Luisa Margal ends the Exile

For a long time, writing remained her secret refuge. A space sheltered from view where she could tell the story of a life torn between Colombia and Europe. Today, Luisa lifts the veil with Fin d’exil, her first poetry book. A one-woman band, the artist moves between writing, photography, theatre and performance, never choosing just one, to explore the traces exile has left in her story.

I meet Luisa at the Parvis de Saint-Gilles, a few weeks before the release of her first poetry collection, Fin d’exil. The softness of the early evening invites us to sit down for a coffee on the terrace of L’Union. Luisa navigates several artistic disciplines, but that night we talk about writing. A garden that is no longer quite so secret now, with the publication of this book by Éditions Les Bonnes Feuilles. For nearly two hours, we talked about the personal and artistic paths that led to Fin d’exil, and about the need to write in order to reclaim one’s own story.

Writing to save herself

When Luisa arrives in Belgium eight years ago, it is to train as an actress at the IAD. At that time, writing is still carefully kept out of sight. Then there is that evening, at an open-mic night organized at Womufe. The organizers are short of participants and insist that she go on stage. Until then, her texts had never left the private sphere. That night, however, she agrees. There are evenings like that that change a life. “I thought of writing as this safe place that I would never share with anyone. When you make art, there comes a moment when it’s desirable to find yourself exposed. But sometimes art simply has a function of expression, without the pressure to ‘make something’ out of it.”

Her intimate relationship with words has roots much further back—in a childhood made of departures and displacement. Her parents flee the armed conflict in Colombia and Luisa grows up in Italy, moving from one foster family to another. A childhood where you have to learn to find your place without making noise. “I think everyone puts things in place to save themselves from a situation. When I was a child, since I lived with foster families and changed very often… it was kind of my condition to be well-behaved, not to disturb, because I was in people’s homes that I didn’t know very well. Writing allowed me to do something. To pass the time, when you’re alone and you have no one around you.” Writing is then neither an artistic project nor a calling. It is company. A way of keeping a space of one’s own in a life where everything else seems temporary.

Writing to take back control of your story

At Womufe, however, writing—an act she experienced as so intimate—becomes a space of encounter. After this first public reading, several people come up to her. Among them, many South Americans recognize in her words something of their own story. “I remember sharing the poem ‘Ma Tante’. It was at Sounds, a place that brings together many migrants from South America. Many were moved.”

For the first time, her words go beyond the frame of her own story, and Luisa discovers another way of inhabiting the stage. No need to slip into a character to reach the audience. Yet shaping yourself, adapting to others’ desires—that is what she was taught. In theatre school, she is taught to erase her accent so as not to be put in a box… and ultimately locked into another. “With the open mic, I told myself: I’m going to own it. I knew I wanted to talk about immigration, about my community, but I wasn’t doing it. In theatre school, they advise you to erase your accent so you won’t always get the role of the Colombian woman, the little foreigner. So I was a bit in that mindset, telling myself I don’t want to write about migration, because otherwise I’ll be reduced to ‘the migrant’ for the rest of my life, and I don’t want that.”

Writing gives her the possibility of reclaiming her story, the product of everyone’s curiosity. “All my life, in every environment, people have questioned me a lot about what I’ve lived through. I’m in exile, I’ve lived in different countries, I speak different languages. And each time, it’s enough to say I’m Colombian, that I grew up in Italy, that now I’m in Belgium… You constantly have to explain how you got there. Little by little, I find myself always telling my story. For once, with the book, I’m happy. It’s me telling what I want to say, in the version I want to give.” With all the complexity that stories of exile contain—what plays out between the lines. “It’s more emotionally complex. In Brussels, there are lots of communities constantly living alongside each other, and within those communities you see the aftermath of war, the traces of the disappeared, migrations. There are so many small details I wouldn’t want to brush aside. Like combing my aunt’s hair, for example.”

Her aunt’s hair is the detail Luisa chooses for her first reading on stage. A seemingly trivial detail she wants to capture in her artistic practices. In her texts as in her photographs, she holds on to those everyday gestures that often go unnoticed. It was, in fact, by photographing her cousin’s hair that she was published for the first time in Vogue. “I photographed my cousin—it was a little staging because she was combing her hair at home, in the bathroom. I told her, come on, let’s do it in our grandmother’s garden. That way I keep a memory of that place and of you doing that gesture.” Memory nests itself in the most ordinary gestures and objects. Art so as not to forget. That is how Luisa describes her vision of photography: a way of holding on to what disappears and paying attention to what would otherwise end up fading away. “When you take photos, you realize there won’t be a next time. Never will that moment—like theatre—be exactly as you see it.”

