Isabel Fonseca

Meet the Residents / Siena is a seasonal series of interviews with Amant’s Siena Studio & Research residents. The conversations take place in the Amant residency studios in Chiusure, in the heart of the province of Siena.

In the summer of 2024, Amant’s Chief Curator, Tobi Maier recorded this conversation during a studio visit with resident artist Isabel Fonseca. With this transcript of their conversation, we introduce Fonseca’s practice to our wider audience and discuss questions such as: What is the impact of the Chiusure and Siena context on our residents’ practices? In what ways has the proposed project changed since arriving and why? And finally, what is artistic research and how is it done?

Tobi Maier: Isabel, thank you very much for making it possible that we can talk to you here a little bit at the residency in Chiusure. Something that we ask all the residents is if they could tell us a little bit about where they came from or where they were before coming to Siena.

Isabel Fonseca: I came from London, where, on June 10, I hosted a memorial for my husband. So, I was coming from the articulation of grief in a group, you could say, the acknowledgement of a loss and a death but also the celebration of a life. These exact themes have been on my mind for about a year since his death. When I thought about the opportunity to come to Italy, I was wondering how I could in some way deepen my understanding of what was going on with me personally, having lost my life partner, and how to think about that in a context bigger than my own loss, or rather to think from the outside to return in. To look to both art and nature, both in glorious abundance in Tuscany.

The first thing I thought of was Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve’s expulsion, which is in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. And it’s an amazing painting, partly for the pathos that this 23-year-old Masaccio was able to bring to it, and the naturalism, which was almost unknown in painting of that time, 1425. How did this very young man have such insight into that suffering? Or was life, with the prospect of a much earlier death, just very accelerated in the 1400s?

And when I think about Italy and this mythical landscape – the rolling hills with an abbey in the view – you really feel that you’re looking out into a Renaissance painting, you know? So many Renaissance paintings have this exact backdrop. And what are we seeing? Does idealization offer solace? Certainly, the view itself does. Not just because ‘nature’ is inherently refreshing. But because man’s impression on the landscape – the neatly tilled fields, the acre upon acre of planted vineyards and olive groves, the clean lines of cypresses – gives hope that there is some point to our being. We make our mark. We exist. It’s not just erosion and decay, but also patient cultivation, planning and growing. Wheat and wine. And then we have made our mark again, in painting the already transformed landscape. Doubly fantastic.

At least that was how I felt for the first weeks of my time in the Crete Senese, as this area is called, for the characteristic gray clays. I already had those landscapes in my mind, planted by painters in our collective imagination, filed under ‘Italy’. Later in the residency, I was able to spend a few hours walking the Biancane di Leonina, a nearby natural ‘geosite’ that is a park. Here the signs tell us how the push for cultivation in Tuscany’s post-war years effectively killed the extraordinary natural landscape: one distinguished by formations called biancane, (a sort of miniature version of those found in Badlands National Park in South Dakota), dating from some 4 million years ago. These Italian badlands are still here, but they are now small outcrops: more decorative, less dominant. And when you go home and read about them, the words used to describe the landscape are not the ones that you came here with. They are called ‘strained’, ‘relics’ and ‘vanishing’. And so, with a newly educated eye, what I once thought of as serenely undulating and fecund now appears desolate, and endangered…. Knowledge is complicated. As the story goes.

I came, over the course of these few months, to consider not only grief and mourning for a beloved person, his Adam to my Eve, but for the terrain itself. For the burning world. The intense heat also adds an element of despair. Indeed, not long after the day we ventured out into blazing, unsheltered Biancane, I read in the news about a migrant worker, one of thousands toiling in grueling conditions in Italy’s flower and tomato fields, a poor man from India, who had died from heat exhaustion. Apparently, there are many of these gruesome deaths, and unknown number. The longer I stay, the darker this rich and beautiful landscape becomes!

As a kind of complement to the Masaccio fresco, because I’m really a words person and a reader and a writer, I thought I would go back to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great epic poem from 200 years later, 1660-ish. I read it in an English class forty years ago, which barely counts. And so that’s what I’m thinking about, both the Brancacci Masaccios and the great English epic, these are my summer reading resources. The basic story that we all have in mind is that the first couple was expelled from the Garden of Eden because of a transgression, which is knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge of good and evil. The discovery of shame. Or self-consciousness.

