She Spins Diamonds of Earth and Sky
Talking to installation and environmental artist Lita Albuquerque is like taking a masterclass on being. Within our two-hour talk, Lita teaches me how to really be in my body and locate myself in the cosmos we live in.
She tells me about recent moments in South Africa, where despite being sick, she was able to look out to a beach filled with waddling penguins and have the knowledge that we live on a paradisical planet—a feeling matched when she was back home, at a beach near Malibu, mediating. These moments and places, snapshots of time and space, are her ‘diamonds,’ and rather than being rocks that come from the land, her diamonds are the land itself.
The land is her earthscape, the canvas that she’s always made art with. It began with her need to place herself within terrain, to connect herself to it, propelled by the sudden rupture of moving from her childhood home in Tunisia to America, and later being inspired by the Light and Space movement that coalesced around her in 1970s Los Angeles. Over the more than forty years she has been practising her art, it has evolved to showcase not only our deep relationship to the Earth but also our relationship to the constellations of stars and the way our planet spins within our spiralling cosmos. But her aesthetics emerged in her formative years growing up in Tunisia in a convent where she was taught by nuns and played in the Roman ruins in Carthage. This is where the rocky terrain of land, the vibrant blue of the Mediterranean, and the Virgin Mary’s cloak covered in stars imprinted onto her mind.
For me, she has the same mission but is diametrically opposed to her character Elyseria, who features in many of her pieces—an ethereal astronaut, an alien insect-like figure from the 25th century who comes back to Earth to share with humankind her knowledge of the crucial importance of the stars and cosmos. It feels as if Lita does the reverse, translating ancient ideas, Pythagorean and Pharaonic concepts, and Platonist philosophies that define our bodily experience within this astral plane and beyond into a contemporary visual language that we can understand and be hypnotised by—as if, in our current times, we are in a lost limbo between ancient knowing and future understanding, a vital knowledge that, along with Elyseria, Lita is taking us by the hand to lead us to.
While I was doing research on you, I saw footage of your beloved “heart room” that was the epicentre where you worked from on your property that was devastated by the Californian wildfires in 2019. The thought of your heart room not being there anymore made me so upset. I feel like things are coming back, though, when I see your beautiful studio behind you.
We’ve been staying at this little house that is actually on the property of the guy who makes all my panels for my paintings. We’ve known him for thirty years, and my daughter, who’s now forty, played in this room when she was thirteen.
This is my little heart room now. It is. Actually, I have a view right here out of the window that looks to where our property is. It’s a few miles closer to the beach, and that’s my big thing, meditating on the beach. There’s a stream on this property, and when we got here two days before lockdown, there were bunnies and rabbits and squirrels and crows, a lot of animals— not so much now. But I really healed here.
When you say the wildlife disappeared a little bit, do you think it’s because after lockdown we came back out?
Yes. That was what was so amazing; at the beginning of the lockdown, we allowed nature to come back. It’s unbelievable how fast nature comes back when we’re not there. Even the air and light was different. Light was expressing itself. It’s still here, but in that particular year and in that moment, it was so extraordinary to look out at this bank of windows, to have the view of the canyon and see all the animals that came out. It’s us. What we do.
That’s so interesting that you talk about even the quality of light chang ing. Is that because at that moment there was less pollution?
It’s more than that. Light is one of my companions, one of our companions, but I really am very conscious of it. I read this wonderful essay by a cultural historian; his name is Thomas Berry, and he’s written a book called The Great Work, published in 1999. The first thing he talks about is that we’ve come to the end of our story, that it is now time for the new story, and the new story is about us in the cosmos. And I thought, That’s what I’ve been doing [with my art]!
He breaks it down to something really beautiful, to three major laws. The first one is of diversity and multiplicity, meaning [that] out of every single thing in the universe, there is no two things that are alike. The second one is the one that’s so beautiful to me: that every single one of all that diversity and multiplicity—including air, including galaxies, including a person, including a rock, including a leaf, including everything you can think of—has an interiority and a subjectivity that is continually expressing itself. The third one is that through that multiplicity and diversity and that expression or subjectivity, that’s how we’re interconnected.
So I started to think a lot about the second law. And I realised, especially looking out, how everything is in a state of constantly expressing itself, including light. Since December 21st of 2020, something happened on that solstice with light. We’re at an incredible moment cosmically and spiritually, and light is expressing itself. Light is information, light is everything. The sacredness of life and of the cosmos is just so extraordinary. I’m just in awe all the time.
