Salve Regina Souvenir
by Matteo Pollini

'She thinks she's gonna have a party and not invite me?
Who does she think she is? I like "invented" her!'
(Regina George, Mean Girls, 2004)

The sacred is a theme which is dear to the Swiss artist Beatriz Millar. Her works always deal with this subject, intricate networks of symbols that can be read on different levels, developments of a line of thought that changes shape but remains stubbornly oriented toward the desire to understand what the similarities and connections are between different spheres of our existence. In this sense, Millar uses the sacred in its simplest meaning, as an element of connection with something other than the everyday. The Salve Regina Souvenir project is the result of a long period of reflection that the artist wanted to grant herself, first of all. The next component of this work is Clown Clone and the Piano Tattoo (2007), a performance-installation in which Millar introduces the public to a clone of herself made of polyurethane, with physical shapes that have been visibly manipulated in the workshop "in order to unabashedly comply with the canons of modern media. The result is an uncanny and perturbing performance, accentuated by the double presence of the clone sculpture and artist in the flesh, dressed like her plastic counterpart for the occasion. Clone Clown is a central work and turning point in the artist’s career, representing the implosion point of all formal and conceptual aspects of her previous work: there are symmetries, the hyper-decorative aspects and symbolism, the reflection on the world of women and the role of the body, a sacred element par excellence in Millar's poetic idiom.

Clone Clown is a necessary reference for understanding Salve Regina Souvenir. This is a project that advances with calmness and balance, opposing those strident and ostentatious attitudes that we are forced to endure regularly not only in the media but in everyday life. If the clone was a form of protest, in the recent works, words and slogans now empty of meaning have been set aside to give way to shapes, smells and sensations. They are works that explore different aspects of women without excluding a priori the male component inextricably linked to the Great Mother, the entity to which the entire project is dedicated. Millar does not explain who or what this Great Mother is, but she evokes it and shares it through the simple act of making bread, which is given to the people close to her in everyday life, and then eaten. The first sculptures in this series, little women in edible bread, were photographed in their dish before and after baking, to form Dedication, amateur photographs that become a record of thoughts and memories of shared moments. The origin of this gesture is the artist's desire to take a step back, both formal and temporal, to examine her origins. The daughter of bakers, Millar recovers the traditional technique of the Swiss Grittibaenz - milk bread shaped like a man, a shepherd usually equipped with a pipe and stick - to create her sculptures, devoted to women. Dedication is the most intimate and personal step in the project, in which the artist gives a symbolic part of herself in a sculpture designed to nourish the recipient. It is a union that most certainly refers to the sacramental act of the Eucharist, celebrating the repossession of creative action, a return to the feminine power of giving and taking life through nourishment. The bread women are photographed before and after baking, leaving the observer to glean by interpolation the steps in between, the levitation, rising and retreating of the raw material, a process that inevitably escapes the control of the sculptor. For an artist like Beatriz Millar, always attentive to the symmetrical arrangement, with balanced and controlled formal elements, the liberating and improvised manual gesture of creating the female figures from soft bread dough and abandoning the final result to the hot oven takes on an intense and profound conceptual charge, which moves the control from the final result to the ritual moment, namely the performance act of the preparation and separation of the work from its creator. In anthropological terms, it is the ritual that enables the passage from the religious mystical experience to the tangible world, or in other words, determines the difference between private and public. Salve Regina Souvenir works from the inside out, going by phases and broadening outward. The first ritual of creation and donation, limited to the circle of personal acquaintances, is followed by a performance in the exhibition area where the preparation and modelling of the bread is done outside the walls of the studio to be subjected to criticism from the public.

