When we imagine a work of art that goes beyond or in some way alters our senses, we think of a work related to our universe and its complexities—something that questions and redefines values, or even lets us be rid of them.

Art today is nomadic: it is no longer necessary to be rooted in a certain format or discipline, but rather in the real content of the works—that is what allows them to endure on a human level.

It is fundamental, though, to try to grasp or to map out the meaning of works, what concepts buttress them, how their development takes shape, what myths underlie their practices, and who undertakes them. Not until that veil has been lifted will we be able to grasp that a work of art is, in the end, the crystallization or fossilization of a thought.

This interview is based on a number of conversations with Tadeo Muleiro. In his own words, he allows us to get a sense of the many ideas, stories, and myths that have triggered his vast and unsettling production.

Particularly relevant are the experiences, as well as the research carried out by the artist, for the production of video performances that, by means of staging and transmutation into a number of characters, constitute an outstanding body of work.

I would like to start with a question related to your beginnings. Some artists must explore a number of territories before coming to the place where what will become their practice really starts to take shape; others sense what that practice is and find their way to it right away. Your recent work suggests a clarity of representation. Could you tell me where you were situated when you first got started?
At the beginning, I mostly made paintings, and the focus of my training was more pictorial than sculptural. Color has always been an important basis for my work.

The first paintings I made, starting in 2004 and beyond, were directly influenced by Mexican codices, specifically by the Borgia Codex which contains the different rituals performed over the course of the year in Mexico. I have had a copy of that codex since I was a kid, and I was always struck by the similarities between its forms of representations and the ones I found in cartoons and comic books. When I was a kid—before I thought about making paintings and sculptures—what I was really interested in was comics. I was fascinated by the superheroes and monsters I would see in movies and cartoons.

My first paintings, which I made in 2004, entailed a pretty strange mix since I was influenced not only by codices and comics, but also by writers like Mircea Elíade and George Bataille—specifically, in the case of Bataille, texts like “Eroticism” and “Theory of Religion.” It was due to his ideas about ritual sacrifice and death, and their connection to sexual practices, that figures with skulls devouring, stabbing, and penetrating one another exploded in my early paintings.

After making a series of paintings with those characters that combined different imaginaries, among them the Mesoamerican imaginary, I became interested in staging a conflict between those paintings and what are considered masterpieces of European and North American art. My small army of skulls and serpents started to bite, devour, and stab Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D'avignon, Botticelli’s Venus, Andy Warhol’s Marylyn, as well as Surrealist avant-garde paintings. In those works, I formulate an ongoing and never-resolved tension between two types of representation. The surface of the paintings is like a battlefield where the action ensues.

That series of paintings gave rise to the textile sculptures. One of the questions I asked myself at that time was how to give those images volume. Stone didn’t seem right, and neither did wood, but fabric seemed like what I was looking for—whether because of its texture or a color range like the one I had used in my paintings.

To make a textile work, you start with a flat paper pattern. That shape is then transferred onto the fabric to be cut and sewn. It is not until you put the cushioning in that there is volume. That meant that I could transfer the images I had drawn almost directly onto the sculptural object, which I would then apply paint to.

My mother was the one who taught me how to sew. I must admit that, at first, I was very clumsy. It took a long time, and a great deal of perseverance, before I could handle fabrics fairly well.

I have always been interested in your work because of its connection to native cultures. I personally feel very close to the Guatemalan and Mexican people because I lived in those countries. What, do you think, triggered or first motivated your connection to those cultures and their rituals?
Though I find the visual imaginary of native cultures very rich, it has not been used very widely in contemporary art. This is particularly true of Argentine native cultures, I guess because they are largely unknown. Even I am not familiar with many of their myths and customs. As a resident of a city like Buenos Aires—and as a descendent of Spanish and Italian immigrants—my direct contact has been limited.

I have had the opportunity to travel both in northern Argentina and to other countries like Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru. Direct contact with some of those cultures gave me a great deal of information that I later applied to a number of works.

In my work, as I see it, the use of archetypical images and myths from those cultures provided me with a basis from which to envision new scenes and cosmogonic tales where those images and myths exist alongside or mingle with elements from the universe of comics or movies, or even autobiographical situations or stories from my personal life

Can you identify which myths formed the basis for the works Papá y mamá I, II [Mom and Dad I and II] and Calaveras [Skulls]? How did the thinking in Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto influence those works?
Papá y Mamá I, II and Calaveras are just one work—the first textile work I ever made. For it, I used elements from the paintings I mentioned: skulls, serpents and jaguars (animals considered holy by pre-Columbian cultures that, in this work, are on the figures’ legs and arms), and exaggerated genitalia.
One of the myths that lies at the origin of this work is the androgyne. Many ancient cultures imagined their gods as beings of both sexes—bearers of an overwhelming power. The primordial androgyne is the ancestor of humanity and of origin myths.
I liked using all of those elements in a colorful sculpture that seems to equate a totem and a child’s doll.
I think this work represents a synthesis of what I had been working in earlier works. What had been a hybrid image on the pictorial surface—images devouring other images—led to the hybrid body in Papá y Mamá.
The artists inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto posited “devouring” foreign influences to generate their own work. In my case, it could be said that I “gobbled up” images from an array of cultures, both ancient and contemporary, to make a new work.

