Anna Maria Maiolino: Presence

Anna Maria Maiolino: Presence, Presence, Presence

For me, nothing is ever linear. Things come back around, but from a new angle each time. As Gilles Deleuze said, difference is both the start and the end of repetition. That's true for my drawings and for everything else I've made.
- Anna Maria Maiolino¹

Anna Maria Maiolino's work comes into being not only as it is conceived, made and re-made by her body, but also as it is witnessed and experienced by the bodies of those who encounter it. The artist works in series, building up a repertoire of forms and ideas in her mind and with her hands - a generative vocabulary of sorts - and she returns to them repeatedly, altering and developing them, in a process of repetition and difference. Maiolino is concerned with the origins of things, but she is not concerned with linear time. She describes her work as originating in memories deep down inside the body, often connected to her experience as a woman. In her exhibition Presença [Presence], a gathering of works reveal an insistent corporeal presence, invoked across an interconnected but diverse multiplicity of materials and forms that all manifest her body's precarity and attest to our own. From the trajectory of the breath that shapes the blown glass sculptures that comprise the Emanados [Emanations] series (2007/2026), to the bodily imprints on the ceramic wall sculptures São Seis Raku [They Are Six Raku] [2025), the ghostly forms of the body's interior in the x-rays that form Marcas na Transparência [Marks on Transparency] (1998), the skeletal-like constellation of Na parede [On the Wall] (2026), the trace of the hand in the Na Noite - No Escuro [In the Night - In the Dark] drawings (2025), and the watchful eye in the photograph X from the Fotopoemação [Photopoemaction] series (1974). Maiolino's insistent presence is embodied in the materiality of these works, while our own embodied presence is integral to the work's persistent vitality.

In Emanados [Emanations], a series of glass sculptures, glass becomes both a container for and embodiment of breath. Formed by blowing molten glass into organic forms, these swelling shapes are delicate vessels, tender spaces that protect the lifegiving force of breath. The forms were created by Maiolino's exhalations and in turn our breath fills these repositories; our bodies are linked to Maiolino's own, and our respiratory cycles - repeated but nonlinear - are fused. Breathing is an invisible and repetitive task which forms the basis of life. In Maiolino's work, the constant and repeated process of breathing is a form of creative work that links each moment in time together. With Emanados, we share a 'vital puff of breath' with Maiolino, recalling a poem the artist wrote in 1971:

'AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

in

out

I'm alive

AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

air

I breathe in

life-body

I breathe out

I penetrate the window of the world

AJJJJJJJJJJ

HAAAAAAAAAA

I breathe in

I breathe out

rhythm

vital puff of breath

AJJJJJJJJJJ

I breathe in

darkness falls

silence'

(Rio de Janeiro, 1971)²

Concurrent to her experiments with concrete poetry in the early 1970s, Maiolino began developing a series of drawings titled Mapas Mentais [Mental Maps] (1972-99), in which she used the structure of a grid or repeated mark making, interjected by words printed in Letraset, to question fixed meanings and articulate the fragmented experience of migration, displacement and life under Brazil's oppressive military dictatorship (1964-85). Maiolino states that drawing is her breath; it is a vital practice that sustains her. Honouring drawing as humans' first artistic expression, she explains that the practice allows her to have a 'storyboard of thinking'.³  She traces back her engagement with drawing to when she first studied art, aged 16, after her family emigrated from postwar Italy to Venezuela in 1954, before they settled in Brazil in 1960. She considers her drawings as works 'with' paper, rather than 'on' paper. In the 1970s this manifested as rips, cuts and tears, treating paper like a malleable material. From the 1980s, the sheet of paper would 'become a "receiving" space for the action of a gesture'.⁴ In the series Na Noite - No Escuro [In the Night - In the Dark], repeated marks accumulate into networks of organic, often cell-like forms. These drawings are produced as daily rituals and can therefore be understood as explorations of memory and the subconscious - they resemble constellations, cartographies, landscapes, organic masses. The marks coalesce into expanding and contracting forms; they are articulations of a nonlinear, creative, bodily time that resists categorisation or confinement. Maiolino sees all her work as a political statement when it is presented to the public, when its presence is shared with others - whether a performance, abstract drawing or sculpture.⁵ The insistent marks of Na Noite - No Escuro [In the Night - In the Dark], articulated in permanent white pen, are luminous against the black paper: stark, resolute and resistant in their repeated irregularity. 'I'm alive', they state - again, and again.

