Probing the membrane between horror and hope: artist Claudia Bernardi
By Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
This article originally appeared in the Winter 1999 Clas Newsletter.
Claudia Bernardi’s artwork is inspired by suffering, yet infused with life. Drawing upon experiences of state terror — such as the exhumation of mass graves in Central America — the artist’s challenge is to resurrect beauty amid the bloodshed and in so doing, to refuse to succumb to the silencing embrace of political repression.
A
native of Argentina, Claudia’s work as both an artist and a human rights
activist has carried her to many unexpected destinations, including Addis-Ababa,
Ethiopia; El Mozote, El Salvador; and a remote village in El Petén,
Guatemala, where she helped recover the remains
of over one hundred victims — mostly children — killed in an 1982 massacre
by army forces. Forensic examination of the skeletal remains Bernardi
helped unearth successfully confirmed the grim horrors first suggested
in survivors’ testimonies: in order to save ammunition, most children
were beaten against the sides of a well, and then thrown down it to die.
Gathering the fragmented remnants of their brief lives changed Bernardi
forever. "Something really major happens," she explains, "when
you go down a well to find over one hundred children murdered. At that
point… the membrane which divides lucidity from madness… is stretched."
Through
her artwork, Bernardi probes that pliable membrane, that space in which
we remain human in the face of atrocity. She describes her art as an "antidote
for the solitude," a liaison between that state of intense suffering
and the larger world. Furthermore, and all the more 
remarkably,
she is able to communicate through her art the unique knowledges which
are opened to her in that space. There is a tenderness, she affirms, in
knowing death intimately, in cradling the tattered clothing of children
in her hands and perceiving, through it, the immense vulnerability of
human life. Her work is a visual testimony of sorts, yet it transcends
the mere representation of tragic events. "I create art in that very
vulnerable state of aperture where everything merges — the good and the
bad, the sorrowful and the joyful," Bernardi says.
Her
technique mirrors this conceptual complexity; she calls it "fresco
on paper," a method she developed herself, whereby layer after layer
of pure pigments are applied to wet paper and run repeatedly — sometimes
hundreds of times — through a printmaker’s press. There are no solvents
or binders to shape the pigments’ flow across the paper; indeed, Bernardi
describes her creative process as one of 
constant
negotiation with headstrong reds, obstinate blues, and other colors, each
blending with an apparent will of its own, mediated by the artist’s careful
influence. Upon and between the layers of pigmentation, Bernardi uses
a porcupine quill to engrave images, sometimes words. The final effect
is one of multiple sheaths, partially submerged forms, fragile human figures
suspended between layers of rich pigment — like the shifting, dreamlike,
imprecise character of many survivors’ memories. "It is beautiful,"
Bernardi explains, "but not without pain."
Finding
this beauty is itself an act of resistance. Reflecting on her own experiences
of life under military rule in Argentina, Bernardi says, "What they
wanted was not to kill so many thousand people… it was to create an atmosphere
to last into the future, an atmosphere of bleak 
individuality,
of hopelessness, ugliness, a lack of even remembering what integrity is
about. And they almost succeeded." Artists, she affirmed,
played a pivotal role in resisting the regime. In the face of state abuses
and intense personal suffering, Bernardi explains, "there is an enormous
temptation to become ugly, dry in the heart… for artists to continue doing
their work in that context is nothing short of monumental."
For
an entire generation of Argentines who grew up during this period, the
events of the dirty war structured their lives, leaving them no choice
about whether to be political. Art, for Bernardi, is a way of reflecting
on these events. But Bernardi does not speak of healing: she explicitly
denies the applicability of the term. "It has dangerous ramifications,"
she insists, "because from certain things there is no healing possible."
Out of respect for the extraordinary nature of people’s loss, there can
and should be no attempt to smooth it over with an unblemished exterior.
"I know where the wound is," she says of her own experience,
"and I don’t want to forget it, to make it less." The challenge
is finding a way to live with it without causing further harm — identifying
that space in the pliable membrane between horror and hope, where memories
of the terror meld with compassion and even give way to a painful sense
of peace. Bernardi’s artwork transports us to precisely this place, providing
a unique glimpse of its complex and fragile beauty.
all images copyright Claudia Bernardi