I’ve had some extraordinary moments in the last two months. I was in South Africa just recently; my son got married there. I got sick, but I got sick in the most beautiful place in the world. It was in a part of Cape Town called Simon’s Town. I was in a master bedroom of a villa, and it had a bank of windows on three sides, overlooking the Indian Ocean. That’s where I spent ten days, on a deck and [at] a desk that looked out to a beach that had pen - guins! I’m looking at Antarctica, and I couldn’t believe what paradise I’m in. Then when I came back home, I went to the beach here in Malibu, and I thought, I can’t believe that this is like paradise too! So I start thinking about all the paradises that I’m experiencing every day. Now I call them diamonds. And I’m accruing all these diamonds, every single day. We just don’t always see them. But we really are in a paradisical planet, and we’re magical beings.
You make me so excited about being here, just by every single thing that you say.
This is what’s happening. I’m going to be doing a performance, it might be in Tunisia actually, but I’m calling it The Ceremony of the Open Mouth. ‘Ceremony of the Open Mouth’ is taken from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is a whole different idea, but the reason I named it that and what I’m interested in is for us to actually open our mouths, especially women, and to really start speaking. The light is doing the same thing. We’re going into our depths, and it’s going into its depth. That’s why so many people at this moment are turning inwards and exploring.
Almost like we’re downloading information or a way of being from this light.
Yes, so the expansion of all of us is magnificent.
I know with your childhood, you grew up in a Catholic convent in Tu nisia. It’s something I’m so drawn to, because my own parents went to Catholic convent schools in Fiji, and I know that little things my mother learnt from the nuns seeped into my childhood. I was wondering if or how your time in this convent in Tunisia has shaped your art?
Tunisia is the ground of my existence. It was very hard to leave as a young girl. People who live in Tunisia love Tunisia. It has so much to do with scent—the scent of jasmine—the colour, the air, the light, the sea, and the architecture. The aliveness. There’s a lot of melding of cultures there which goes way, way back with the Berbers, the Tunisians, the Muslims, the French, the Jews, and the Romans. There’s so much history, and so much history in the earth that you can really feel. I grew up in a Catholic convent in Carthage overlooking the Roman ruins, and playing amongst one of the famous amphitheatres. I really had an extraordinary childhood, looking back. There’s a whole history of our family there. My mother’s father was a surgeon and created his hospital—he was a specialist in tuberculosis—and her mother was a singer of classical Arabic music from Andalusia and had her own orchestra. In the last year, she’s now on the internet because she was the voice of Tunisia in 1934. I never met her because she died way before I was born.
In 2018, I went to Tunisia again with my son. It was a totally different country. When I was there [as a child], it was under French rule. I was raised Catholic, but my entire mother’s family was Jewish, and the Jews were expelled, even though we left before that happened. And about four years ago, my brother and I get a letter from a guy from Tunisia, and he said, ‘I’m the assistant to the chief rabbi in Tunis.’ When I went, we met him, and he took us to all these now defunct synagogues, and my grandmother’s and grandfather’s names were all over the place because they were quite wealthy and had donated. I had no idea [of this] when I was growing up, because I grew up in a convent.
How do you think this all infiltrated your art?
I was three years old when I went to the convent, so I took everything in. A lot of it wasn’t so great, but what has totally infiltrated into my work was this grotto down below the convent. There was this beautiful Romanesque building which had a courtyard, and before you got to the Roman ruins, they had a grotto which had a statue of the Virgin Mary wearing the blue cloak of stars. Whenever the nuns did something terrible to me, like tie my arm back to the chair [to punish me], I would go there, and I would always love being there. I realised the piece I did [at AlUla] in Saudi Arabia with Elyseria, she is [almost like the figure of] the Virgin Mary. I can see how it came from the grotto.
I got a lot from the nuns because I got to see Renaissance paintings, but it came through the catechisms or the Bible. I had the Islamic influence of everything around me and the daily call to prayer of the mosque. On the Jewish holidays, I’d go to my grandfather’s house, and he’d be speaking in Hebrew, so [I was around] all these different rituals and prayer. That’s really powerful. It was a discipline from a very young age, a daily practice, which could also be terrifying. That all goes into my work, for sure.
I can imagine that break from Tunisia when your mother brought you to America must’ve been traumatic and almost a culture shock. I think adapting to a new terrain at times can be as much of a shock as the societal aspect, so I love that you’ve created the character of Elyseria, an astronaut from the 25th century who travels back to tell us of the importance of our position among the stars. She too navigates new terrains. I was wondering, with your work, have you ever had a moment where you have seen a landscape in a completely different way, and what that moment was for you?