What contemporary artists who have also developed hybrid bodies of work come to mind? Artists that make use of similar imaginaries to stage their work.
One artist that has always caught my attention is Nick Cave—not the singer, but the African- American artist that made “soundsuits” out of different materials for performances and videos. On the local scene, I find Marina De Caro’s textile work very interesting, regardless of whether or not it is hybrid. I love the work of many artists and find what they are doing amazing, but I’m not sure I would call them direct points of reference.

How would you describe the transition from sculpture to video performance? How important are time and duration to that discipline?
The surfaces of the early paintings and drawings gave rise to textile sculptures—that is, the images in the paintings but with volume. I then started wondering how those sculptural pieces might move, which gave rise to the idea of the suit.
That’s how the suits in Los Hermanos [The Brothers] work: when I show them, they are sculptures. I would even say that you wouldn’t really imagine wearing them until you see the video.
The different suits that I have constructed are a core that gives rise to different narratives. In the videos, I develop fictions that might include me (I appear in a number of them, albeit in costume) or might dialogue with a variety of other stories, some of them mythical-fantastic, some of them autobiographical, and some of them historical-social.
Thanks to the questions of time and duration implicit to the video support, I went deeper into those concepts and placed those figures in a story.
Each character constructs or contains different fictions. The character in El abuelo [The Grandfather], for example, can voice criticism of the “Desert Campaign” waged by Julio A. Roca, instigate the rite in La Salamanca, or turn into a comic-book illustration. As a device, the suit embodies me and allows me to formulate interplay between different possible stories.

I am interested in how you reinterpret the figure of Roca in El abuelo. What, for you, is the conceptual connection between this work and your earlier works? How would you describe your fiction-based approach?
My intention in the video El Abuelo was to address somehow what is called the “Desert Campaign” of 1879, which consisted of the slaughter of the native communities in Argentina and the seizure of the lands they still held. One of the symbols of that incident in my mind is the monument to Julio A. Roca at the corner of Julio A. Roca Avenue and Perú Street in the Monserrat section of Buenos Aires.
In making this video, I tried to avoid falling into a simple defense of native cultures. I wanted the work to be like a fable or fantastic myth. I wanted the story told in the video to make the character into an “entity,” an ancient pagan god that surfaces in the country and wanders around the city.
I was not sure how to avoid being too obvious at the point when the character in El Abuelo stands in front of the Roca monument.
I liked the idea of covering the monument with patterns and symbols found in the fabrics and ceramics of the Mapuche and Tehuelche cultures—both of which were exterminated in that campaign—rather than “destroying” it. I wanted to change the statue of Roca into a hybrid monument that could combine both types of representation: the equestrian figure and the symbolic imaginary of native cultures.
Working with something like the Roca monument—with a figure so representative of an incident from history—anchored this work more directly and powerfully in what I had been doing in relation to native cultures.

The origin of La Casita [The Little House] lies in a Temazcal ceremony. Could you tell me about that experience and how it makes itself felt in the work? What physical process do you consider important to the ceremony?
The possibility of going to the Temazcal ceremony arose suddenly several years ago. I went with my brother, Emmanuel. It was an interesting experience. I have to admit that at the beginning I had trouble getting into what was going on, but it was only a matter of time. As the ceremony progressed, I was able to connect. You go inside a sort of tent that is supposed to represent a return to the womb of the earth. The one guiding the ceremony starts putting hot rocks in the tent and the temperature rises. It is like a steam bath.
Once the ceremony is over—at least the time I did it—you cool off under a stream of water.
The most intense physical sensation I had as a result of the ceremony did not hit me at the time, but a few days later. It’s a purification ceremony, which means that you go through a sort of physical catharsis, and your body and mind feel much lighter. One of the aims of the Temazcal ceremony is to generate a “death” and subsequent “rebirth” of the body.
La Casita looks to that Temazcal idea of the mother’s womb/cave. I painted a series of native American animals—jaguars, llamas, condors, and serpents—and plants in it. There are also images of native American foods: tomatoes, cacao, potatoes, corn, sunflowers, and manioc.

Your most recent productions are self-referential; they bring a number of imaginaries together, from the personal to the totem-like cosmogonic. These works have a clear sense of direction. Where is your work headed? Is performance a way of unifying the elements you have been working with since the beginning?
The most recent video I made was El Padre [The Father]. It is the most self-referential of all my works so far. My father’s murder was hard to deal with, and making this work at his house was a very emotional process.
In a certain way, this work is a synthesis of everything—all the elements—I have been working with thus far. It brings together the cosmogonic or mythical universe and personal experiences. On a formal level, it has a different rhythm; the action ensues at a slower pace than my early videos.
This work was a way to work through or to exorcize a specific event. It is the first work with such a dramatic charge.
Rather than performance as such, what has allowed me to unify all the elements I have been working with is the suit or costume. That is the crux of all my production, whether video performance, photography, sculpture, or illustration.

Buenos Aires, August 30, 2015.