31/1/11

LA SELVA LACANIANA

ESTE ES UN FRAGMENTO DE LA CONFERENCIA QUE ESTOY PREPARANDO PARA EL CICLO  "LA VERDADERA HISTORIA DE LA DANZA", AUSPICIADO POR EL CENTRO HISTÓRICO DE INVESTIGACIONES DE LA DANZA OI, RAMA ACADÉMICA DEL COLECTIVO AM.

Tal como M. Foucault relacionó el océano con la locura en el imaginario y la episteme de la cultura occidental, llamándolo antiespacio, o no-lugar, Lacan relacionó la selva con el inconsciente. Aunque interesado en un enfoque lingüístico, para Lacan (y esto es sorprendentemente poco sabido) igual que para el mismo Foucault (pero por supuesto, con opiniones opuestas al respecto), la etnología y el psicoanálisis están más relacionados de lo que aparentan, y forman juntos, a demás, el cimiento epistemológico de las llamadas “ciencias humanas” de la modernidad. Para Lacan, el corte transversal con el que, en un solo movimiento, la etnología expone y analiza sociedades cronológicamente contemporáneas, pero culturalmente anacrónicas e incompatibles (al menos en apariencia, y en relación siempre a la cultura occidental, diría Fucault), es equivalente al corte psicoanalítico a través de las capas de representación y significado a lo largo del consciente y el inconsciente. Es decir, de alguna manera, la etnología es al macrocosmos social, lo que el psicoanálisis al microcosmos individual, y las comunidades aún cercanas a lo tribal son en términos etnológicos, equivalentes a un inconsciente macrocósmico de interconexiones socioculturales. Para Lacan, la Selva Lacandona (que evidentemente lleva su nombre), fue tan importante en su reinterpretación estructuralista de la teoría freudiana, como, digamos, las galápagos para Darwin, en términos de trabajo de campo. Su análisis de las comunidades indígenas chiapanecas y la comunicación entre estas, informó directamente su teoría de cadenas significantes a partir de las cuales funciona el inconsciente. A su vez, la influencia lacaniana fue determinante en la cosmogonía lacandona: se insertó el complejo de Edipo en la cultura; y la noción occidental de culpa, que había sido a penas esbozada en el pensamiento indígena a través de un catolicismo sincrético, terminó de ser entendida e incorporada. Estas aportaciones son fácilmente identificables en las tradiciones lacandonas; particularmente en algunas danzas y cantos relacionados con casamientos o bautizos. Desde entonces, el llamado “Sincretismo Lacaniano”, o “Sincretismo Lacandon” ha generado las condiciones para que numerosos movimientos tanto artísticos como sociales emerjan. Entre ellos, la internacionalmente aclamada coreografía mediática del EZLN, surgida a mediados de los años 90 y escenificada a lo largo y ancho de todo el globo a través de medios de comunicación de principal importancia. Las artes escénicas internacionales se han visto influenciadas por las propuestas lacandonas, en las que una estética militar de apariencia matriarcal pero con un protagonista masculino (volvemos a Edipo) es desplegada, siempre bajo el cobijo de una personalidad misteriosa, si bien identificable e incluso estereotípica, que juega con personificaciones de un posible preconciente cultural culpígeno, evidenciándolo. Movimientos como INPEX, en Suecia, o La Fura Dels Baus, en España han retomado este formato.

21/1/11

INTERFERENCIAS ROCKED

INTERFERENCIAS was a festival/artistic residency that happened in Mexico (both SLP and Mex City)around november/december 2010, in which around 25 young artists from over the world gathered to collaborate together inside a non hierarchical structure. It was fucking brilliant and a lot of questions arose from that experience. There is going to be a publication, product of what we lived there and reflected after. In the first part of it all of us should write a text using as guidelines a list of questions we built around 4 subjects that awoke interest in our practice:

Starting point What is your motivation/interest/desire? How do you enter your work? Is theoretical research necessary for your work? What importance has the starting point during the process?

Context How does space (architecture and social context) influence your work? When does work become political? Can art go beyond its cultural context? Do you use an external eye during the process? Does the knowledge of who your audience is influence the way you work? How does your economic circumstances effect your work? What is your relationship with the modes of production in which you develop your work? What are the implications of nomadism? In which art field do you position your work? How does art influence a broader context?

Authorship Do we create or make? How does collaboration question authorship? Is it possible to erase the author from the work? Who needs an author? What is your style, how does you signature establish through it? How do you relate to stealing? Are you acknowledging how your background has shaped you?

Points of exit What is a point of exit? When do you see the end? What ends and what starts when you finish a work? Is the product more valuable than the process? How do deadlines influence the process? What do you leave behind?

I sam not sure If I should this before the publication arrives, so I better wait before publishing my text.

We were also asked to give some feedback, also framed in a series of questions. In exchange, I will not write down the questions, but only my text/answer, and this is it:


multitude

INTERFERENCIAS was freaking weird. I had been working like crazy before getting there so I did not really know what to expect, I did not even have very clear what we were going to do. None of us did, apparently. Anyway, my expectations (because I cant say I didn’t have them) were very abstract, and so…

I found myself experiencing relations in two different ways at the same time: one was general; my relation to the group itself as an ungraspable-always-shifting-tidy-multiple entity, and the other way was particular: my relation to differentiated individuals, or to little sub-groups.

