“Feminism in Brazil … was a luxury we could not afford,” Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger has said. 1  She has also suggested that “rather than a feminist demand,” her work produced during the Brazilian military regime (1964–85) was “simply the work of a Brazilian artist living in that difficult moment.” 2  Known for her trailblazing video art, conceptual investigations of Brazilian identity, and attempts to grapple with Indigenous history, Geiger has repeatedly resisted feminist reclamations of her work. This resistance was common among her generation of women artists in Brazil. 3  Living under a dictatorship that, in 1968, outlawed any form of political opposition to the regime, artists such as Geiger saw women’s issues as extravagant in the face of an urgent human rights crisis. Additionally, given the US government’s backing of the dictatorship, the feminist movement’s associations with US cultural imperialism further intensified their aversion. 4  Nevertheless, as art historian Claudia Calirman has recently argued, artists of Geiger’s generation still faced societal constraints due to their gender, and they used their art to combat those limitations. 5  Geiger’s artwork from the mid-1970s offers a cogent example of this phenomenon. While it certainly provides a fascinating record of her experiences as an artist in Brazil living under an authoritarian military regime, it documents those experiences from the perspective of an artist who happened to be a woman and a mother.

In particular, her artist’s books from the period reveal how Geiger articulated the challenges of her daily realities, reflecting her struggle to balance the different types of labor for which she was responsible. The feminist concept of the “double shift”—where women return home from a full day of paid work only to find themselves responsible for a full evening’s worth of unpaid, domestic labor—was a key issue that women in other parts of the world were mobilizing around. 6  Elsewhere in Latin America, women artists had introduced the notion of a “triple shift”: waged labor, unpaid domestic labor, and artistic labor. 7  Though Geiger did not explicitly label it as such, she contended with the burden of the “triple shift”; she supported her family financially by teaching art and language classes, she bore primary caretaking responsibilities for her four children, and in between, she made art.

Geiger’s artist’s books from the mid-1970s employ aspects specific to the book medium to succinctly enunciate the physical and psychological toll of being a woman, a mother, and an artist under dictatorship. These works are closely connected to other coeval aspects of her artistic production, including the video works and conceptual endeavors for which she is best known. Therefore, an examination of her artist’s books provides a framework for considering how—despite her repeated assertions that this was not her intention—her works can contribute to our understanding of an emerging feminist consciousness in Brazil.

The format of the book allowed Geiger to create narratives that unfold across the bound pages and to experiment playfully with the way viewers intimately interact with these objects. Dashed off photocopies combine with carefully collaged found images and detailed handmade elements that she meticulously crafted for each edition, which typically consisted of twenty-five or fifty copies. As the viewer flips through the pages, recurring motifs and layered images slowly evolve and transform: some images gradually shrink or expand through Geiger’s experimentation with the photocopier, while others are progressively stripped down as layers of tracing paper or plastic transparencies are peeled back.

I find the latter case particularly intriguing. Images seem to melt away as the viewer turns diaphanous pages and what lies beneath comes into sudden focus. In Geiger’s book Os 10 mandamentos ilustrados (The Illustrated Ten Commandments, 1975), sheets of transparent tracing paper alternate with opaque, photocopied compositions. As art historian Zanna Gilbert has pointed out, when the pages are turned, the Indigenous figures printed on the tracing paper repeatedly “‘disappear’ from the colonial European scenes” beneath them. 8  Moreover, as the artist herself has suggested, the material fragility of the transparent pages underscores the precarious status of the figures that are pictured. 9  Geiger’s use of transparency performs the erasure of Indigenous Brazilian experience and, more darkly, the violence inflicted upon the Indigenous populations from the colonial era to the present day. Further, it implicates the viewer, making them complicit in these processes.

I propose, in turn, that in Geiger’s books, transparency also becomes a revisionist strategy: it serves as a means of reclaiming experiences that have been overlooked, ignored, or actively erased, including her own experiences as a woman living amidst a patriarchal, authoritarian regime in the mid-1970s.

In A alimentação, Geiger combines nutritional diagrams and definitions with charts that track regional food production, hunger, and malnourishment. In conversation with her commentary on the challenges she faced as a mother during this period, her inclusion of photocopied charts documenting food shortages in Latin America and cases of anorexia is haunting. But haunting in its own way is a series of layered sheets of tracing paper that feature colorful, hand-labeled images of various foods: poultry, bananas, papayas, oranges, pineapples, and watermelons (fig. 3). Behind these transparent sheets is a set of six sentences, likely culled from a Hebrew student workbook, first printed in German and Portuguese and followed by pages in the original Hebrew (fig. 4). The first sentence reads, “The kids sit and eat.” “Mother gives Sararle milk,” and “Mother gives Berele milk,” read subsequent sentences. The viewer peels back image after image of food to reveal these deadpan sentences statements that suggest the assumedly natural role of a mother as nourisher and provider.

Stacked together, the pages form a new type of still life. Rather than a careful arrangement designed to display artistic virtuosity, luxury, and the bounty of the tropics, Geiger reinscribes the same luscious fruits that populated nineteenth-century Brazilian still lifes (fig. 5) as literal sustenance for her offspring. They are not meant to be admired, but rather to be consumed and metabolized. With each turn of the page, another fruit is stripped away until nothing remains. In contrast to the gentle nudge of memento mori long associated with still life, Geiger’s rendition prompts the viewer to experience her anxieties about providing for her children day in and day out under dictatorship. What happens, Geiger seems to worry, when the food runs out?

