Pages from journals are frozen in midair, as if caught in a photograph of them flying away in a windstorm. A figure emerges from a book, a look of concern on her face. A mirror captures the skyline of a city. They’re all part of a larger show and puppet theater piece called Sueños, by artist Anatar Marmol-Gagné, running in the project room at Artspace through March 20. Together, the elements combine wonder and gritty, emotional realism to tell a story about family chaos and the wrenching effects of immigration that make the political deeply personal.
The installed exhibit is in some ways a prelude to the artist’s performance of a puppet theater piece — an excerpt from a longer work — that will take place at Artspace on March 13. The installation and accompanying show are “quite autobiographical,” said Marmol-Gagné. “I’m baring it all.” Telling her story through art and puppetry, however, also gives her a little distance from her own history. “It lends itself to a magical way of telling the story.”
When Marmol-Gagné was a girl, she had worry dolls that she used to help deal with the turmoil of her life. “You could tell the worry to the worry doll, and it was supposed to take your worries away. I used my worry dolls a lot,” she said wryly. In the accompanying show, the worry dolls become the narrators to the story, telling the events of Marmol-Gagné‘s life from the perspective of figures who have been entrusted to help her get through it.
There is a lot to talk about, as the story of Marmol-Gagné‘s family is intertwined, inextricably, with Venezuela’s descent into chaos in the past couple decades. Marmol-Gagné‘s parents divorced when Marmol-Gagné was two-and-a-half years old. Her father was in New York City, where he had gone from Venezuela for graduate school, and decided to stay. Her mother stayed in Caracas. But when Marmol-Gagné was seven, her mother was in a bad car accident that left her unable to care for her daughter. That meant Marmol-Gagné moved to the United States to live with her father, where she stayed for eight years. During that time, “we went through the process of getting a green card together — which was grueling,” Marmol-Gagné said.
But her home life in New York was not tranquil. Her father and stepmother had a fractious divorce, and she and as she became a teenager, “my dad and I fought — really bad fights,” Marmol-Gagné said. In the end, she recalled, her father told her, “I can’t take care of you — you’re going back” to Venezuela.
It was 1993 and Marmol-Gagné was then 16 years old. “I figured I was going back for a few months,” she said. Instead she was there for six years. “Definitely not what I was expecting, but it never is,” she said.
Fluent in Spanish and English, she studied translation and interpretation. She stayed in Venezuela until 1999, when Hugo Chávez came into power, and her family found itself on the wrong end of its politics. “The political climate was getting really bad,” she said, and Caracas was too expensive to live in by herself. Her stepmother offered her a studio apartment to come back to in New York. “So I packed up and left,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave — I had to start from scratch, again,” in making friends and other connections, as she had when she was 16.
A customs officer let her back into the United States even though her green card had been expired, at that point, for three years. She has since gotten U.S. citizenship. Now “I can’t go back. I’m deemed a traitor to my country,” she said. “I haven’t seen my mom in 11 years.” And she has watched helplessly as, under Chávez — and, since 2013, his successor, Nicolás Maduro — Venezuela has slid from being one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America to the epicenter for a political, economic, and humanitarian crisis. Today her mom is “as best as she can be,” Marmol-Gagné said. In a country that made its name as an oil producer, “right now, there’s no gas. It’s very hard.”
She moved from New York to the New Haven area in 2004 with a significant other. “I came up to New Haven and really fell in love,” she said. Compared to the expense of living in New York, “I could live here and have quality of life.” She stayed after her relationship ended. In 2009 she applied for and got into UCONN’s MFA program in puppet arts, part of its theater program.
“What I like about puppetry is that I can really submerge the viewer in this world” that she has created, she said. “Puppets tell stories really well,” able to convey meaning and emotions through gesture alone. “It’s more interesting to show the story instead of telling it.” A childhood nightmare can be conveyed through visuals alone. “When there’s a puppet involved, the suspension of disbelief is immediate,” Marmol-Gagné said, “and complete. There’s nothing like it.”
Marmol-Gagné will perform an excerpt from her puppet theater piece at Artspace on March 13, with four separate showings. Tickets are free but seating is limited and people are asked to register in advance. But the installation in the project room also carries much of that emotional weight. In the exquisitely crafted dolls, the scrawled letters, the lights and shadows shaping the wall, there are the echoes of past turmoil, as well as the promise of solace.
Sueños runs in the project room at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through March 20. Visit Artspace’s website for hours and further information about the March 13 performance.