This attention to detail also shapes the way she tells exile. Far from grand narratives and spectacular events, Luisa is interested in what plays out in the intimate: habits, sensations, gestures repeated again and again. “We don’t realize that everything that is a war, an exile, a migration isn’t made only of the event of exile with a capital E. It’s made of lots of internal experiences. Of course, there are pains that are frontal, and we tend to tell those because they’re clearly more obvious and more important. But we mustn’t forget, I think, everything that belongs to the realm of the everyday, the smallest things, or the invisible.”

The book is illustrated by the Franco-Peruvian artist Maïra Villena.

Writing the end of exile

Then comes another happy coincidence. Luisa comes across the call for manuscripts from a young publishing house, Les Bonnes Feuilles. Fifteen texts are requested. She counts hers: exactly fifteen. She sends her submission without thinking too much about it. By an arithmetic stroke of luck, a few weeks later she learns she has won second prize in the competition. Listening to her tell her story, many things seem to happen like that: an open mic short of participants; a call for texts that matches exactly the number of poems she has written. Yet behind this apparent ease lie years of writing, photographing, observing and creating—an entire life spent developing her art.

The book will be titled Fin d’exil. “A reader who doesn’t know me won’t necessarily know what my book is about. I thought it was nicer that someone could also feel drawn to a topic that is strong, which is exile. I wanted it to speak to those people.” She grows up in an environment where ideas, books and speeches occupy a central place. “My father and mother raised me to read, to think, to reflect on words.” She pauses before smiling.

“My life has always been about being in circles of politically engaged people. And so I told myself: my life has to be able to be something else too. But in the end, you never escape your story. With my parents, it’s almost inevitable—I feel like I’m continuing a tradition… I’m perpetuating the tradition because they put that chip in my head. Yes, I have a lens that’s too strong to get out of.”

Italy will be the second major stage of this story. It is where Luisa grows up. It is also where she develops her love of literature and finds a word for what she is living through. “The term exile appears in the poem A Zacinto, written by the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo in 1803. It’s about an Italian who is exiled in Greece. When we studied that, I think I was in primary school. And it was the first time someone explained to me what exile was, when I understood that I was living it.”

Years later, Belgium becomes a new chapter in her story. In the meantime, poems and fractures have accumulated, but they have also begun to speak to one another. That is the movement Fin d’exil tells. “We went over all the texts with my editor. In this case, my texts follow a path. She suggested an order of resolution, but also a more personal vision. And so, in that order, ‘end’ of exile makes sense. Because they’re no longer disconnected fractures. First there’s the poem ‘Départ’ which speaks about my childhood, up to the last one, ‘Détruire la ville, tuer le serpent" a very recent poem—the one that represents me the most right now.”

An end of exile is also what her mother is living—Luisa dedicates the book to her. After decades spent far from her country, she is preparing her return to Colombia. For Luisa, the question is different. For now, her story continues to be written in Europe. “People often ask me how I feel here. In fact, I consider myself a Colombian woman living in Europe. And I love living in Europe—my daily life adapts here, maybe forever. Yet I will always be Colombian.”

A Colombian of Europe. For a long time, Luisa believed this hybrid identity was an exception. Then there was Barcelona. Selected for an artistic residency where she has to develop a photographic project, she discovers a reality she had never encountered before: a large Latin American community shaping the city’s cultural landscape. “That experience in Spain blew my mind, because I realized there were loads of Latin Americans! I feel like I’d been lied to my whole life. Because I grew up in Italy, and then I lived in France and in Belgium. I was thinking: it’s crazy—this world has always existed and I didn’t know.”

In Brussels, Luisa enjoys building her bearings, her Latino “foundations,” often around music and dance. “I love going to Cartagena, for example. It’s very particular—the music they play is from the depths of the last village in the south of my country, party music that is my reference. Then they play traditional bachata and I love that. Otherwise, I love going to Clave y Sabor, where they give salsa caleña classes, or to Rueda de tambores.” As often in her story, places matter as much as people. They become anchor points—places where different facets of her history can coexist.

The future looks full of promise. Her first book will be released in the coming days, while her photographic work has just been selected by Creatura, a leading Latin American contemporary art magazine. As with her poems, her artistic path seems to move forward through encounters and surprises. “What’s next? I don’t see myself more as a writer than as an actress, than as a photographer. For me, everything complements each other. They’re different media of expression, there for different reasons. Depending on what I feel like telling or expressing, one medium will impose itself on its own.” Listening to her, nothing suggests she will ever choose between writing, photography, theatre or performance. Since the beginning of our conversation, all these paths seem to lead to the same place—the title of her compatriot García Márquez: vivir para contarla, to live in order to tell it.

Fin d’exil was published by Éditions Les Bonnes Feuilles. The book is beautifully illustrated by the Franco-Peruvian artist Maïra Villena.

IG: luisamargal