WTF MANIFESTO

1. What The Fuck, Manifestos are trendy nowdays, let´s make one
2. What The Fuck Yvonne, you still have followers
3. What The Fuck do you think you are doing
4. What The Fuck do you "think" you are doing
5. What The Fuck do you think you are "doing"
6. What The Fuck do "you" think you are doing
7. What The Fuck: everybody copies the same shit
8. Why The Fuck don´t you copy something original
9. Why The Fuck don´t you copy in an original way
10. What The Fuck: I feel a certain authorship pride hidden in a poststructuralist pretension
11. What The Fuck: pretending to be Roland B. but being Jesus C.

SCALE OF GRAY

Through the creative process for a self portrait performance piece that I have been working on, I came to the idea that identity (personal identity) is not something clear with delimited edges that we can comprehend as a being, but a blur juxtaposition of layers, some transparent, some more opaque, that together create what we believe to be as persons. A friend of mine used to say "Life ain´t black or white, there is a whole scale of gray". I particularly like this sort of pessimistic, or at least just selective decision of excluding even the idea of color in the phrase. Excluding a whole universe of possibilities, and yet proposing an infinite of combinations with just the scale of gray. Identity, and the layers that compose it, is as multiple and vast as a scale of gray, and also as limited.

There are certain features carved in our nature that define the identity palet in which we will be able to move and develop throughout our lives. Inside that scale of gray, we are free to use the tones we prefer, to unconsciously choose some others that we might like or not, and to steal, copy, reproduce, imitate, pirate, or be influenced by all kinds of gray we might find inside our experience. We can not go against our natural features, but we can enrich, or limit them through the use of layers inside our scale of gray.

SCALE OF GRAY (Francoise Le Copycat / Jack Maldonado) is a two parts project that relates musical experience to an intent of understanding the sources of various identity layers. It is, so to speak, another try for a self portrait performance piece. Music and media have a great deal of influence in the construction of our personalities, some evident some concealed:

In FRANCOISE LE COPYCAT I search for the evident. By parasiting famous pop songs invested in the dress of a rockstar, I pretend to question the validity of copy, piracy and originality, both in an art work and in the construction of personal identity.

In JACK MALDONADO, I search for the concealed. By singing songs of my own authorship, I try to make evident for others (if not for myself) the influences of external factors both in composition and interpretation of these self portraying (or at least autobiographical) songs