‘I return to myself and to the beginning.’
Portfolio
Anna Maria Maiolino
Anna Maria Maiolino is an artist of Italian origin who lives and works in Brazil, having achieved international renown. Among other prestigious awards and honours, in 2024 she received the Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale, an accolade bestowed in recognition of her powerful body of work, which is characterised by great artistic originality and important anthropological, cultural, social and political significance. For this issue of Electra, the artist has prepared a portfolio of her work, accompanied by an interview which was conducted by American curator Helen Molesworth for the project The Forgotten Her Story. MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon, will be presenting a major exhibition by Maiolino, Terra Poética, until the end of August 2026.
Anna Maria Maiolino, Untitled, from the series Tempestade de Ideias, 1995. © Courtesy of Studio A. M. Maiolino
Anna’s more than sixty-year body of work emerges from her experience as an immigrant and a woman, shaped in part by the years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Recognition did not come early, with critics initially dismissing her work as ‘obvious’. Yet it is precisely this so-called obviousness that Maiolino transformed into a language of resistance.
As part of The Forgotten Her Story, an ongoing research initiative devoted to recovering and amplifying the histories of women whose cultural impact has been overlooked, Anna Maria Maiolino reunited with curator Helen Molesworth for the first time since her 2017 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which Molesworth co-curated.
At the Musée National Picasso Paris, within Maiolino’s Terra Modelada installation room, the two women sit surrounded by hand-moulded, stillwet clay forms bearing the imprint of Maiolino’s hands. There, they return to three essential elements of Maiolino’s vocabulary: clay, eggs, and line, as archetypes of human experience and how the rituals are the foundation of humanity.
HELEN MOLESWORTH Terra Modelada is one of my favourite things you do when you work with clay. The clay is still wet when you’re making the forms.
ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO For me, Terra Modelada is a spiritual experience. It is an homage to Man’s work and its mystic: Humanity’s work. We have used our hands since humanity made the first tool. Within Terra Modelada, the manual shaping of clay gives rise to forms; segments that echo one another, yet remain distinct.
HM Fatta a mano. It’s like making bread or making pasta.
AMM Yes. You can connect it with food in a scatological way, because there are things that might be discarded, and the body is very intelligent, because in doing scatological work, it works in a very simple manner.
HM You’ve always believed in the body. You’ve always been very honest about how we eat and defecate.
AMM The body is our support and our primary operative instrument: everything comes from the body and from what we do with it. Today, much of the meaning of myth and ritual has been lost, and, as a consequence, we have lost much of our connection to the body – the ritual of dining together, or simply enjoying one another’s company, celebrating affection. I remember with pleasure when my family made bread every week, and we would bring some to the neighbours. This was a celebration, a ritual, which I think we have lost. We have to come back to the body with love. Real love.
HM Love is hard, though. You need to be open and vulnerable. You can get hurt if you really love. I remember asking you in 2017, after Trump had been elected for the first time, ‘What should I think about dictatorships? What if this becomes a dictatorship?’ And at the time, you said that I had to pay attention, listen, look, and always know what was going on. I was thinking about you living in Brazil during the military dictatorship. How did you feel about making artwork during that time?
AMM The artist finds a way to bypass censorship. For example, in In-Out (Antropofagia) – a short film I made on Super 8 between 1973/74 – the metaphors, I believe, were too sophisticated for the censors to understand what was being expressed. Poetry is a very powerful tool, and it’s clear that there is a political persona within me.
HM Can I tell you what I think your political position is? For me, the politics of your work has been one that understands that life is long. You carry within you your mother, your grandmother, and you carry them forward. You are from the 19th century, and the 20th century, and here we are in the 21st. But also, your work says something about the history of women on Earth. Always making food. Always taking care of others. Every day we must eat. This is not a question but a political truth, a spiritual truth, a self-evident truth – that we must eat, and that someone must cook the food. Fatta a mano. Your work reminds me of Pompeii. I went for the first time two years ago, and I thought about your work when we were there because of the images of the bread. We think we are so new, yet we’ve been doing this since the beginning of time.
AMM When I feel uncertain, lost in my work, I return to myself and to the beginning. I begin by thinking about cultures, about the origins of humanity. I say that I am an ordinary woman, and that making art makes me more human and brings me happiness. Art is the ultimate form of human expression.