Still life was long viewed as the most acceptable form of imagery for women to make. 14  Historically, it was deemed suitable for women because it was “intellectually undemanding” and ranked at the very bottom in the hierarchy of the fine arts. 15  Even in the twentieth century, still life remained the safest subject for women, including those who participated in the Brazilian avant-garde. The celebrated Brazilian modernist painter Anita Malfatti retreated to still life when her avant-garde experiments shocked local audiences, and it was while they were both studying still life that she first met fellow modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral. 16  In her transformation of the genre through the transparent layers of her artist’s book, Geiger asserts a different kind of association between women and still life—one that is powerful, affective, and urgent rather than trivial and conventional.

In her book Passagens (Passages, 1975–76) Geiger takes up a different genre, also long associated with the production of women artists: the self-portrait. Once again, she transforms the genre through transparency, making space for nuanced articulations of women’s experience. In Passagens, the artist repeatedly pictures herself in a long black coat as she moves through the New York subway system, seated in a train car and walking along a train platform. This book is related to her video work of the same title, Passagens I (1974), in which she filmed herself climbing a series of staircases in Rio de Janeiro. She has explained that in this video, “I sacrificed my body, testing its endurance … I look tired—and I actually was. The video is a loop of me climbing the stairs, but in order to film it I had to repeatedly climb them.” 17  During the dictatorship, Geiger began teaching English and Portuguese to earn enough money to support her family. She explains, “I thought about teaching art at the university, but it was really far away, and with the kids, I wouldn’t have had any time for myself. I was exhausted.” 18  Her description of the self-inflicted physical exhaustion she performed for the camera resonates with her accounts of the unavoidable exhaustion of the “triple shift.”

Art historian Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda argues that Geiger’s video traces a “progressive narrative from the intimate to the public.” 19  The artist records herself first climbing an interior staircase, her heels echoing in the stairwell; followed by an exterior staircase accompanied by the sounds of children playing, people chatting, and a dog barking; and finally, the broad staircase of a public, government-operated building with the sounds of honking horns and traffic speeding by in the background. For Aceves Sepúlveda, this gradually more public trajectory can be understood in relation to “the slow progression of women’s fight to gain more visibility in the public sphere.” 20  As she repeats her plodding, solitary climb, Geiger refuses to allow her physical and psychic exhaustion to remain relegated to the private realm.

In her artist’s book made the following year, she shows herself moving through a different set of urban spaces. Photocopies of photographs are printed at varying scales and across experimental forms, including foldouts and clear plastic transparencies. While these photographs were likely taken when Geiger briefly visited New York in early 1975, they harken back to 1969, when she lived in the city while her husband was working at Columbia University. 21  After only a few months, Geiger returned to Rio with their four children, exhausted by the struggle to take care of them in New York. 22  As in Os 10 mandamentos ilustrados, the incorporation of transparent materials in Passagens seems to enact erasure. Over the course of the first four pages of the book, Geiger’s image gradually disappears. Two superimposed pairs of portraits of the artist seated in an empty train car are reduced to a single pair, then to a smattering of outlines on graph paper, and finally to an empty grid (figs. 6–7). The following pages feature a set of foldouts recording her movement along an almost empty train platform (fig. 8). The repetition of the image grid at varying scales evokes the same plodding exhaustion articulated in her video, while the high contrast of the repeatedly photocopied photograph gradually degrades Geiger’s image until she is reduced to little more than a silhouette—a ghost of herself. These images seem to summon up her own words: “I wouldn’t have had any time for myself. I was exhausted.” 23  Her experiments with the artist’s book format allowed her to articulate both the physical and psychological experience of juggling her multiple labors.

But here, transparency also offers the possibility of reclamation. The final page of the book is the same as the first: a clear plastic transparency featuring a double portrait of Geiger. Bound directly in front of the book’s black back cover, the image is almost invisible—he precarity of women’s agency in the public sphere spun across a glossy, gossamer surface (fig. 9). When the page is turned, Geiger’s image comes back into focus. Laid atop the repeated images of her standing on the platform in profile, this frontal view of her looking out at the viewer allows her to reclaim her identity. The pages of Passagens map a self-portrait that is viewed from both within and without. She presents her likeness—her visage, her silhouette. But she also traces a psychic experience. The pages narrate what it feels like to be on the verge of losing oneself and refusing to give in.

In her 1974 book Diário (Diary), Geiger photocopied a worksheet designed for children learning to tell time. Leaving the clock face blank, she wrote in pencil above the diagram, “The time that the artist went to sleep” (fig. 10). This same image and accompanying text appear on six consecutive pages. If she wants to make art on top of her other responsibilities, sleep is what she must sacrifice. Wryly, she narrates the grim realities of her daily life. Perhaps these realities are not specific to women (as suggested by her use of the masculine form “o artista”). Perhaps this book is “simply the work of a Brazilian artist,” not a gendered commentary, as Geiger would have us believe. 24  But when viewed in combination with her other artist’s books from this period, Diário offers a succinct articulation of what it meant to be a woman, a mother, and an artist in Brazil under dictatorship. The oppressive weight of expectations and responsibilities, fears and anxieties, could not be separated from her art production.

Yet, even amidst the burden of the “triple shift,” Geiger found a way to disrupt the status quo. She experimented with the unique capacities of the artist’s book, relying on photocopied images, transparent supports, and spiral bindings to tell stories that renegotiate established artistic genres and narratives. Her use of transparency suggests that women’s place in society is not fixed but rather malleable. Geiger’s artist’s books propose a series of subtle strategies that, whether consciously or not, could facilitate feminist intervention in 1970s Brazil.