask about your exhibition, Coda, at Murmurs in Los Angeles—especially the piece Our Garden Remains (2022).

SA: This work came to be because I was doing research on unclaimed bodies in the US for another piece—which we’ll talk about—and that led me to walk through a lot of different cemeteries in Chicago, noticing fake flowers and decorations in the garbage cans. I’ve always collected materials and it takes me, sometimes, years to make a piece. For instance, right now I have, in my studio, I don’t know how many wasps’ nests that I’ve been collecting for many years for another piece about childhood and memories. It’s still not done, because I’m still collecting.

Because of Covid, there were more flowers in the cemeteries than usual. At first, I only collected the real ones; I’m usually more drawn to natural materials for my work. But then I quickly saw the possibilities of the plastic flowers and the other decorations as well. They were loaded with sadness and memory; it just made sense for them to exist together. I was interested, as well, in how we all come together in the end—even during the mourning of our loved ones individually. The flowers say so much about not just the way we mourn, but also about consuming and memories. All the materials I work with live in this strange stage between death and decomposition, in this limbo space. It’s almost like a stretch of that moment—there’s time to think about what happens in between. Even the plastic has an end.

"All the materials I work with live in this strange stage between death and decomposition, in this limbo space. It’s almost like a stretch of that moment—there’s time to think about what happens in between. Even the plastic has an end."

Our Garden Remains, 2021 (detail)

Tapestry made of faux and real flowers and various decorations scavenged from garbage bins in cemeteries, woven with artificial sinew

96 x 576 x 20 in.

Exhibited at Murmurs, Los Angeles

Photo by Joshua James Schaedel

MU: The other piece in the show, Si Buscas Milagros, Mira (If You Seek Miracles, Look Around) (2022), is a shrine containing the placenta from your son’s birth. Are you comfortable talking about your birth experience?

SA: I’m completely open. It was definitely extremely traumatic for both me and my son; literally, his heart stopped because of the complications, I passed out because of blood loss, and there was a problem with the placenta as well. That’s why I became so fascinated by the placenta and how little we know about it, how it’s mostly thrown away—other cultures take more interest in it. It’s thanks to my mom that I have the placenta; she ran home and put it in the freezer. For this project, she shipped it to the US, so it’s been traveling around, this placenta, for a while now.

MU: The shrine also contains tiles that look like the pieces you used in Entre Nosotros (Among Us) (2020)—concrete imprints from donor cadavers’ skin.

SA: They look almost the same, but these tiles have the trencadís technique, which I love. The word “trencat” in Catalan means “broken.” It was originally invented as a technique—instead of traditional mosaic, where you cut the tile to fit into your drawing, trencadís uses broken tiles from factories, from mass production, and repurposes them. Also, the place where the placenta is contained—usually in Europe, that part of the shrine is at eye-level, but in this case, it’s where the placenta would be in your body. If you see it in person, it’s lower than your belly. I guess that piece was the self-indulgent one.

Entre Nosotros (Among Us), 2020 (detail)

Portland cement tiles casted from human dead donors

132 x 132 x 132 in.

Photo by Robert Chase Heishman

MU: I really like it.

SA: This was something I really wanted to make. Our Garden Remains was more traditional—based in research, something I can probably explain better with words, discuss the “why” and the “how.” But this one was more emotional. Like the flowers, the placenta usually gets thrown away, like it’s not a big deal. I was shocked when I looked up the terminology of “placenta.” Its origin translates to “flat cake.” Flat cake. The most amazing organ, and it’s “flat cake.” It was insulting!

I was inspired by a wayside shrine, a peto de ánimas, in my mother’s neighborhood in the woods. You’re in the woods and suddenly you find this thing. First it had the Virgin Mary, but then someone decapitated her and it was just the body. Then somebody stole the body and there was nothing for a while. And then somebody put a tile with an image of Jesus Christ—it was almost an ongoing conversation throughout the years. And then I put the jar with the placenta there; I was looking at it thinking, “Oh, that's what I want.” That’s why the title, Si Buscas Milagros, Mira, was so important to me, because it questions the things we pray for—the placenta in this case. Like the many materials I use in my practice, it’s here with us in this world.

