When did you first see yourself as a creative person?

There wasn’t a specific moment but rather different sets of circumstances. I come from an artistic family: my father was a poet and my mother an artist. She died when I was just a girl and after that I was always drawing.

I had a difficult youth and although I never went to art school, when I came out of that period, around the mid-1980s, I had formed my own idealised concept of art and knew I wanted to dedicate my life to it.

Would you say you’re still the same creative person as the young Ana Gallardo?

No, I’ve grown in creativity, especially in recent years. My art is collaborative: I’m not some genius shut away alone in a workshop producing masterpieces. I’ve collaborated with others throughout my career, whether working on projects or teaching classes. I thrive on community and getting inspiration from shared experiences, like with María in my current project.

Right now, I’m enjoying the best, most productive time of my life. Until my 50s, I was dependent on so many external factors, which limited what I could do. As well as creating art, I had to make a living to support myself and my daughter.

Now, by contrast, I can finally say “no” to things, which is a luxury. I’ve achieved this by consciously working hard to make my old age as pain-free as possible.

You’ve spoken a lot about the “violence of aging”. Are you finding it to be as violent as you expected?

Oh, it’s worse than I imagined. For me, aging – as we experience it in our society – is unacceptable: there is a lot of pain and frustration in the physical deterioration of the body and not being able to do the things you used to.

What’s more, as women, we disappear from most orders of life as soon as we’re done with the menopause and become completely invisible after retirement age. It’s not the same for men, who are still considered useful members of society long into old age.

What does the aging process mean for an artist?

For an artist, it’s worse. Not that you can’t go on producing art: you can always go on creating and doing as long as your body allows. But the art world generally isn’t interested in the older generation. You become invisible.

There has been a trend for “discovering” older female artists in recent years, but those women are the exception and often it is only their earlier work that is of interest. By and large, we’re invisible.

At the same time, past a certain age, it’s much easier not to care, which is very liberating. It frees you to create work without worrying about opinions or consequences.

Given that you won the Julius Baer Art Prize for Latin American Female Artists in your 60s then, what does it mean for you?

I was surprised and honoured to be invited to submit my project. And to win the prize means a lot: for me, of course, it’s great, but it’s also great that the prize brings visibility to female artists.

The standard among the nominees in the first two editions was very high for such a new prize, so it gives me hope that it can provide a space in which more female artists are seen and valued.

On a personal level, winning the prize has allowed me to do things like travel to Bogotá and it gives me breathing space to do more of the work I’m passionate about.

This exhibition focuses on the rediscovery of a connection from your youth. How does it fit into your wider oeuvre?

I’ve always been interested in the invisible, untold histories of society. History has been written from a narrow male perspective, but the history of the world is so much more than that. I believe art should bear witness to different perspectives, and it can shift the narrative of society to include more voices.

In the 1980s, I was very politically engaged and became involved supporting a group of Mayan women whose people were being targeted by the military government in the Guatemalan civil war. They all used pseudonyms, such was the fear of reprisals, so I never knew the true identities of those I was communicating with.

Then, in researching my recurring interest of violence against women and the violence of aging, I was put in contact with one of the women, María, who is the same age as me and is the subject of the installation.

To hear her experience of suffering during those years – losing not just family members and friends, but also the opportunity of having the life she wanted – is harrowing and at the same time very relatable.

She has been through terrible things that nobody should have to go through, and she has experienced the same frustrations as any woman entering old age, which I’ve been exploring through my project ‘Escuela de envejecer’ (School of Aging) since 2008.

Tell us more about the installation itself.

I’ve reproduced fragments of María’s and my own story using charcoal on vast, variously sized panels of paper that extend from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The charcoal covers almost every square inch of the paper, forming a dark, velvet-like texture, and the words are marked using an eraser, as are the landscapes of Guatemala. The effect is as if every letter and every line have been extracted from the wall with difficulty; as if they have always been there, hidden, in pain, but with no way of being contained forever.

Meanwhile, a series of screens shows various scenes from the Guatemalan mountain forest with natural ambient sounds. The forest is land that was allocated to and planted by María and others following the end of the conflict.

The installation gives a fragile physical form to memory: deceased bodies giving form to a new life and purpose in bringing visibility to the otherwise invisible stories of two old women.