Though its inevitable and necessary, I have never been very fund of groups, and especially not fund of forcefully feeling part of one. There is a certain implicit subjection, a certain decline of the personal matters, the personal decisions. This declining does not make them disappear, of course; it just (normally) hands them over to someone (or something) else so you don’t have to take care. This is what I find so fucking fucked up. Of course it’s more comfortable, but it’s also dangerous. I don’t know if the system we came with in interferencias (because we came with a system) could actually work in a “society”. I mean, I think that, at the end, it does, but, hell! It’s slow. In terms of taking decisions, the way we worked is not practical at all; it takes ages, and its very exhausting. Of course everything depends on the circumstances, but even like that I would dare to say: What the fuck, make it slow, make it hard, make it unpractical, but make it cool. In the context of interferencias, no one ever gave up a personal perspective just to please someone, or just to agree easily. No one left its individuality in order to belong, and yet we all did belong, and fit and feel part of. No one handed over his or her personal matters and decisions in order to subject his or herself to an institution, and this is fucking amazing. Am I exaggerating? Am I overreacting/overacting? Am I being a memory-idealist? YES. But I am sure that this that I am writing, though is not precise, is quite recognizable. Lately I have been very interested (or interesting as many of you used to say) in the word multitude, and its etymology that could refer to a large number of people and its implicit multiplicity, to a plural entity, more than to an unrecognizable scummy mob.

Interferencias was a multitude; a plural entity that did not erase the particularities of its parts, put rather recognized them and even functioned from them. An immense machine, falling apart at every movement, including its dysfunctional system in its production ways and in its “product”. At least “I” learned a lot out of all the communication and organization problems. Couldn’t tell foshizle, but that was perhaps the greatest part of it.

More than “being” we were “becoming”. Always falling out of the expected. My way of seeing art and my own artistic process has definitely been affected by this big time, and I think it will keep going.

In the middle of this cancer tumor (with pieces of shapeless teeth, bone and hair inside it) the interferencias experience was; there was also a space for the tete a tete experience. (Of course, a personal relation inside such a context is not at all what it would be out of it, and so it cannot be tear out the common one) Besides of party, meal, hallway and casual talks –which were very important--, the workshops and the performances were determinant. Having the chance to get to know and relate to the work of others in that way, was the perfect other side of the multitude, it gave a face to the name, or a voice to the face, or a body to the voice, etc. independently of matters of personal taste, the rush of performances, and the tiredness of workshops, the fact of everybody knowing that (let’s face it) want it or not your work is gonna represent you in front of others, and the fact that it actually did, gave a whole other perspective to the collaboration, another layer of understanding (or not understanding) upon what we were doing.

There is also the situation about the people who were invited (oh, little thing). This way of making a people’s curatorship instead of a cv’s casting, apart from the fact of being quite a political statement, worked beautifully, I think (of course I was also invited hahaha).

So, perhaps intuition rocks, but what I can tell for sure, is that:

INTERFERENCIAS ROCKED


10/1/11

FUCK YEAH MANIFESTO

This is a Manifesto I wrote for a site specific piece (called STOP BEING CREATIVE//RESPECT ART) I performed on december 28th 2010 in a small town in México called San Pancho. Since it was very much for that context, some of what is said in here might not be precise or even understandable out of it. Whatever.

FUCK YEAH MANIFESTO


a) FUCK Creativity as a pretension of originality, there is nothing new.

b) YEAH to recycling, taking old instead of new as long as, by doing that, we contribute to the production of meaning

c) FUCK the Author-God. FUCK the Artist-Creator.

d) FUCK moving for moving and doing for doing

e) YEAH to making, yeah to decontextualizing

f) YEAH to producing (through making) the space for different meanings to arise

g) FUCK History and its dogmatization Project. FUCK tradition and its prejudgeful gaze.

h) YEAH to History as a source of inspiration and contrast, YEAH to an archeological gaze upon it, with the critical focus on its modes of production of discourse and meaning, more than on the discourse and meaning themselves.

i) FUCK exoticism of folklore as a patronizing way of neocolonialism.

j) YEAH to analyzing our own social constructions, and the dogmas they conceal. How many prehispanic gods do I have to know in order to feel the same.

k) FUCK laziness of analysis and therefore, FUCK unanalyzed generalization of ideas. FUCK the simplistic (Not any bridge is necessarily good for anybody, and not any wall is necessarily bad).

l) FUCK the notion of inherent. There is no such thing.

m) FUCK representation and its politics of totalitarism.

n) FUCK taking action and then not being responsible for its consequences, FUCK HIT AND RUN, but also FUCK assuming the consequences in a victimistic way, FUCK THE OTHER CHEEK.

o) YEAH to acknowledging the political potential of each one of our actions

p) FUCK YEAH, STOP BEING CREATIVE

q) FUCK YEAH, RESPECT ART

r) FUCK YEAH!!!