But now, in rereading, I realize that the transgressive knowledge is not of good and evil, but rather the awareness of death. Indeed, it’s ‘on pain of death’ that they make the discovery of good and evil. William Blake is also part of my exploration, particularly the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, and pieces from the Songs of Experience. Innocence is childhood, but what is childhood? It means a person before they have death awareness. And ‘experience’ is very loosely saying someone with a sense of mortality and everything that that might mean. So how does this relate to grief and mourning? That a necessary component of life is not just death, but death awareness. And it’s not bad. It’s just a fact. It’s experience. Indeed, in my own recent experience of the sundering, the expulsion from a happy state, as it were from the Garden of Eden, one of the things I got was a powerful new death awareness. Not just his, but my own. That is a loss of innocence in favor of experience gained. I think it is not the facts that wound, but rather loss of agency. The ‘I didn’t choose this’ element.

TM: In your recent work on disappearance and dementia, you also mentioned the special difficulty of mourning a living person. There has been a recent upsurge in exhibitions dominated by notions of care. What do you find most fascinating or urgent about the subject in the moment that we live in now? Why do you think it has been gaining visibility?

IF: Well, probably because people are living too long. We’re having long periods of time, long periods of frailty and dementia, because people are sticking around, unlike in the Renaissance, you know, where you do your great thing and that’s it, off you go. Masaccio died at 27, having made his place in history with only 27 works. Does more time mean better time? How good is the nineth decade, for anyone? And of course, people living longer implies a sort of burden of care on the younger generation – the ‘children of’, who become caretakers of their parents. That’s a theme I’ve also written about in fiction. In a novel called Attachment. It’s a very interesting moment, perhaps the only time in the generational tide, when you completely switch roles. Another thing about the subject of care is that it’s encoded in sentimentality and virtue. When in fact, there are all sorts of sinister elements and crushingly poignant elements. Most of us in the Western cultures, or the richer nations, run away from this experience. Our parents are in old age homes and the nuclear family does not include the grandparents. Unlike in other places, where more generations commonly live together. There’s also, for some reason, considerable shame attached, I think, with care. Both for the recipient and the giver.

Going back to Milton – he had the most extraordinary and productive kind of care. He went blind at around 50, almost a decade before he began Paradise Lost. Imagine that. He not only conceived the whole thing in his head, with no possibility of writing and editing, and rewriting and improving, as writers do, he couldn’t read anything else. So how did he do it? Care! His daughters were his amanuenses: they took the entire epic down in dictation. He recited the poem. No doubt that limitation influenced the form. An epic is designed to be spoken – and easily memorized, as for example with Homer. Of course, Renaissance painters also had help – as it were, studio assistants – up on the scaffolding.

And it is something I’m interested in because I found myself in a situation where over a decade caregiving pretty much became my life. First for my mother with dementia. And then for my very ill husband. In terms of mourning a living person, what they call ‘anticipatory grief’ – in the case of a person with dementia, the tragedy is that the person you love is so changed that they may as well be someone else. They are in a very real sense ‘gone’. Your person has effectively died, with no moment or ceremony. The dementia activists, and yes, they exist, wish to persuade us that a person with dementia is not different, let alone ‘gone’, only ‘differently able’, or neurodivergent. They reject the metaphor of a living death. Nice sentiment, but is anyone convinced? Perhaps this view at least encourages greater empathy for those who are unable to express themselves. But not always. I witnessed any number of doctors and nurses speak over my mother, and my husband, as if they weren’t there. My mother couldn’t express herself because she had dementia. My husband was muted by the shock, and somehow the shame, of a terminal diagnosis. He was also British. In other words, unlike the average American in the waiting room, he didn’t believe that there was a cure out there, if only he could find a way to buy it. They talked about my mother, and even my husband who clearly did not have dementia, in the third person. As if they were not only ill but also deaf. They routinely referred to my mother as ‘Mom’. Not even ‘your mom’, just ‘Mom’. She was in that sense unpersoned by care. In the case of a terminal illness, the silent grieving of the partner-caregiver is one that you try to conceal, and that has to do with regret, decorum, and dignity – all forms of care.

TM: You’ve been telling me that you also worked a lot on travel writing. And you also showed me your book, Bury Me Standing, The Gypsies and Their Journey. And that’s very much about family, thus not the opposite of caring. How do you distinguish between these research projects? Or how do you do your research? Is it triggered by an instinct?

