We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marisol García Walls a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Marisol thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Every night, starting when I was a baby until I was about 13 years old, my mother would read us a story before bedtime. Looking back, the fact that she managed to sustain this small ritual throughout so many years taught me some of the most important lessons in my life as a writer.
Even though I always knew I wanted to write, I consider the path to doing so wasn’t straightforward. I studied Hispanic Literature and then did a master’s degree in Art Studies. As someone who finds it difficult to fit into the traditional definitions of what a professional career looks like, I always kept my options open. Writing my bachelor’s thesis allowed me to learn about book history and the study of materiality in the arts. Then, my master’s work with feminist art archives led me to discover my interest in critical theory. Working with the archive as a new paradigm across different art forms led me to think about the importance of integrating archival practices into curatorial discourses. In the background, however, the interest for writing was always there, integrating all my various interests. I would say that right now my main focus as an artist is to use writing deliberately as a space for experimentation.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

In my career as an essayist, my main interests are memory, autobiographical writing and the relationship between objects, material culture, and visual arts. These interests found their way naturally into my two books, Involuntary Statement (Madrid: Ediciones La Palma, 2024) and Atlas of Family Traits (Medellín: Tragaluz, 2022). In Atlas of Family Traits I was trying to situate my academic interests using my personal life story as a frame. I used experimental methods —such as walking while following an analog map, writing with Oulipo-style constraints and using media archeology to recover lost photographs— in order to trigger different aspects of memory. Involuntary Statement, on the other hand, is a book that deals with the subject of rape in Mexico and the absence of justice to the victims of systemic violence. In this hybrid memoir, I took the text of the original statement I gave at a police station in 2009 and intervened it with marks and erasures in order to highlight the discrepancies between personal memory and the documents that the State provides when dealing with a crime.
In my work as a curator, I am particularly interested in the boundaries between personal and collective histories. In 2017, Julia Antivilo introduced me to the world of feminist art archives. As part of the Feminist Curatorial Laboratory, I began working on an exhibition based on several Mexican art archives that address the history of women’s struggle in our country. Working with historical collections and showed me that archives create constellations —dialogues between the past and the present—, a task I greatly enjoy.
I believe this idea also informs my writing, in which one of my main interests is to integrate academic concepts into an experimental writing practice. I am interested in a type of writing that is nourished not only by personal experience, but also knows how to dialogue with different discursive practices. For me, art theory is an incredibly nourishing field that informs my creative writing. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, in terms of writing, I have mostly practiced essay, testimony, and memoir. Since 2014, the lines of exploration that define my work became clearer. I can say that my work focuses on the relationship between the body and documentary practices and I use mostly archival material a means of linking personal and collective memories.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My second book addresses an experience I had when I was twenty years old and living in Mexico City. One night, when I was returning home from university, four men broke into our home and robbed it while my mother, my sister and me were inside. As a result of this experience, I was also a victim of rape. Besides the obvious statement that it was a very difficult experience to overcome, I find it important to mention that trauma has a powerful effect on creativity. For years, I experienced a strong disconnection between my emotions and my creative work. I saw the points—my practice as a curator, my practice as a writer and my personal experiences—but I simply could not connect them. My entire life became about how I was incapable of writing and crafting the images that appeared so clearly inside my head.
It has taken me a lot of effort to realize the importance of maintaining a constant practice that traces the path back and forth between desire and habit. In the past few years, I have focused on laying solid foundations: I read everyday, write daily for at least an hour and made creativity the focus of my small business. I moved to Xalapa, a smaller city than Mexico City, where I host an online writing workshop that allows me to have time for my writing. Battling with mental fog, chronic illness and trauma has not been easy at all, but I do have to admit that it has made me stronger.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I am currently developing a complex project that I feel that integrates all the elements that are important to my creative practice. It is a book titled Reverberations, which examines precisely the relationship between image and text through the concept of repetition. Besides its relation to reflection and resonance, the word “reverberation” is used metaphorically to describe the effects or impact of a traumatic event. The research for Reverberations draws from various archives in Mexico City, including materials related to the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, surveillance records issued by the Federal Security Department in the 1980s that had students and cultural agents on the watch, and materials related to the creation of a seamstresses’ union after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. The goal is to continue exploring the relationship between memory, the gaps and lacunae in the archive and to think about the way that documents shape our recollections.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m_i_n_i_g_r_a_m/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marisol.gwalls
• Other: Paperbell: https://paperbell.me/marisol-garcia-walls

Image Credits

Portrait picture: Indra Cano.