With simple props that might be found in a kitchen or tool shed, Marta María Pérez Bravo conjures scenes that embody the sacred, giving prosaic form to mysteries of the spirit. Crossing boundaries between the sacred and the profane comes naturally for Perez Bravo, as her art and life are rooted in the tenets of a faith that finds the spiritual manifest in all things, natural and manufactured, living and inanimate.
A native of Havana, Pérez Bravo came to the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte as an adult, finding within them a way of comprehending the world that was, for her, universal in its reach and deeply personal in its touch. Her earliest photographs dealt with just such a convergence: even as she became immersed in the religions of the African Diaspora, she became a mother with the birth of twins. While Pérez Bravo’s infant daughters led her on a personal journey into maternity—with all the attendant realities of diapers and conflicting feeding and sleeping schedules—her photographs were immersed in Yoruba tradition, in which twin spirits, called ibeji, are revered.
From the moment she began to make art in 1986, Pérez Bravo has been her own model in photographs shot by her husband Flavio, who operates the camera according to the artist’s direction. And from the earliest photographs, made in the courtyard of their home in Havana’s Marianao section, Pérez Bravo has adhered to a singular format. Each photograph depicts the artist enacting a concept derived from her faith, situated within a white aura that causes the edges of the scene to vanish into nothingness.
In the pantheon of Santería and Palo Monte, white is associated with Obatala, the spirit (or more properly, orisha) of creativity and purity. With this white aura, Pérez Bravo honors Obatala and removes her vignettes from their specific place—whether her home in Havana or her current residence in Monterrey, Mexico—to a floating immaterial space that is simultaneously familiar and visionary. In the process, Pérez Bravo also transforms her body, so that she is at once an individual woman and a representative of all flesh. In this, perhaps, she adheres to the examples of Christian martyrdom inherited from Catholicism, her family’s religion and the furnace that forged the smelting of Africa, Taino and European traditions in Cuba.
Like many white Cubans who came to Santería and Palo Monte as adults, Pérez Bravo regards folklorist Lydia Cabrera as a spiritual guide. Fifty years ago, Cabrera was engaged in a decade-long study of the oral histories and legends of Cubans of African descent, eventually publishing her findings as El Monte in 1954. Like her peers, artist Wifredo Lam and writer/musicologist Alejo Carpentier, Cabrera spent years in Europe that led her to make connections between the modern fascination with African art and the reality of African influence on Cuban culture.
Following a generation of writers and artists whose work had been derived from academic models, Lam, Carpentier and Cabrera were among a group of pioneers that led Cubans to realize the uniqueness of the island’s syncretic culture. Lam has long been lionized as Cuba’s foremost modernist, but Cabrera exerts a special influence among many current artists. As Pérez Bravo puts it, "Lydia Cabrera’s books are like Bibles to me. I’m really a devotee of her literature and thoughts." Cabrera’s research remains a great resource for understanding Afro-Cuban culture. But perhaps as important for artists was her methodology: By attributing validity to personal accounts and oral histories as cultural records, Cabrera encouraged the next generation of artists and writers to value the subjective voice.
Subjectivity is central to Pérez Bravo’s photographs, which are composed with an underlying symbolism alluding to her personal experience with spirituality. The meanings of her images can be elusive, and clarity may not always come from her titles, which tend toward the poetic and often incorporate terms from Palo Monte. As Pérez Bravo works from her faith, certain allusions may be clouded in translation to nonitiates. For such viewers, the photographs may appeal purely in terms of their mystery and beauty.
But central themes and associations emerge for those who take a holistic approach to Pérez Bravo’s work, understanding that with each photograph, the artist guides the viewer through her own spiritual journey. Indeed, her recent photographs offer evidence that this journey is taken step by step, and that each step is a profound encounter between flesh and spirit, the commonplace and the holy, matter and the immaterial.
