Son[i]a #413
Mari Chordà

Mari Chordà was born on 14 May 1942 in Amposta, Tarragona, a land to which she is deeply attached. She is a painter, sculptor, writer, poet, and activist, whose painting and poetry speak of pleasure, motherhood, and the female body. She was also among the first of her generation to propose the idea of free sexuality. Mari Chordà developed her own pictorial style in formal and colour terms, without following trends but focusing on the direct depiction of her own body—the female body—and its cavities, sinuosity, fluids, and mutations. 

Language and social action have also been at the heart of Chordà’s artistic body of work, and an inseparable part of her life and biography. In 1976, on the occasion of the first Catalan Women’s Conference, she wrote her first book of poems, entitled “… i moltes alters coses” (…and many other things). It was published anonymously at the time because she argued that the words were not only her own, but the voice of a collective emancipation. Other books of poems came later, as well as other creations, and…many other things.

In this podcast, we open up Mari Chordà’s memory box. She takes us back in time to her childhood, when a long illness became an opportunity to discover drawing. Here we encounter boxes of pencils that sketched out futures, women who influenced her profoundly, and the sea as a backdrop and a source of inspiration. We spend some time exploring her role in the social activation of spaces such as Lo Llar in Amposta and the feminist Bar-Biblioteca laSal in Barcelona, unravelling all the elements involved in the care and sustaining of spaces for mutual support, care and learning created by women. We look back on the years when she abandoned her artistic practice, which were also a time of flourishing of poetry, feminist activism, and the increasingly strong conviction that joy, pleasure, and coming together are profoundly transformative.