HM And do you think that the artwork made you more human in part because you were making it with your hands?
AMM Working with clay and with my hands is deeply pleasurable. It is a plastic, sensual material that allows any desired form to be shaped. Clay is earth. The archetype of matter.
HM So, clay is earth. Clay can be moulded in any way. It exists everywhere because it’s earth, the first material we’ve used as humanity. The other thing that you use that I’ve always found really moving is the egg.
AMM Yes, the egg, a symbol of life. I like to tell a story from my childhood about the egg. My mother raised chickens to ensure food for her nine children, and she would ask me to collect the eggs from the coop. I will never forget the feeling of holding a warm egg in my hands, freshly expelled by the hen. I have a poem that says:
I cogitate that
had Leonardo da Vinci been born before the hen
he would have invented the EGG
using the Extreme Ratio and the Divine Proportion
in the EGG nothing is in excess
without injuring it makes its way out from the
little orifice in the body
simply makes its way out and always original
enters the world
the EGG is the EGG
prototype of entirety and beauty
in the face of this paradigm of life and mystery
I revere the hen and envy it
HM I listened to this poem, and I know all the work you’ve done with the egg, and I agree. If the egg didn’t exist before Leonardo, he would’ve invented it, because it’s perfect. It’s hard, and it’s soft. It’s the beginning of life. It’s full and empty. It’s delicate and strong. Women make eggs. So my real question is, why, for hundreds and hundreds of years, have women been hated?
AMM Because we threaten, we are a creative force in nature.
HM Is it really that simple? I mean, even after all this time, there is still all of this anxiety around female creativity, around what it means to be an artist who’s a woman, a person who can make an egg and make a child, and also make artwork. Still, it must be said that making good art is very difficult to do.
AMM If you are honest and sincere, the work is valid. In making art, as in any profession, we must be ethical.
HM You have 83 years of memories. Let me ask you another question. Your life has been involved with art for such a long time. What has surprised you the most about being an artist?
AMM I feel like a foreigner in life. Because of this feeling I’ve had, ever since I was a very young girl in Italy. I was born in difficult times during the Second World War, and I always asked myself: Why am I alive? I want to die. I want to go back; I feel a longing for something from long, long before; a strange feeling, a nostalgia for something unrecognisable or unknown, which also made me feel very inadequate.
HM I want to go back to the very young Anna, the little girl who doesn’t know why she’s on the Earth, doesn’t know why she’s been born. Do you think that making artwork over these many years has helped you have a connection to the earth?
AMM Yes. Art allowed me to establish a connection with life, and it healed me. I believe that working with art transcends the real. Art is sacred.
HM The thread is also something you use in your work a lot.
AMM The thread is a line. Kandinsky spoke very well about the line. Like in music, visual artists use the segment, continuity, the point. For me, it’s about spatial ambivalence. And if one has spatial ambivalence, one also has temporal ambivalence. For example, in Por um Fio, I’m talking about the continuity of time, which is also continuity through generations. I exist because my mother exists; Veronica, my daughter, exists because I exist. And therefore, the continuity of humanity, the infinite. Each one of us is a point along the line. I use yarn or thread because it’s a domestic material.
HM Do you think one of the reasons you make art is to repair some of the harm in the world?
AMM Yes – but that’s what artists do. Not just me. Art makes transformation. You can have an idea from the past and make a new work, a new question, or you can express philosophy through art. In this way, art is really a transformation. This is a big present, but also a challenge for you, as a curator. I think that a good curator is a poet.
HM I do, too. Why do you want to make more simple things, while many artists want to make things more complicated?
AMM Because life is beautiful. Why should I be making things that make me tired and upset? I want to be happy making art.
HM So, you do the clay, you do the egg, you do the thread, and then you make paintings. Is there anything you want to do that you haven’t done yet?
AMM I love drawing because it’s like breathing. It’s the storyboard of the thinking. It’s very funny because when I’m sad, I don’t draw. I went a long time without drawing, but a few days ago I came back to it. It just flows out of me.
Anna Maria Maiolino, In-Out (Antropofagia), 1973. © Courtesy of Studio A. M. Maiolino
Read this article in Issue 32 - Primavera 2026
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