Si Buscas Milagros, Mira (If You Seek Miracles, Look Around), 2022 (detail)

Artist’s placenta, Hydrocal tiles cast from human dead donors, ashes

65 1/2 x 16 x 12 in.

Photo by Joshua James Schaedel

MU: For a moment, it was in the woods. That’s amazing. The two pieces work wonderfully together, given the dichotomy—or lack of dichotomy—between life and death. I also loved the title of Our Garden Remains, its double meaning. The way you describe and title your work is poetic, emotionally palpable.

SA: It's always a struggle, because I struggle with the English language. But it’s important to open the door to a conversation without being didactic. Giving this other layer to Our Garden Remains, I was very excited—I struggle with titles a lot, but the double meaning, the noun and the verb, was satisfying. That was a moment of happiness. At the exhibition, you enter from one of the doors and you encounter the piece, which is 48 feet long, but it’s on a diagonal. The space it creates ends in a very narrow corner you cannot go through; it forces you to go all the way around the piece, walking the 48 feet, and then you find that little room with the placenta at the end. The tapestry casts a big shadow over this empty space, which makes you feel like you’re inside the piece—and you can see other people walking by the other side. I thought that was interesting: the life and death conversation, who sees which side.

MU: Why did you choose to make Our Garden Remains a tapestry?

SA: We talked earlier about how we all come together—mourning is such an individual practice for most people and in these cemeteries, at least when I visited, everybody’s in their own place, arranging their flowers and not talking to each other. And then all these flowers go together to the garbage. I thought the tapestry was a very beautiful way to show this. The flowers are woven together, creating this textile. If you cut it somewhere, everything will fall apart. Everything points down to the ground—there is this pulling toward the earth; it gives you clues for where these things come from—but the piece is hanging up high. There is this tension between the worlds.

MU: You’ve discussed the experience of meeting the donor cadavers you worked with—while at a morgue and at the Yale Anatomy Lab—for Entre Nosotros. You often work with beings who are no longer animated, or with objects that were once part of the living world. There’s an exchange happening, something to learn from them.

SA: Yes. With these materials, you need time to get to know them. That’s why a lot of the materials sit in my studio for years before I’m even able to work with them. It’s not just about what they are—it’s what they really mean, how they make you feel. When you are trying to make something out of plastic, you are thinking, “What do I want to make?” When you work with these materials, they already have a language of their own. You’re trying to have a conversation with them and find common ground to make something happen. It’s a process. I learn a lot. And technically speaking, many of the materials I work with are extremely fragile. It’s not just about conceptualizing. How can I work with them to make them do what I want them to do—or rather, what they want to do?

When I talk about getting to know the donor cadavers—which was a very special time for me—I was literally getting to know them. A lot of the people spend months on the same table; you go every single day for hours, working and spending time with these people you’ve met after life. But you’re getting to know them in ways I will never get to know you. It’s super intimate, and you are there on your own; you get to look at every single crevice of their body, reading their history through their wrinkles. It’s very beautiful, and also difficult.

"With these materials, you need time to get to know them. That’s why a lot of the materials sit in my studio for years before I’m even able to work with them. It’s not just about what they are—it’s what they really mean, how they make you feel. When you are trying to make something out of plastic, you are thinking, “What do I want to make?” When you work with these materials, they already have a language of their own."

MU: As a species, we’ve been contending with death in a more public or collective way since the pandemic—which is not to diminish the struggles and pain that came before. You’ve always been making this kind of work—work that I find very sensitive to these experiences. Have you noticed a change in the way your work is processed or received?

SA: Oh, definitely. Since the pandemic, I feel like my work got more attention, because I think people were trying to find works that touched on those topics to just, I guess, share and make them more approachable. My most recent exhibition is “Ode to the Unclaimed Dead,” at the Chicago Artists Coalition. There have been a lot of images of mass graves of unclaimed bodies, especially the ones at Hart Island in New York. I found the word “unclaimed” so interesting and imprecise—in the US, an unclaimed body is one that isn’t claimed, but also, if you cannot afford funeral services, you have to “unclaim” your loved ones. They are both in the same category.

