"One has to look at oneself, understand who one is, and nurture it"

Paula Bonet receives me in her studio. She is working on a large-format piece where I recognize the artist Roser Bru who, like a sacred totem, watches over me. I observe the books and see that she also has La mirada interior (Siruela) by Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí, which among others, talks about Hildegard von Bingen ---a totem of mine---, and we begin to draw lines about female characters with such enthusiasm that I almost forget to record. It's curious, we haven't even started to get into the subject and she has already named and recommended a few interesting women's names.

In March 2021, Anagrama published her first novel, La anguila, a text that redraws the archetype of the hero's journey, to transform into the heroine's journey, in a raw transit full of obstacles that concludes with the protagonist's recognition. This 2022, with the publication of Los diarios de la anguila, the narration of this odyssey is culminated from the illustrated diaries that are the seed of the first book.

--- How was La anguila conceived?

--- It's a long journey that is already in my first drawings. La anguila is a work that had been brewing for a long time, but the click that allows me to write it now is first age, then the perspective of the initial moment from which the narration emerges, which began exactly 20 years ago, and then the social context. I started writing the book in 2019 and, at first, I wanted to talk only about the violences that are invisible in language. I had had the experience of maternities and non-maternities, and I thought that this violence is even in a consultation with the most feminist gynecologist, and that I myself am part of these violences. I wanted to talk about those that are in all these places: in good manners, in the way of doing things, more pleasant, or agreeable, or comfortable, which also counts.

--- How do you decide to publish it?

--- Initially, the book was only supposed to be the first part, but several things happened, such as I was lucky enough to meet Nell Leyshon at the Oaxaca Book Fair ---I had just read El Bosque and had read Del color de la Leche--- whom I wanted to quote. I met her without knowing it was her, and talking about her book and so on, that's when she told me "this story you're explaining to me, you have to tell it now." Then I told myself, if I'm talking about violence, why am I hiding the most obvious ones? Because they are just as invisible as the first ones, because they seem obvious to us when they have already concluded. All the mechanisms that allow a person to be raped, for a woman to be harassed, manipulated in all these ways that I explain in the book, happen in plain sight of everyone. They are also invisible. It's when she appears dead that "oh!", we throw our hands up in horror. No. She appeared dead after a long process and, surely, many signs that none of us saw or that we overlooked, that we linked to these good customs. I think they even made us think that we had to face them because that's how we were strong. And face them silently. That for a year a person is following you, "they have a problem, poor thing"; or that semester after semester, a person with a position within a university abuses students, is very strong. What I was trying to do for La anguila was that all this we are talking about now, the reader would not receive it in an obvious way, nor what my opinion was about it and, above all, what my feelings were. That they wouldn't know if I was still hurt, if I had resolved it, if I felt a lot of rage, if I felt a lot of anger, if I loved, if I was still asleep. For me, it was important to distance myself and disassociate myself from a character who bears my name, because in the end, things happen to this character that have happened to me, but many other things happen to her that have not happened to me.

--- In the end, it doesn't matter if you are or are not the Paula Bonet of the story, in the end what matters is that there is a story being read and it's as if you were looking out the window at what's happening in the street. You interpret what you, as a reader, are feeling when you read it.

--- In La sed (Lundwerg), the first illustrated book I made that moves away from the preciousness of my early drawings, there are very dark images, even the eel already appears. I was looking for this essential mutation to be able to survive: adapt to the environment, but with a bit of intelligence. In that book, what was happening to me was that I was approaching this guilt with a certain lucidity, without understanding anything: why do I carry the guilt for something I haven't done? Why do I look in the mirror every day and have to resolve this conflict that I don't even know what it is? It's impossible for my actions to be so important, to condition the lives of the rest of the world, and in such a negative way. There is a moment in life, usually around 40 for women, where there is this revelation of understanding that one cannot be wasting energy fighting against something that is external. One has to look at oneself, understand who one is ---very difficult (laughs)---, try to understand who one is, and has to nurture that.