One of course is Antarctica. I went there with this incredible man. He was recommended to me by an astronomer I used to work with, and he had been at the South Pole for an entire year, so he had experienced three months of complete darkness—three months of complete light and three months of twilight. He was part of my team, and he kept saying, ‘Lita, I cannot wait to see your face when you step on the continent.’ I could not believe what I saw. White everywhere, white light everywhere. When I called my daughter, Jasmine, she said, ‘Mom, you sound like you’re in heaven,’ and I said, ‘I am!’ She asked me if I missed anybody, and I said, ‘No!’ [We both laugh.] I was so filled with light.
You came out of and were influenced by the Light and Space movement of Southern California in the ’70s, and I was wondering how you came to your own spin and version of it, with your fleeting powdered pigment pieces in the desert?
The Light and Space movement was a mixture of minimalism, performance, conceptual art, and land art. That was [what was happening] where I lived, in terms of what I knew people were doing and what friends were doing. Then two things happened. In 1975, I saw a Robert Irwin show. It was a white cube at the Riko Masuno gallery, and he did black tape at eye level all the way across the room. All of a sudden, what it did for me is it turned the gallery into two volumes and [gave me] the idea that a simple gesture, a simple mark can alter your perception. In a way, it turned my artistic and aesthetic world upside down, because I realised that art wasn’t a two-dimensional surface on the wall, that it existed in space. That, coupled with what was happening with land art and what was happening with performance art, [was very influential.]
Then in 1977, Susan Kaiser Vogel did a blue flame piece. She had red bricks but then put ultramarine blue pastel [over it] so that because of the red underneath, it turned it to exactly the colour of the sky, so you looked up and her brick room dissolved into the sky. That was it for me. The idea of a gesture and connecting the Earth and sky also fit into what I grew up with in Tunisia, with all the myths there.
If you looked through history and everything about cosmology there, it was about the Mediterranean and the relationship to the sky. I started doing these marks on the land.
Then I’d go out into the desert, and first they were marks that related to the horizon line or the setting moon or the rising sun. Then it became about the stars. That came about because I was out in the Mojave Desert in dry lake beds. There was nothing there but being able to see the cosmos. So that was the big shift: it’s not just about me and the Earth.
Years later I named it, only because it had been what I was doing, and I was reading about Yves Klein and his friend Arman who were claiming things: ‘I’m claiming the sky’ and ‘I’m claiming plenitude.’ I thought, Wow, these big male egos [are] claiming things, but what am I as a woman claiming? I realised what I had been doing was that I was claiming the relationship between the Earth and the sky. Then evolving even more than that, it was a development between the relationship of the Earth and the cosmos.
It also came from being uprooted—even just in my individual life, not even historically through my Jewish heritage, but of being what I thought was from North Africa and moving to America at a certain age and needing to find a connection and a location. So, location has always been really important to me. Now that we have the image of the Earth from space, we really see how important it is to locate ourselves in our greater context and what that does to our reception and greater thinking.
I forget, because we’re so used to having that image of the Earth, that there was a time that we didn’t!
It wasn’t that long ago, and now we take it for granted. Nineteen sixty-nine, in terms of our history as humans, it’s very recent. We never were outside enough to be able to have perspective. I’ve always loved reading Buckminster Fuller and how when he was in the scientific community it just didn’t work for him, and it wasn’t until he stepped outside the scientific community that he was able to have a different perspective. I think of that and how we’re in the midst of a long revolution in perception, bigger even than the one in the Renaissance, where it’s no longer a one-point, two-point perspective, but now that we have that image we can actually imagine and see ourselves in space.
I’ve never thought of it like that—that it’s not only technologically but ideologically as well that we’ve moved so forward in terms of going to and navigating space.
Things are moving so fast that now we think, Of course! But there was a time not so far away when things weren’t moving that fast. That image of the world is everywhere [now]: on the web, in an advertisement. I’m surprised that you mentioned that because it’s so obvious to me. But that’s the theory of the obvious; when something is obvious or I do a drawing and I think, Oh it’s so stupid, it’s nothing, it’s childish, it’s because it’s so obvious to me that I think that everybody has it or is aware of it, but in fact it is the unique gift that you have to give to others.
That’s so true, because since I’ve come in contact with your work, I always look up to the stars now. And that’s been revelatory to me, and yet it’s so obvious. I do Odissi dance, and before we practise, we do a prayer to the Earth to ask her permission to step on her, and just doing that gesture makes me feel in strong connection with her. But weirdly, I didn’t connect the two together: the Earth and the sky. There was a disconnect for me. But in the little French village where I live, there are these large Celtic rocks that mark each corner of the village, and every time I go past, I put my palms on them so they can tell me their story. I was always trying to figure out why they’re there in relation to the Earth, but now you’ve given me the idea that maybe they’re in relation to the stars and our connection with the skyscape, that they’ve been placed there for that reason.
