The Enduring Signal from Lourdes's buoy
A tribute to Lourdes Grobet, an extraordinary artist, friend and imaginative beacon to dreamers everywhere
“I had an inherent leaning towards politics. It had been in me since I was a young woman. But not in the ‘working for a political party’ way of speaking. My political inclinations were towards working for the needs of people and working in the streets.” – Lourdes Grobet, 2021
Versión publicada en la revista Resiliente Magazine en Ciudad de México
My friend of many years, iconic Mexican artist, photographer and filmmaker Lourdes Grobet, died of pancreatic cancer in July 2022, at 81 years of age. I’ve been thinking about her ever since. Her imaginative light continues to shine brightly for all of us who knew her and/or were touched by her art, but I have struggled for months with how to describe her special gift.
The many posthumous tributes to Lourdes tend to focus on her pathbreaking photography of Mexican wrestlers, the lucha libre, and with good reason. The New York Times reported in their Spanish language obituary:
[A]round 1980 she entered the wrestling arena, camera in hand, convinced that the sport of wrestling was an underexplored part of indigenous Mexican culture.
“I was so surprised by the events,” she told AWARE, a Paris nonprofit that promotes female artists, in a 2021 interview. “And I decided that I would focus a lot of my efforts on wrestling because here I saw what I considered to be the true Mexican culture.”
In another interview, Lourdes spoke about the cultural importance and meaning of the masks of the luchadores.
[T]here is so much history in these wrestling rituals. Masks are a common link in Mexican history, linking the pre-Columbian past to the present, for example the Zapatistas. Playing with and veiling one’s identity was central to my work.
Although I live part time in Mexico and love this amazing country, I did not meet Lourdes until later in her life, and I initially knew nothing about her storied artistic career nor her iconic photography of the luchadores. As a Swiss-Mexican who grew up and was educated primarily in Mexico City, Lourdes had unique insight into Mexican culture. She was a genre-bending, creative tour de force whose brilliantly varied art projects spanned more than five decades and multiple art forms bringing fresh perspectives to what she called “the staleness of tradition” at every turn.
Lourdes became a friend and imaginative sounding board for me at a time when I was obsessed with trying to mount a new political art project in the Arctic. In an incredible irony, she was editing footage for a film she had just shot in the Arctic exploring one of the main themes of my project. She understood me right away, although she was also far ahead of me.
What follows is my story of our offbeat, often hilarious friendship at the far frontiers of artistic imagination.
BUOYED BY LOURDES
My introduction to Lourdes came via an appropriately eccentric encounter with an oceanographic navigation buoy she had left behind in Anchorage, Alaska, 7,885 km (4,900 miles) from Mexico City, while filming in the Bering Strait.
I was in Anchorage in November 2011, to meet with Tandy Wallack, owner of Circumpolar Expeditions. I was seeking Tandy’s help understanding the logistics for the Arctic leg of a new multi-media performance art project that I was thinking of launching called América 2.0.
The project was about imagining what might happen if we scrapped the dysfunctional politics of the surveillance and warfare state that emerged in the US after 9/11 and started over with a new imaginary nation. Today, the project looks prescient.
Tandy and I were in her kitchen overlooking her wooded backyard. I saw the buoy sitting atop a large picnic table. A location light flashed intermittently, giving this landlocked marine contraption a spectral appearance akin to the neural spasms of a long amputated limb.
Not recognizing it as a buoy, I asked Tandy what the big blinking thing on her picnic table was, and she answered matter of factly, “Oh, that’s Lourdes’ buoy.” It was impossible not to laugh, and half chuckling, I blurted out, “Who the hell is Lourdes? And what is she doing with a buoy?”
Tandy shared the entire amazing story, and we ended up in her basement watching a first cut trailer for Lourdes’ documentary film “Equilibrio y Resistancia” about the arbitrary geopolitical division by Russia and the US of the Native American people of the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait. The film went on to become a 2015 Ariel Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature.
I asked Tandy for Lourdes’ contact info, and our friendship began via email and Skype, with Lourdes in Mexico City and me in LA. I knew immediately that I’d found a kindred spirit.