"There is a moment in life where there is this revelation of understanding that one cannot be wasting energy fighting against something that is external"

--- Publishing The Eel, which is a novel that hurts, has done more damage to me than I thought once it was published, because I knew I was very far away, but in reality, I wasn't. With the book Rodents. Pregnant Body Without Embryo (Literatura Random House) about gestational losses, I was very much inside and I risked making a book. I tried to polish the text a lot, to keep it to the bone, and for my intimacy not to appear, but I was at the epicenter of the pain and I never publish from there. I need this rest, this perspective, that's how it has been until now. Rodents didn't pose any problem for me to present it, to do a very long tour, to go to Latin America I don't know how many thousands of times, to listen to stories of women much more serious than mine. At no time did my voice tremble, nor did my eyes get wet, nothing. And with The Eel, which is a story I explain 20 years later, when the stories of other people reach me, they affect me a lot, they hurt me a lot. I'm also getting stories more serious than mine and they hurt me. It's like: why are so many violences allowed against us? Because a gestational loss is nature understanding that this is a being incompatible with life, and one has to accept it and understand it. But an evil that a person has exercised with all their lucidity over another person ---which is usually not just one because they chain them together---, knowing that it will condition their life until the end, this wickedness is very difficult for me to place somewhere and understand. Because I just can't understand it. The publication of The Eel, coming out of the pandemic, first novel, all the gravity that reaches me from readers... Almost two years have passed and I still have daily feedback. A new release usually has a life of 3-4 months, and we will complete two years. There were days when I received 20 messages, and three of them were very extensive with many details and caused me a lot of pain. I couldn't not read them and not respond, it wore me out a lot. And my idea was to go to the publisher with the travel diaries, wanting to publish something that would take me away from all this pain.

--- So, were these diaries made before the novel?

--- The diaries are all these here. (She shows me a shelf with about twenty notebooks). Five have been published. My new proposal for the publisher was for it to be something lighter, more in the vein of La sed (which is not light, but anyway), the fact that it had images and could travel the world. Passing through Marrakech, Jerusalem, Romania, Cartagena de Indias, Oaxaca, Chile, Buenos Aires, all these places where I had kept travel diaries. Also, I really like arriving at places and finding the material there. For example, the one from India, which is all color, is made with school supplies, bought at a stall from a lady who sold textbooks and notebooks. When I took it to the publisher, they saw that there was a whole block that were these trips I made with the photographer Noemi Elias and Pep Masachs, from Viatges Acompanyats; the second block were literary fairs, basically in Latin America; and the third block were these from Chile, managing abortions, managing these demolitions, the painful ones... So Anagrama decided to publish these last ones. This initial idea of moving away from La anguila, with the editorial work of the publisher and with the proposal they made, I saw that it was not the one I had to follow. First I made the diaries, but without the intention of them being published, and somehow now I find that what we have done is very beautiful, because there is a lot of dirty material from the novel that is here. They are personal diaries, there is no artistic intention of construction.

--- The diaries close the cycle of La anguila, because within all this darkness, there is a lot of light. You have opened a path. You have helped many people unintentionally. And, furthermore, you have opened the La Madriguera workshop.

--- I set up La Madriguera, the engraving workshop, to which women and women and more women come, young people from all over the world. It's a beautiful thing. And for me, the great success is that everything is horizontal. That there are no absurd confrontations that occur due to the male gaze ---in La Madriguera there is no male gaze---. I wanted it to be the safe place for them, to develop their talent and their art, which I didn't have. Because now with perspective I see that many of the places that were most interesting to me were full of traps, which were basically those set by people who abused the power that gender, age, and the professorship gave them. Now at 40, I know what I shouldn't do with my students to not make their lives more difficult. This way of teaching that I still see in many places, teaching through pain, and through obstacles. Why don't you make things easier for those who come after? Why so many obstacles, if when things are horizontal everything makes more sense? I already know that my students learn from me, but do you know everything I learn from them? I never stop learning. So, if I wanted to impose myself as a reference for something, it would say a lot about my mediocrity. I mean, I am not a reference for anything. I know how to do this, but it is not definitive, it is mutating all the time.

--- There is a before and an after in your work.

--- In my first drawings I had an extreme need to find beauty, but I was immersed in evident pain. There is a lot of anguish in those drawings, no matter how precious they are, there is a lot of being lost. There I was representing the role I had been told I had to play as a woman. Write, speak, draw, but only up to here, in this way. Cross your legs, smile, be complacent. My unconscious was saving me, I think. I came from four years of abuse, so you come out of there absolutely annulled saying "I have a voice and I have strength and I need right now to hold on to this strength." And my way and the tools I had at that moment in my late twenties was to make these drawings. When I see them, they cause me a lot of unease, much more than these paintings (we look at the magnificent painting hanging on the wall of a female face) because here there is a direct gaze. Here there is an evident investigation, and when one paints or the person who is seeing the painting, already knows that they will find things that will make them uncomfortable. I was so aware when those drawings became so famous that the market could take away what was most important to me, which was my work, that I decided never again to put my work at the service of the market. I have here I don't know how many 2 x 2s that I don't know if they will ever be sold, or if anyone will be interested in them or what will happen to them, but I don't care because this is real, this is pure, this has truth and it is the only meaning my life has. The only thing I have had since I was little is this. What has never abandoned me is this. It is what I feed and where I put the most love. For me, painting is an essential thing.