IF: I can’t explain really the foundational restlessness that I have always felt and written about one way or another. I really don’t know what that is. I could psychoanalyze myself, but it is perhaps a human condition, restlessness and the need for travel. The group of people that I wrote about are supremely expressive, even emblematic of that human restlessness, although it is not at all clear if this is a ‘lifestyle’ or the result of remorseless persecution, of being expelled. Think of their role in opera and painting, of how the ‘Gypsy’ exists in the European imagination as, you know, Carmen – free spirit, sexually liberated, stereotypes that couldn’t be farther from the truth of people living very difficult and unusually conservative lives – at which point we recognize them as Roma rather than ‘Gypsies’. But that notional freedom of movement is romanticized because it is carefree, care-free, ‘without a care’. This is a form of nostalgia, a wish for a return to childlike innocence, or to a supposedly easier time, not like now. And so, we go back to the subject of care, which is a kind of burden, however eagerly undertaken. Adult responsibility is the definition of loss of freedom. Sorry to say. And anybody who becomes a parent – a caregiver in the first instance and for many years – has that experience. The first feeling is worry. How can I protect this tiny person? You will also probably love that child more than you love yourself, most people do, but the job is to protect – to protect from harm. Like the Hippocratic oath of care that doctors take: Do no Harm. When I wrote that book, I was not yet a parent. I was younger and freer to travel, for as long as I needed to, to really understand the culture, in my case for around five years. And very often, as a woman traveling alone, I was cared for by my Roma family, often to the point of feeling in custody.

TM: Can you tell me about elements of movement in your own background?

IF: I had been traveling with my grandmother when I got the idea for that book. She was from Hungary and had immigrated to the US as a baby, around 1902. We were looking for her town, which had become part of Slovakia. Her family who didn’t emigrate, her aunts and uncles and cousins, were killed – sent to Auschwitz towards the very end of the war, when a vast number of Hungarian Jews were exterminated. But the idea of being persecuted whether you stay or go is also interesting to me because another bit of the family, they were Russian Jews. They also ‘emigrated’ but not in a voluntary sense. They left their world (a Russia that became Poland, because countries also migrate) because of pogroms: there was always a push rather than a pull. And so, we return to the question of agency. You don’t always choose to leave your home. Think of that nameless Indian migrant to the flower fields of central Italy. No, you don’t always choose to separate from your loved ones. And you never choose grief. These forms of movement are obviously different from the kind of glorious searching wanderlust celebrated, for example, by Bruce Chatwin.They are, nevertheless, defining. It’s all there from the start. Think of a seder, which commemorates the exodus of the Jews out of Egypt. On the move from the very beginning! My own travels, mercifully, have been entirely elective. Except for the next move. Where to live? It’s an open question.

TM: Now we are here in Chiusure and you also undertook a trip to see the Piero della Francesca frescos recently. And you met the rest of the group in Florence. You mentioned the view from your studio/apartment here, but you also talked about how you were eager to enter the majestic and ancient landscape surrounding Siena on foot. How do you further think your research and your writing will relate to the local people and the region?

IF: I think this landscape is important because it is one of these visibly ancient landscapes. There is a fabulous contrast, one you could describe as innocence versus experience, or rather as organic evolution versus relentless cultivation. On the one hand, you have the Crete Senesi, the pale clay of the region, which is sediment from a vanished sea, the bedrock of the Tyrrhennian. I mean, how old is it? Between two-and-half and over five million years: the Pliocene era. That is one aspect of the local landscape. On the other hand, you have the immaculately cultivated agricultural landscape which is even more characteristic of the region and its people: olives and wine, olives and wine. And now, in addition, you have – or I have – awareness of the cost of this domestication, as told in the signs across the Biancane di Leonina.

And even in the town, the way people live, is kind of timeless and unmodern. Old people spend their evenings sitting out in the square, gossiping or just hanging out. No sign of any modern technology, or, it should be said, of the isolation that such ‘connectivity’ technology creates. Indeed, no sign of children, or teenagers: nothing about the future. And so here you’re a little bit unshackled from modernity, which is wonderfully useful for freeing the imagination. In terms of walking into the landscape, I have been making ever further little explorations. You must go late or very early because of the intense heat. But everywhere you go, you’re all alone in this ancient landscape. Where is everybody?

It’s a very soothing experience to be connected to nature, even when you are in the town, you are always glimpsing the gorgeous landscape. I think that, in terms of grief, this connection is possibly the best thing that anyone has ever thought of. Along with a bit of community. The oldsters in the piazza are on to something, talking to the same people for their entire lives, so profoundly at home. But the connection with the landscape. Not just with undisturbed nature, but with cultivated land. The local monks, you might say, represent another kind of cultivated nature, with their commitment to stillness and renunciation, and for life. Though they seem quite integrated in the community, and not all that still. What is it that makes a person choose to self-sequester at all?

TM: Thank you, Isabel, it was a pleasure.

IF: And it is a pleasure to be here. It’s magical.