Lorenza Böttner

Biography

Petra, an armless girl devised by the artist Javier Mariscal, was the mascot of the 1992 Paralympic Games in Barcelona. At the opening and closing ceremonies she was played by Lorenza Böttner, who had herself lived without both arms since childhood. By then she had been working as an artist and performer for more than ten years, but few people knew her name.

She was born on 6 March 1959 in Punta Arenas, in the far south of Chile, into a family of German descent. Little is known about her childhood.

At about eight, trying to reach a bird’s nest, she came too close to a power line and received an electric shock; both arms had to be amputated at the shoulder. The Chilean children’s magazine Mampato wrote about her as an example to other children: an armless girl who drew with a pencil held in her mouth. Later the family moved to West Germany, to Lichtenau; according to some accounts in 1969, according to others when she was about fourteen. There she was taught at an orthopaedic rehabilitation centre alongside children harmed by thalidomide. As a teenager she refused prostheses and, instead of the life her diagnosis promised, chose art school.

In 1978, at nineteen, Böttner entered the Gesamthochschule in Kassel and studied there until 1984. During these years she began publicly to call herself Lorenza. It was then, too, that she developed what she called “danced painting” and “pantomime painting”: moving across the canvas, she left brushstrokes with her feet. When one of her teachers called her a “walking performance”, she answered with a series of photographs for which she altered her face with make-up. Her diploma work was called “Disabled!?”, and the performance that accompanied it took apart historical and medical images of disability. Armless street artists also painted with their feet and mouths, earning their living that way; Böttner took up the same technique but made a statement of it and accepted neither condescension nor pity. Her main subject was her own body. In her self-portraits she showed herself now as sensual, now as maternal, and critics wrote that these images unsettle the familiar division into masculine and feminine. Alongside the self-portraits came the armless Venus de Milo and people on the margins of society: prostitutes in Europe, African Americans facing police violence. She explained in 1991 that she needed armless ancient statues to show the beauty of a mutilated body: after all, so many marble figures are admired even though they have no arms. The curator Paul B. Preciado later described her path in the words “transition and not identity”.

After graduating she went to study in New York with the support of a British network of disabled artists, in which she worked together with Sandra Aronson; Böttner insisted that artists who paint with their mouths and feet have a lineage of their own. In New York she performed in the street, among other places outside St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where she danced on large sheets of canvas. She sat for the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Joel-Peter Witkin, but the way they photographed her body struck her as dehumanising.

In Michael Stahlberg’s documentary “Lorenza” (1991) she orders cheese in a shop, and the shot breaks off just when the purchase has to be picked up. To my mind, this cut says more about her art than many descriptions: an everyday action is put on display, and the question is left unanswered.

Lorenza Böttner died in Munich on 13 January 1994, aged thirty-four. Two years later two Chilean writers wrote about her: Roberto Bolaño in the novel “Distant Star” and Pedro Lemebel in his book of chronicles “Loco afán”. Both used her life for their own arguments about Chilean art, and Bolaño credited her with events that never took place. Her works and her memory were preserved by her mother.

The wider public saw these works more than twenty years later. A small selection was shown at documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, and from 2018 Preciado staged her exhibition “Requiem for the Norm”: at La Virreina in Barcelona (November 2018), the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2020) and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York (2022).