"I have I don't know how many 2 x 2s that I don't know if they will ever be sold, or if anyone will be interested in them or what will happen to them, but I don't care because this is real and it is the only meaning my life has"

--- The face is the place where I can develop not only the plastic part that allows me to go to many places. There are many textures on a face, then there is the hair. A face is never the same, not even during the same day. Also, this painting takes me far away from something that harms me in our current context, which is this immediacy and this need to constantly self-portrait from such a complacent place. One of the things I like most about the painting workshop we do at La Madriguera is that we do portraits. First we paint a sculpture, which is usually Hipolita Sforza, the Italian poet. Then a model comes, who is usually one of the most assiduous ratonas ---that's what we call the girls in the workshop---, and the next day we do self-portraits with a mirror. It is an escape from that immediacy, it is such a serious analysis in the most painful sense of the word: being with oneself, holding one's gaze for an entire day is brutal, and many students end up locked in the bathroom, literally crying, and some cry in public. At this point, there is indeed a part of redemption and that transition accelerates. Seeing it is a privilege and it evidently takes me back to the moments when I experienced it myself. It is very complicated to look at oneself, very complicated to understand oneself. And the paintings are this. Cèlia Pol ---Lucien Freud's partner for many years--- explains it very well, how a dialogue is established with the person posing and the person painting, especially when those of us who paint are women. She talks about that horizontality of female painters versus the verticality of male painters. How some usually impose their gaze and how we try to make the gaze belong to both people, the one posing and the one looking. And I see this a lot in my paintings.

--- I don't want to finish without talking about the importance of Roser Bru in your life. You have even promoted scholarships in her name. How has that gone?

--- Everything that has had to do with Roser has always been a very beautiful experience. I have been in Chile for the last month where I took 7 students from La Madriguera for them to do a residency with 7 Chilean women at Taller 99, which is the place that saved my life and where I met Roser Bru, who is an artist we constantly need to champion. When I met her at twenty, it took me a long time to speak to her because of the impression she made on me. I was very lucky to be able to meet her and share with her, and to learn so much. She was super critical. When you showed her a piece, the whole firmament could fall on your head. For me, Roser is also a reference. Her work is very current and this speaks of her lucidity, because she was talking about what we are talking about now at a time when no one was listening to her. And, even so, somehow, she managed to turn the focus towards her work. Those caryatids she painted, the column woman, the woman who endures, all those watermelons pierced by a knife, the pomegranates, she was constantly reclaiming that femininity that was attacked, and seeking beauty and the elimination of that slap, that stab. In this painting (she points to the painting she is working on) beneath the portrait there is a whole work much in the line of Hilma af Klint, of geometric shapes, colors. I don't know if part of that ocher will end up on the face or disappear completely, but somehow that chorality in La anguila I think is also in my paintings. In fact, here I am making a hybrid with a student ---she doesn't know it--- and Roser, but it is interesting to be able to capture these experiences, that it doesn't just stay on one plane, that they can be taken to a painting. It is interesting that each one from their experience, from what they need, can interpret and can resolve, and can feed on what they are seeing.

I remember the first illustrations I had seen by Paula and how distant I felt from them, even with a certain rejection. Then I remember the car trip where we listened to an interview on the radio and my partner told me, "Are you listening? You have to interview this woman for The New Barcelona Post, the book she's talking about is very much for you," and since we had been driving for a while, it took us a bit to realize that the interviewed artist was Paula Bonet. That was quite a revelation and a surprise, as the prefabricated image I had of her and her work dissolved to give way to an unexpected and enriching discovery of a new body of work, a revealing writing with a penetrating message, and, finally, of a woman with fierce creative and spiritual strength. I hope it won't be long before we can see an exhibition of these pieces that inhabit Paula Bonet's workshop.