Absolutely, and the more you do that [sort of practice] it’s really about yourself. The body is always implied when you think of the Earth and the sky because you’re in the middle of sensing the Earth and observing the sky. We’re never separate. Apart from being in an aeroplane or parachute, our feet are always on the ground, so we’re always “in relationship to.” Everything that we do, we’re in relationship to. I totally believe in us being the revolutionary female archetype and the importance of opening our mouths now—which is why I’m doing The Ceremony Of the Open Mouth—and that it’s the time to understand that we, women, bring in the idea of relationship through body, Earth, and cosmos.
I love that, because I’ve seen images of your works, scattering pigment in the desert, making that gesture that you talk about, and it’s so beautiful. It reminds me of my Indian ancestors, because they would do the same thing with white pigment. It was a temporary mark-making on the Earth, just as you would do, and they would do it at a time when they thought God’s face was upon them, during dawn, and women would make designs on the Earth to attract “God’s face.” With you marking the Earth with lines of pigment, even though it’s temporary, there’s an idea that you’re there, that you’ve marked it; there’s an energy footprint of you left by your consciousness. How do you think your art-making has affected your consciousness?
Oh, so much. Because, again, what I learnt from Irwin or Kaiser Vogel, the simplicity of the gesture is such. I’m also very interested in sacred geometry and how it leaves an imprint in the colour. It leaves an imprint in the mind, and I hope it does that for other people. So, for me, it’s almost like an invocation to the gods and also to ourselves that we’ve been here, and [it’s] the accumulative effect of that. My different markings in each piece also do different things. For instance, the very first piece I did, which was the blue line, what that did, to me, was that it took that blue pigment but then it extended it all the way to the horizon to form a cross. Again, it’s that interrelationship with the human and the environment that is a language.
I just learnt something from one of my students just a couple of days ago. He quoted from an 18th century German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder writes that language existed in nature first, and our language is our response to nature. In his book The Treatise of the Origin of Language, he argues that humans learnt to speak as soon as they perceived that nature was speaking to them. They made signs for things by imitating the sounds of things that they were already making by themselves. The sound had to designate the thing, just as the thing gave the sound. Language was imminent in nature, and because nature was action, language was a form of action too. Since the whole of nature resounds, Herder argues, there is nothing more natural for a sensuous human being than that he lives and speaks it out.
This makes so much sense to me, because when the Vedic rishis were in deep meditation, they heard om as the vibration that plants grow to and DNA replicates to, and they translated this “language of nature” back to us.
It totally parallels that, and when the pandemic happened, with nature coming back, again [there’s] the idea that everything has a subjectivity and interiority that is constantly expressing itself. Also the idea that I said a couple of years ago, that the more we respond to nature, the more conscious we are. We are not alone; we’re in constant relationship to nature in a way that we may not be aware of. We started language by hearing what nature was expressing.
Just to state the obvious: even with trees, we have a complicit language of breath with them—what we breathe out, they breathe in, and vice versa. We are constantly in motion with all of them.
With everything. The energetic footprint is an accumulation. When I did the Antarctica project, a friend of mine said, ‘Oh, what you were doing was activating the kundalini of the Earth’ by doing this spiralling motion that was mirroring the spiralling motion of the stars above the South Pole. And it is true. It is energetic.
When you’ve been doing this mark-making in different places, when did you feel the most energised?
I think both [in] Antarctica and the pyramids and Cairo. In terms of my work, Antarctica was so incredible because the particles of light there are so pure; they enter your body in a very different way than they do here. When I came back to Los Angeles, the air here felt like soup in comparison. So it was really about experiencing this incredible purity of light. I was doing the piece there where I align these 99 orbs to the stars, and I ended the performance with the spiralling of the stars. I really felt that energy that came, it was like kundalini rising.
This year at the pyramids, when I was in the costume of the 25th century female astronaut, standing in front of these incredibly magic, ancient beings, it really resounded through my body. What I had done [with] the piece previously, 25 years ago, was a star map onto the desert in front of the pyramids. It was a little more intellectual in that the original project was meant to be a honeycomb pattern in front of it. That was a very complex set of ideas that I had that came from a vision of seeing the Earth from space, and instead of continents the way we know them, it was one continent in the shape of a honey bee. That sent me into a whole lot of research about the bee and the symbolism of the bee. In fact, the bee was the symbol of Lower Egypt in the Pharaonic days. What I did was a nature language in front of the pyramids, and because I was always also fascinated by Pythagoras and how he used to have his students mediate on the hexagon in space every morning, I also did drawings of the hexagon in the sky [above the pyramids] as well. And the pyramids fit right into this hexagon pattern that’s in the sky. I was reading Plato at the time and became fascinated with the King’s Chamber and how the shafts of the chamber were aligned to certain rising stars. Plato talks about the soul coming from a star and going back to a star, so I thought the bee is the carrier of the soul.