SCHEMING ABOUT A NEW AMÉRICA WITH LOURDES
Lourde’s Equilibrio y Resistancia documentary began with the dream of a wheelchair bound paraplegic friend. The friend called Lourdes excitedly one morning to tell her that she’d had a dream that Lourdes and she had traveled to the Arctic and crossed the Bering Strait by boat from Little Diomede island on the US side of the International Dateline to Big Diomede island on the Russian side. At their closest point, the islands are 2.4 miles (3.8 kilometers) apart, but both the weather and Arctic waters between them are often treacherous for crossing.
Danger and daunting logistics aside, Lourdes knew immediately that her friend’s dream was an important and inspired message, that she must act upon it. She committed in the moment to not only take the trip and make the crossing, but to film the entire adventure.
As she researched the project and put together funding and grant requests, Lourdes’ understanding deepened, and the symbolic meaning and purpose of the journey came into focus.
Forgotten victims of the Cold War, the native people of the Diomede Islands were often members of the same family forced to live in separation on either the US, English speaking side of the Dateline, or the Russian side. Caught in the maelstrom of a nuclear powered geopolitical superpower standoff, residents of the islands were not even permitted to travel from one island to the other to visit long lost relatives. It was, and still is, emotionally compelling living history, a cautionary tale about the culturally oblivious mindset of both Russian and US colonialism, now writ large in Ukraine as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war.
Equilibrio y Resistancia is perhaps more relevant now than when Lourdes filmed it.
By the time Lourdes and I met, she had already completed principal filming in the Arctic and was working on editing, post-production and promotion of the film. Yet she was captivated by the craziness and synchronicity of the project I envisioned, and a delightfully humorous dialogue ensued.
My project was called América 2.0. In the end, I could not raise enough money to mount the audacious version that I envisioned and had to put it on indefinite hold. However, Lourdes loved the imaginative boldness of the project, and we had an enormous amount of fun brainstorming and discussing ways to possibly work together, becoming friends in the process.
AMÉRICA 1.0
After 9/11, I knew almost immediately that the beautiful country I had been blessed to live in from birth was being hijacked by a cabal of madmen (and women) who were making decisions that would have devastating consequences for generations to come. At the time, I wrote:
We are operating with a dangerously shriveled view of América that is too often defined by the sum of our fears rather than the sum or our boldest dreams and aspirations for the future.
As much as I love the United States, I had always thought of it as being part of “América,” which includes the 35 nations of North, South and Central America, large parts of the Caribbean and Greenland.
This is evidently a provocative idea, as evidenced by the continuing reactions of alarm in the US against Alfredo Jaar’s 1987 art project, Logo for America.
After 9/11, the capacious idea of the United States of América seemed to have been forgotten in the rush to identify an all encompassing enemy. We had not only defined América as just the United States, we’d gone overnight from a nation admired worldwide for its openness to others as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, to a nation defined by its anger and fear of the other.
No one understood this better than Lourdes. During one conversation, I asked her how Mexicans viewed the US. Although Lourdes found many things to admire about the nation, she answered that Mexicans “suffered” their often overbearing, ham handed neighbor.
AMÉRICA 2.0
My plan to launch the new nation, with everyone in América being automatically included as a citizen, was as follows.
FIRST, I wanted to fly to the Arctic Circle with a minimalist but representative expedition that included indigenous people from the area and plant the América 2.0 flag in the Arctic ice cap to reclaim the entire region and its enormous and geopolitically crucial store of natural resources for all citizens of the new nation.
Many people do not know there is a mad scramble by Russia, the US, China and other nuclear armed states to lay claim to the vast oil and gas reserves under the Arctic ice. In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated the Arctic Ocean floor may be home to 30% of the planet's undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13% of its undiscovered oil.
At the time that I dreamed up the project, Russia was already using miniature submarines to plant the Russian flag on the Arctic ocean floor in an effort to lay claim to the regions’s resources.
I envisioned filming the planting of the América 2.0 flag and the reading of a proclamation about the founding of the new nation, its vision, purpose and inclusivity while also laying claim to the region’s entire natural resource base on behalf of our citizens across the Americas, especially indigenous people. I even met with various tribal leaders while I was in Alaska, and they seemed intrigued and willing to indulge me. Although I’m sure they also thought I was crazy, they nonetheless shared wonderful ideas and suggestions.