The expansion also corresponds to the increasing number of female figures in bread. The Great Mother is also one, but takes on many shapes - an infinite number - of shapes. In fact, the thing that is immediately striking about the display area for Dedication is the diversity within the homogeneity of the material. Millar's women, arranged neatly on the wall in their uncooked and baked versions, seem like the catalogued images of archaeological finds. Like the ancient Venuses and goddesses of fertility, they have an archaic aura that sometimes verges on childish manual ingenuity, like products of instinct rather than design. They are not intended to represent, but to evoke primordial figures capable of assuming contrasting appearances. Millar, in the documentation of this performance, wonders what it means to be a woman and what the essence of the idea of femaleness is. She finds the answer in repetition and multiplication. Each of these figures seems to be part of the answer.

The encounter with Millar's women calls to mind the captivating character of Myra Breckinridge, the protagonist of the eponymous 1968 novel by Gore Vidal. Myra is a woman whose specific purpose is that of "re-creating the sexes thus saving the human race from certain extinction." Surveying the methods used by the heroine of the novel to achieve her purpose, what is striking about Myra is her awareness of being "all women." Myra disguises herself, assumes different appearances and quotes the classics of literature or Forties films, adapting her behaviour and her stage presence by taking inspiration from those icons that in her view embody the Goddess, or the Great Mother. Similarly, the soft, fragrant bread of the Salve Regina Souvenir sculptures is a raw material full of life, waiting to be processed and shaped by the hands of the artist to become a vehicle for an idea of femininity that transcends a specific time or space. The series of sculptures of bread that accompanies the photographic works are a necessary step in the ritualistic concept behind the project, towards the sphere of the object. Unlike their photographed counterparts, these sculptures are asking that their material presence be observed and contemplated. They are Beatriz Millar's personal dedication to those goddesses, intimate icons that mark her growth and maturation. They bear unequivocal names, such as Circe, Potnia Theron and Shekhina, covering the endless variations of the concept of woman. They are figures from history, mythology, film and literature, brought to life through stories, texts, songs and film. With time and reflection they have become an integral part of the artist's spirit, giving life to new figures, hybridizations of diametrically opposed nuclei as well. For Millar, bread turns out to be the only possible vehicle for synchronizing the spirit with the body, to unify all these qualities in a supposedly universal food that, in Western cultures, symbolizes the woman's domestic work and home.

Investing the little female-shaped bread sculptures with a conceptual role so intense that there is the risk of a short circuit or reversal of the work's meaning, establishes the artist's net refusal to consider the body, the material, as an entity that is separate from the person. Nina Power recounts how this tendency is especially true among women. Nina Power, in her brilliant book, One Dimensional Woman reasons on how women, in contemporary culture, regard "their breasts as completely separate entities, linked fleetingly or not at all to their selves, their personalities or even the rest of their bodies. Any form of moral or rational consciousness or consciousness of the ego ends up dissolving into self-objectification." Some parts of the body can then become real "resources" in the physical and economical sense, and from these, it is a good idea to take as much advantage of them as possible. The fact that breasts are mainly used for nourishing offspring passes perversely to second place with respect to their being a secondary sexual characteristic. The body-object that is separate from the woman as described by Nina Power is a symptom of a social and cultural situation in which the division between private and public is increasingly blurred, in which the instinctive thoughts or pictures of evenings spent with friends and their families are made public - by choice - through various social networks. Every aspect of our being is now incorporated in a process of self-promotion.
Beatriz Millar, with her edible woman, permanently cancels out the distinction between material, physical and spiritual. Her preparation of the bread is a moment for getting in touch with the sensorial faculties, namely all those senses the body uses to relate to the surrounding world, establishing transcendental dialogue with the Great Mother, a dialogue that takes place without the need to speak or express concepts, which results in archaic sensations and feelings capable of shaping the being from within. The bread women are souvenirs of these dialogues, testimonials that trace a journey, not yet concluded, in search of the primordial matter that, like bread, feeds our lives.

Bibliographical references

MARINUCCI, M. 2010. Feminism is Queer. London (UK): Zed Books.
POWER, N. 2009.  One Dimensional Woman. Winchester (UK): Zero Books;
VIDAL, G. 1968.  Myra Breckinridge. London (UK): Little Brown.