MALIBU, Calif. — On July 20, 1969, artist Lita Albuquerque and her friend were driving through the Tunisian Sahara Desert when their car broke down. Together they walked toward a farm in the distance, where they found their friends watching a broadcast of astronaut Neil Armstong’s first steps on the moon. In the middle of the desert and at just 23 years of age, Albuquerque witnessed a historic moment that would accelerate space technology and radically transform our relationship with outer space. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Albuquerque likened the Apollo 11 moon landing to the Renaissance; both, she explained, revolutionized perspective.
That moment fueled the artist’s lifelong curiosity about the cosmos, which would become a central aspect of her installations, paintings, and sculptures that link people with Earth and beyond. “It’s complex for me to wrap my mind around all the aspects of my career. It is one large story about humans and the cosmos,” Albuquerque said. Now, at age 78, the prolific artist is ready to embark on a new chapter in her career — one that is more personal and allows us to re-read her work under an entirely new rubric.
In June, under the direction of Tunisian-American curator Ikram Lakhdhar, Albuquerque recreated her first landwork, “Malibu Line” (1978), on the site of her former family home, which burned down in the 2018 Woolsey Fire. The arts nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) hosted two days of public viewings, during which over 500 people showed up to experience the piece, consisting of ultramarine blue powdered pigment in a trench stretching 68 feet in length (~21 meters) and swelling from 14 inches wide at its start to 17 inches wide at its endpoint (~36 to ~43 centimeters). In September, Albuquerque and LAND will host an additional public viewing, and she and Lakhdhar hope to bring the work to Tunisia by 2025.
Early in her practice, Albuquerque lived and worked in Venice, California, among a community of artists who would pioneer the Light and Space and Land Art movements. Her original “Malibu Line,” located in the artist’s previous Malibu residence, was 41 feet long and two feet deep. Albuquerque described the work as a simple gesture, influenced by groundbreaking California artist Robert Irwin, who maintained his Venice studio until 1970. Archival photographs of the ephemeral work, which was eventually taken over by the elements, visualize how it connected the land to the horizon line and the earth to both ocean and sky. Until now, the work has largely been read by art historians as an experiment in perspective.
Albuquerque recalled the first time she showed Lakhdhar the images of the original “Malibu Line.” “[Lakhdhar] said to me, ‘That looks like a longing for Tunisia!’ Now, I would say all of my work is a longing for Tunisia,” observed Albuquerque, who spent the early years of her life there. “At the time I was emerging as an artist, you didn’t talk about personal things.”
In the 1930s, Albuquerque’s mother, who briefly worked as a playwright in Paris under a male pseudonym, moved from her native Tunisia to Hollywood to pursue a career in journalism. A scandal in the papers forced her back to Tunisia, where Albuquerque was raised from five months to 11 years old. She would spend the majority of her childhood boarded in a Catholic convent in Sidi Bou Said, a town northeast of the capital named after Sufi scholar and religious figure Abu Said al-Baji. Regarded as a tourism hotspot, Sidi Bou Said attracted both modernist European artists and Tunisian artists from the local École de Tunis. Albuquerque became attached to the land, admiring the ancient Roman ruins of nearby Carthage and the vivid color of blue found on Sidi Bou Said’s buildings, sky, and ocean. She regularly visited a grotto at the convent, where she would spend time with a Virgin Mary sculpture donning a blue cloak adorned with gold stars. The confluence of being a Jewish Tunisian living in a Catholic convent in a predominantly Muslim country under French colonialism undoubtedly left a mark on the young Albuquerque.
“I don’t know what my family was before colonization,” Albuquerque admitted. Her decades-long practice has always been, in some ways, a result of the violence of colonialism and the societal pressures placed on independent and creative women. Most importantly, it is about a longing for Tunisia and, as she puts it, the “presencing of absence” — both of family and land. Albuquerque combines ancestral knowledge passed down to her through visions, cosmology, antiquity, and science fiction as a way to reclaim the pre-colonial past, connect to her Tunisian heritage, and envision an alternative future. In fact, she credits the 25th-century Female Astronaut, a character that came to her in a vision in 2003, with the creation of her artworks. “I think of these gestures, like ‘Malibu Line,’ as hers,” she explained.
For diasporic artists, the art market often demands work that includes easily identifiable cultural markers. But Tunisia has always been present in Albuquerque’s work — it just took a fellow Tunisian-American like Lakhdhar to see what others could not.
“Do you feel like the project of recreating ‘Malibu Line’ is a homecoming of sorts?” I asked Albuquerque.
“It will be in Tunisia. It has to be Tunisia. I want the two lines to meet across the continents,” she replied. “This is the time for me to bring out my history and combine the personal with the universal story. It’s just the beginning.”