Tandy helped me understand that the Arctic ice cap is an ever moving target, and we eventually settled on planting the flag and reading the proclamation somewhere “nearish” the North Pole and ultimately much safer. Who would know? After all, América 2.0 was meant to be comedic, nearly farcical, because humor and irony are often the best ways to make a point.
THE SECOND LEG of the new nation building exercise involved reuniting the Diomede Islands. I saw the islands as historically, uniquely symbolic, the last remnants of the ancient Bering Land Bridge over which many of the first inhabitants of the Americas traveled from Eurasia.
I wanted to plant the América 2.0 flag on Little Diomede, then sail to Big Diomede with a small delegation from the US side to plant the América 2.0 flag there as well, while filming a symbolic ceremony celebrating our brother and sisterhood.
Because of her in-depth knowledge of the area and its history, the reunification idea really resonated with Lourdes, and she suggested that we could reunite the islands symbolically by using laser lights with intersecting beams while filming the event at night.
This led us on a hunt for lights that would be both sufficiently powerful and affordable to span the considerable distance. It wasn’t feasible either technically or financially, but Lourdes suggested using boats manned by residents of both islands to get close enough to the International Dateline to allow their beams to cross using the best high powered portable lights available at the time. She was even willing to return to the Arctic with me if I could find funding for the project.
The use of intersecting light beams was a brilliant idea by Lourdes with perfect symbolism, but we never quite figured out the physics, or the finances, of the project.
THIRD, after reclaiming the Arctic and reuniting the Diomede Islands, I wanted to travel to the United Nations in New York to file an application for América 2.0 to be admitted as not only a member state, but as a permanent member and Chair of the Security Council.
I had already visited the UN with brilliant New York City performance artist Shishaldin. (She is originally from Alaska and is named after Mt. Shishaldin.) She also loved the zaniness of the project and wanted to work with me if we could find meaningful funding.
The staff at the UN information desk were incredibly helpful and decidedly amused. They seemed to love the tremendous imaginative energy of the whole thing and gave us all the necessary forms to file for membership while taking time to explain each step of the process.
FOURTH, after filing for UN membership, I envisioned an epic year long (minimum) journey from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, recruiting new América 2.0 member states along the way while documenting the bounty and munificence of our new nation.
BEING PROVOCATIVE
In a description of a 2015 exhibit of Lourdes’ work at the Centre de Cultura Contemporánia de Barcelona, the museum director noted that:
Much of Lourdes Grobet's photographic work is dominated by transgression, humor and provocation. She is an enemy of delicacies, in the midst of paradoxes she always seeks the combat position: to look at the gaze of those who are not heard. Her work does not seek images appropriate to the fashionable discourse. “I don't need to understand why I take photos. I have always been clear about why I do a project.”
The description of Lourdes as an “enemy of delicacies” (enemiga de exquisiteces) whose work “does not seek images appropriate to the fashionable discourse” (no busca imágenes adecuadas al discurso de moda) speaks volumes about the depth of the loss from her death.
In an age of conformity and small mindedness inadequate to the task of confronting the enormous civilizational challenges of the times, Lourdes work and example still speak directly to inspire those who know how to listen.
Although I saw Lourdes less frequently after pausing the América 2.0 project, she was always willing to make time to meet when I encountered young artists who admired and had been inspired by her work and were amazed that I knew her. She was also always gracious enough to pose for photos with them.
After learning of her death, I rounded up a group of friends for a night of lucha libre at Arena México in México City to celebrate Lourdes’ remarkable life. The star of the night was a luchador named Místico, an obvious crowd favorite, who miraculously came back from what looked like certain defeat at least a dozen times in the course of the fight. It was a fitting remembrance.
RIP Lourdes.
Into the Mystic (excerpt)
By Van Morrison
We were born before the wind
Also, younger than the sun
'Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic
Hark now, hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly
Into the mystic
Yeah, when that fog horn blows
I will be coming home
Yeah, when that fog horn blows
I wanna hear it
I don't have to fear it
And I wanna rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
Then magnificently we will float
Into the mystic
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