This insistent vitality - the 'life-body' of Maiolino's 1971 poem - continues to resonate in the series Marcas na Transparência [Marks on Transparency], in which the 'receiving space' of paper is replaced by x-ray scans of Maiolino's own body. These intimate images reveal her body's interior, evoking a sense of vulnerability. They 'receive' drops of ink that drip, run and seep into silhouettes around a spectral skeleton. Maiolino describes the ink as 'a transforming agent', whose corporeal appearances on the x-rays 'recall, reinforce, and further enhance the production system of these drawings: body/matter and the interrelations between the force of gravity and the drives of my own body.'⁶

Maiolino's work always invokes the performative presence of the body. Her practice can be considered as a performance with an ever-changing score, a score that she explains 'is expanded when I change media and technique'.⁷ In 1989, Maiolino began working with clay: 'When I arrived at clay, all my work changed.'⁸ She felt that everything was possible with this tactile medium, and she reflects that it was at this point that her cosmovision came into being. She recalls a crystallising moment when, after making the work in clay Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil in 1993, her son suggested that she read French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. After finishing the book in 1999, she felt deeply moved by the profound connections she found between his philosophy and her practice - and the roots of her own lived experience of Calabrese culture in southern Italy, where she was born. She remembers watching her mother make gnocchi, repeatedly moulding their forms, the shapes never identical because of the organic movements and inevitable irregularity of the human hand. She began devising installations of unfired clay shapes arranged in serial formations, grids, piles, constellations, which could then be recycled, reconstituted and reformed at the end of each exhibition. These shapes were moulded by hand, in quotidian gestures, just like her mother's gnocchi. They are manifestations of daily rituals; they bear the traces of a body's movements while summoning the repeated and crucial internal workings of the body, ranging from ingesting to excreting. These works also speak to the often-invisible reproductive labour of women's bodies, a form of repetition that sustains the bodies of those they care for. Repetitive domestic labour is not simply a repetition of the same task, but the constant creative repetition of remaking the present. Both Maiolino and Deleuze draw a distinction between a sterile and rigid form of repetition, which Deleuze describes as 'repetition of the same', and a creative form of repetition, the 'repetition of difference'.⁹ This kind of making and remaking necessarily embraces flux and resists linearity.

In 1997 Maiolino made her first raku pieces, engulfing her clay forms in the flames and smoke of the firing process. Despite the intense heat of the kiln fixing each form, sculptures made using the raku technique retain the unpredictable traces of the firing on their surface, leaving swirling and mercurial marks. Maiolino returned to the practice of raku in 2015 to create what she calls an 'alphabet of signs'.¹⁰ São Seis Raku [They Are Six Raku] is one of these constellations, fired in the kiln in her studio along with cloths and leaves to leave their abstract marks on their surfaces. Each irregular kneaded form bears the repeated traces of Maiolino's hands, as well as the elemental traces of fire and the imprints of the detritus of everyday life.

Maiolino herself watches over us and her work in the gallery: her eye features in a single printed photograph (X from the series Fotopoemação) from 1974. Glancing aside, as if warily observing something approaching, Maiolino is present with us. In the Super 8 film X from which this image originates, a pair of sharp scissors is pressed against the artist's eyes and tongue, a visceral comment on the acute precarity of living under the surveillance, censorship and violence of Brazil's military dictatorship. Here, in the print from 2026, the scissors are ominously absent. Only Maiolino's eye is present. 'I'm alive', it tells us, 'I'm alive', 'I'm alive.'

Lotte Johnson¹¹

July 2026