Several recent photographs suggest a neophyte’s searching need for faith. Posing with her feet in mid-step, as if frozen in mid-journey, Pérez Bravo describes the travails and comforts of a pilgrim’s progress. "Cruzando un Río" (Crossing a River) shows the artist’s bare feet among strands of elastic thread, in a shallow space defined by a white sheet. Taken at its literal elements—feet, thread, sheet—the scene is simple and mundane. But the title encourages us to think symbolically, to imagine that the threads are ripples of water so that we see a woman taking a cautious step through a shallow rivulet, moving slowly upstream.
Santería and Palo Monte are religions of symbols, in which one thing invariably stands for another. Having nudged her viewers toward symbolism, Pérez Bravo sends us in search of metaphor and narrative. Is the woman fleeing unseen pursuers, wading into water to throw the dogs off her scent? Or is she moving with reverent care as she ascends toward some unseen vision? Looking at Pérez Bravo’s other scenarios, one begins to suspect the latter. Recalling the sacred associations of rivers—cleansings, baptisms, crossing over to Jordan—it becomes clear that the artist’s feet are leading us somewhere.
The feet race across square stones marked with crucifixes in "Siete Cantos" (Seven Songs), a path through the bedrock of music in religious rituals. Ascending a stack of bricks in "Acosumbrado a Saltar" (Accustomed to Jumping), the artist’s feet act out an ecstatic faith in the miraculous abilities of orishas, the divine spirits of ancestors. "The spirits leap and fly without obstacles," Pérez Bravo says in reference to this photograph.
"Buscando un Secreto" (In Search for a Secret) shows the artist nearing the source of her journey, posed as if diving headlong into a well. The well, Pérez Bravo says, is filled with sacred inscriptions. As she surrenders herself to the darkness of the well, the artist is figuratively reentering the womb, preparing for rebirth in the rituals of her faith.
Pérez Bravo demonstrates the routines of ritual with "Los Componentes" (The Components), a series of three photographs showing the black kettle associated with altars and ceremonies. Reaching from above, the artist’s arm deposits items into the kettle, each representing the various ingredients that activate the sacred receptacle. Soil from a holy site is a powerful activator, and its sources are indicted by small white carvings—graveyards are represented by crucifixes, churchyards by church facades. Small bells called aja, used to summon the orisha to ceremonies, are arranged in preparation as one is delicately rung.
Obatala is summoned by "Caballo" (Horse), in which the artist sits beneath a white cloth topped by horsehairs. "Los Cantos Mandan" (The Commanding Songs) shows the artist squatting over ten empty bowls, hands clapping as she performs the songs that praise and direct the orisha. The tools of ritual are infused with power, so much so that they become extensions of the artist’s body in Mbele, an Afro-Cuban term for knife. The knife’s handle is fused to her hand, so that the blade becomes an appendage of her arm. The artist’s hand is again transformed in "Ver y Creer" (See and Believe), which uses her body to give physical form to the orisha.
If Pérez Bravo recalls the steps of her journey within Palo Monte, from neophyte to initiate, there can be no doubt of her ultimate faith. "Vive Ahi" (Live There) offers testament to a belief in miracles. The artist is unseen, again posed under a white sheet. Atop her head is a bowl holding a crescent moon. The image refers to a legend, Pérez Bravo says. "It is said that if one places a plate of milk at night as an offering to the moon, it takes a drink." In Spanish, the words I translate as "it takes a drink" (ella baja a beber) also refer to low tide, to the relationship of the moon and the oceans. In this still and poetic image, Pérez Bravo finds an eternal cycle in the ephemeral moment at which the moon’s lips touch the bowl.
On the thoroughly domestic stage on which she enacts her passion plays, Pérez Bravo has found a kind of homespun transcendentalism. This is where her photographs have the most power for those not initiated into her religion. Although the references can be specific to Santería and Palo Monte, Pérez Bravo speaks from a common vocabulary that connects her to all faithful people. As she makes her journey, Pérez Bravo personal cosmography speaks from the beliefs of one to the faith of many.
--Grady T. Turner
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