Extract of a conversation between Marina de Caro and Albertine de Galbert (Paris, 2023)
ADG: How do you choose your colors?
MDC: It's not really a choice, I don't really care. It just needs to be organic. I don't like when it clashes too much with reality. The colors should be "attached" to one another. For example, for Hormiga argentina [Argentinian ant] - the pieces made with textile tubes and installed in the gallery's staircase -, pink helped me create a path. It is mostly the distribution of colors in space that aids the organic perception and reading of the work, so that the visitors can easily feel involved.
ADG: Are there colors you would never work with?
MDC: No, I've done the exercise of working with all colors, even the ones that I don't like.
ADG: What colors don't you like?
MDC: Purple.
ADG: Ah, you don't like it?
MDC: I hate purple, I despise this color, and yet I've just done a purple painting.
ADG: Do you know why?
MDC: I don't like it. I couldn't wear this color for example, I don't know why. I can't find any "purple gestures" in my body. But even if I don't like it, I work with it because it helps me step out of myself; otherwise, I'd always stay the same.
ADG: I'm talking about color because it's crucial in your work. You're even part of a collective you created with artists and art theorists3: Cromoactivismo. It's a movement aimed at restoring the symbolic and political significance of color (as opposed to Pantone, for example, which classifies and neutralizes the affective impact of color). Is that right?
MDC: Yes, but Cromoactivismo is very specific; it's not the same as working with color in works exhibited in institutions or galleries. In Cromoactivismo, we symbolically "load" a color with our individual or collective political experiences. We also draw from archives, which, for me, are alive. On the other hand, here, it's about building an experience, which then will become "chromo-active". Color doesn't have a symbolic value in itself; it requires the experience. In my opera, I work with this double "value" of color, as container and as expression of the experience. In that work, color is both a symbol, content, and experience.