Interviews, Issue 8

Julie Mehretu

Mysteries of Place-ness

Words ERIK MORSE

Photography GEORGE ETHEREDGE

The work of abstract painter Julie Mehretu has always been immersed in the mysteries of place-ness. Yet, her interests go well beyond place’s geographic or Euclidean parameters. Rather, Mehretu’s early, large-scale map works, atmospheric monochromes, and, most recently, her color field paintings on glass invoke psychological and sensorial experiences of the intimacies of place, along with its expressions of alterity and community, dwelling, and displacement. Indeed, such knotty relationships between place and displacement throughout Mehretu’s oeuvre have led to a litany of recondite terminologies and abstruse concepts to describe her work, including “intermingling,” “emergence,” “the surround,” and “the in-between.”

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mehretu was forced to flee her country as a child amid the civil uprisings that followed the assassination of the country’s ruler, Halie Selassie. Such primal scenes of uprootedness and escape have persistently haunted her memories over the subsequent half-century. They have also imbued her practice with an ineluctable attraction to the elsewhere, an inarticulate space of possibility and potential comprising the elusive thresholds between the near and the far, the departure and the return.

It is through her consistent departures into this elsewhere that Mehretu has encountered the ecstasies of place-ness, and then returned bearing the souvenirs or keepsakes of these travels in the form of her intimate abstractions.

ERIK MORSE: I’m deeply interested in looking at the evolution of your work through a particular lens of movement—that is, through the categories of displacement and travel. These include themes like departure and return, the near and the far, the interior and exotic, all of which I think of as part of this larger concept of the tourist imaginary.

JULIE MEHRETU: When you talk about the tourist imaginary, tell me more about how you’re thinking about it.

EM: Do you know the anthropologist James Clifford? He gave a lecture that was later published in essay form called “Traveling Cultures” (2008). The topic of the essay was what he called the “story of dwelling-in-travel,” as a way of talking about movement, displacement, and this kind of tourist imaginary. Toward the beginning of his talk he says, “In tipping the balance toward traveling as I am doing here…culture comes to resemble as much a site of travel encounters as of residence, less a tent in a village or a controlled laboratory or a site of initiation and inhabitation, and more like a hotel lobby, ship or bus. […] To press the point: why not focus on any culture’s farthest range of travel while also looking at its center…. How is a culture also a site of travel for others? How are spaces traversed from outside? How is one group’s core another’s periphery?”

JM: I think it’s really interesting, because I feel that tourism and culture are thought of or have been thought of as being kind of contradictory or somewhat opposites. But there’s something that I really find fascinating there—one of the last sentences in what you just read. This idea of the edges of culture—what are the boundaries of that, and how much is that something that is not just embedded in a local but moves from place to place? For example, when I travel a lot, going from place to place, I see certain relationships that I feel undeniable between, I don’t know, parts of Asia and parts of Mexico.

EM: Around the time you were completing your large-scale work Cairo (2013), you described this experience of being a displaced artist in New York City with a strong attachment to distant landscapes. You described the feeling as an intense criss-crossing over oceans and continents. Could you elaborate further on what you meant by this displacement?

JM: Since I have lived in various places at different ages or different stages of my life, each of those—especially as I get older—get put into these periods of historical time. And then there are these somatic experiences that happen when you smell something and it brings a memory rushing back to the fore of the mind, and you might not have thought about it at all. Right now, we’re seeing so many things happening that bring back certain types of deep visceral fears or emotional reactions, which then bring back other moments of lived experience. I always find this trips me out, especially when it happens regarding a sense of place.

I couldn’t understand for a while why that was so. I think when I was working on that [Cairo] painting, a really close friend of mine said that it’s kind of like my Addis painting. Even though I was drawing the architecture of New York, while having this major event happen in Egypt, it was like this cyclical thing of my childhood coming back to me.

EM: I did want to talk a little bit about your recollections of childhood between Addis and the US. I read that one of your first memories of art came from paging through your mother’s book on Rembrandt, which she had brought to the US from Ethiopia. Another memory you recalled having an effect on you was visiting the modernist Hilton Hotel in Addis when you were still quite young. I’m wondering how these two formative experiences of dwelling-in-travel might have informed the way you began to see dwelling and displacement from a very early age.

JM: Absolutely. My mother brought so little when they left Ethiopia because they didn’t expect to leave when they did. My parents had just finished building their new house. They’d started it before the revolution, before the assassination of Halie Selassie. Then we left in June of ’77. We were actually only there for five months. My father couldn’t leave, so my mother and him packed us all up quickly. My father met us two months later. Some families didn’t get reunited for twenty years or something. We were very lucky. Part of the reason my father was able to get out was because of his work with these international universities: one in the Netherlands and one at Michigan State. That’s how he ended up being able to get a visa to leave with the invitation and leave the country, but then never were able to return.

My mother brought this Rembrandt book, which was my earliest memory of a particular painting. I remember my mother talking to me a lot about Rembrandt; she had studied some art history and loved it. After we came to the States, we went to Detroit a lot for my father’s immigration paperwork, and we would visit the Detroit Institute of Art regularly.

But, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I also think about Addis Ababa in that moment of the 1970s, when I was a child. [My father] was an economic geographer working with other agriculturalists and economists on development and how to further projects in Ethiopia’s modernization process. And I remember places like the Hilton Hotel being a brand new place having this kind of pan-African Internationalism. It was a part of a movement for this democratization of the country, which was completely co-opted by Mengistu [Haile Mariam, former president of Ethiopia] and the Cold War. There was this enormous shift in my personal upbringing.

Coming to Michigan was a really different reality. In East Lansing, where we moved, there were certain felt memories that I had from Ethiopia in the buildings. A lot of the Michigan State campus was built during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. And its land grant university language was another kind of international project. I grew up near that and the African Center, so there was this good-sized African community of international students; and yet, we were in the middle of East Lansing, Michigan, which is a different reality than Addis Ababa.

It’s weird how that stuff is tangled in my mind, how the memories get folded on one another. I think what sticks with me—or what I find interesting—is how they reverberate inside of me, these echoes of one another, even though they’re from incredibly different places.