You’re blowing my mind about the interconnectivity of everything.
And the power of us. That’s the thing. I’m teaching a class right now, at the Art Center College of Design, called The Spiritual In Art. What I’m doing with the students is having them do practices that really take them to this kind of place. I feel we don’t have time, and yet we really need to understand who we are in the complexity because it’s so beautiful and it gives us so much joy. That’s what I intend to bring in to alleviate the grief that the Earth is so full of and that humanity is so full of, and to have people experience that joy. People do have these experiences all the time, but there’s certain triggers, like energetic footprints, that [cause them to happen.]
I’m beginning to see these are our triggers and tools that we can use; they affect our perceptual system, they affect our bodies, and we need to start listening to our bodies. If you really go into inner space and you begin to listen to the inner space, then you begin to listen to the Earth, then you begin to listen to the cosmos, and then you see that entire relationship. I love to think of the Earth as the stethoscope to the cosmos, that it’s a listening system to the cosmos. If we are all listening, then we can start to hear.
It’s that simple gesture you do every day that if you’re conscious of the Earth—like me sending her a prayer before I do Odissi—you won’t be able to hurt her. What else are you getting your students to do?
Talking to them about automatic writing, which is not the surrealist automatic writing, but just focusing on a date, time, and location. I tell them that the most important tool there is to understanding time and space is the cosmic address, which is every day you say, ‘This is Friday, February 11, the year 2022, at 12:38 Pacific Standard Time in Malibu, California.’ But then I go to: state of California, United States of America, Northern Western Hemisphere, planet Earth, third planet in our solar system in Orion’s Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, next to the Virgo cluster, next to the Super Great cluster, next to Laniakea, and then I stop for a moment. And then I go from Laniakea to the Super Great cluster to Virgo to Milky Way to the Orion Armto the solar system to the third planet to planet Earth to the Northern West - ern Hemisphere to the United States of America to the state of California to the city of Malibu on Friday February 11 of the year 2022 at 12:39 Pacific Standard Time. And they’re supposed to write from there. I’ve been doing it for decades, but they’re just eating it all up, and I have half the department in the class, so it’s pretty cool. It is time. It’s time for this. That’s what we should be focusing on. Imagine if we all did the cosmic address, that we would state it at the same time, and you connected all the points.
It makes me want to take the class so much. I don’t want to dwell too much on the fire because I know how traumatic it must have been for you, but I was wondering how the tragedy of loss played into new ways of thinking and making for you?
I mean, there was much so much rage inside of me after that, so much fire, that I really haven’t utilised it yet. I mean, I did some; I did a lot of drawings. The whole property was devastated, but my friend was convinced there were still things in there. She was like an archaeologist, with her boyfriend. They had hazmat suits on, and for eleven days she dug through a lot of debris, so I have what is called a fire archive that I couldn’t even look at until now.
The film that I’m showing in Venice at the 2022 Biennale, Liquid Light, was, so to speak, taken out of the fire. Jasmine, my daughter, was the only one on our property when the fire happened, and I said, ‘God! Grab my hard drives.’ I thought they were all in one place, but they weren’t, but the film was there. We wouldn’t have the film had I not said that and she not grabbed them. We edited it after [the fire]. There were elements in there that burnt, which she found charred. So for the first time, I’m feeling okay to show that. I remember I had a show in October of 2019 in Paris, so almost a year after [the fire] happened, and people wanted me to talk about it, and I just couldn’t. I think a part of me didn’t want me to accept it. I think I was like this four year old that was traumatised, so traumatised that I went into ‘That couldn’t have happened to me.’
So, as I’ve healed, I think it is now going into the work in a much deeper way—not coming out as rage but coming out as power. I’ve never said that before. For a long time, I think I was processing a lot of what was going on with what I had to deal with [emotionally, but also] with insurance, which was really intense, as well as family and working through that whole time. I received such an extraordinary amount of generosity coming towards me; it was phenomenal how much I received from the art community. But I’m seeing it now, that it got transformed from rage into power.
photograph by rochelle fabb,
2021 giza plateau, cairo, egypt