In Ode to the Unclaimed Dead, you enter the room and see an elevated casket inside a false wall; it’s the exact same measurements, materials, and aesthetics used for the caskets of unclaimed bodies in the US. There’s a lot of space between the entrance and the false wall; when you get close, you realize that the whole casket is covered with millions of dandelion seeds—on the sides, on the top. Each seed is alive and can represent one of those lives. Because it’s elevated, it’s giving space and time to think about it.

Ode to the Unclaimed Dead, 2022 (detail)

Unclaimed plywood casket covered in dandelion seeds Casket dimensions 79-1/2 x 29-1/2 x 16-3/4 inches Photo by Robert Chase Heishman

MU: Why dandelion seeds?

SA: They are very special to me. They are, first, a symbol of hope; children ask for wishes from them. It’s their fragility; they really symbolize hope for me. Everyone is a seed, everyone is so fragile.

MU: This practice of making things, this research, might be a good way to cope with these sometimes-ineffable subjects, too.

SA: And it’s also a way to have a certain approach without even letting viewers know what they’re approaching. I feel like a lot of my work has double layers—for instance, Our Garden Remains. When you enter the gallery, it’s like, “A wall of flowers!” And then you get closer and realize it’s something else, something different. Art lets you do that. It's a way of accessing very difficult topics; for me, it’s more sensorial and more approachable than words—even more so now with COVID, when we cannot even touch each other. So, it’s more and more important to have this work, I think.

MU: I was thinking about how you become interested in and then incredibly focused on a very specific idea—like the cicada wings used for Velo de Luto (Morning Veil) (2020).

SA: The cicada wings are a great example. The first day I came to Chicago in 2012, my English was terrible. I was supposed to transfer here for school and I was walking downtown by the lake—the little bit of nature that I could find. I saw these cicada shells on the bark of a tree and it was amazing. I put one in a container and started researching cicadas. Illinois has cicadas that appear every year, but I became interested in the cicadas that appear every 17 years—they have the longest life cycle. They wait underground; there is still a lot of mystery about how it’s possible for them to be so synchronized. Thinking about rebirth and life cycles, there’s no better example than a cicada. I waited for the swarm that happened in Kansas in 2015. I drove there, waited for them to die, and brought them to my studio.

Think of what we were talking about earlier—the conversation between the material, what you want to convey, how that can happen. I started sewing them one to the next, with one strand of hair—partly my mother’s hair and partly mine—in the form of a mourning veil. For me, that was very meaningful, because it was a reverse of Spanish patriarchy—breaking the cycles, reclamation. That’s why I used the hair from two generations of women, who grew up in a society like that, to weave it. In Spain, if your husband were to die, you used to have to wear a mourning veil all your life. I didn’t cut the hairs when I used them, so the hair is dangling a bit, and the veil has its own volume.

Selva Aparicio in her studio, with wasps’ nests

MU: Your bond with your mother inspires so much of your work. Has becoming a mother yourself, learning from your son, changed your relationship to your practice at all?

SA: I think that it’s hard to answer this, but I’m sure it has. I was looking at my portfolio since he was born, because I was applying to the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a grant for artists and writers with kids. I was looking at it and thinking, “You know what, Selva? You’ve made your best work since he was born.” A lot of people tell you that when you are a woman artist and you have a kid, your career is over—so many people say that. It made me a lot stronger. I always work really hard, and now I work even harder. It has given me an emotional stability that I have never had in my life before. Knowing this kind of love—I think that has helped me concentrate on my work on a different level.

Monica Uszerowicz

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer born in Brooklyn and raised in Florida. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, BOMB, Burnaway, Deem Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Pin-Up, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant recipient, a project for which she is currently writing about Floridian and Caribbean artists whose work elucidates or works to mitigate the effects of climate change. Her photographs have been exhibited globally and most recently on display at Miami art space Oolite Arts, as part of the group show Feels Like 97°.