DR (The Danish Broadcast Corporation) has a daily programme of 25 minutes interview called VITA. It is a programme that I love to hear and that I admire a lot. When I went to Denmark this July/August I was interviewed by Helle Solvang about the art scene in Copenhagen and in Santiago and also a bit about how to let life take shape in a foreign country: VITA 1. September 2009
By Helle Solvang – Airsquare in Copenhagen on the day of recording
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories, bla bla on writing and language
Nicolas Cadavid is a Colombian artist living in Santiago and editor of the Colombian magazine La Caja published electronically by the art collective Galería LaMutante. Nicolas made me aware of the theme of the second issue:
Acá no somos de esos, which animated me to write an article about the exhibition Honesta Anatomia by the Chilean artist Florencia Grisanti:
Det var ikke så meget fordi, at jeg var nøgen, det var mere komikken i situationen, et moment af total udstillelse i en række af oplevelser, der kun havde fået magtesløsheden til at vokse og overgivelsen ditto. (1)
This is transit, this is Frankfurt, a corner of a restaurant, green tea and sparkling water.
This is 6 hours and 40 minutes to departure and 17 hours and 41 minutes to arrival. This is the second stop in a tour that started wednesday at 10 o’clock + 6 hours, that is, at 4 o’clock pm two days ago. This is two days and 50 minutes later. This is after visits at the immigration office after closing hour. This is no sleep and computer black out.
This is communication Santiago – Seattle – Sao Paolo – Gothenburg – Paris – Frankfurt – Copenhagen. This is the tour in the carousel. This is the power of centrifugal force. This is a sleepy body in an alert mind. This is a sleepy mind in an alert body.
Så det var der jeg stod, på et afsides handicaptoilet.
Endelig fri, ingen snærende ligninger, ingen skarvende sko, ingen stramme strømper. Kun vand på hud, vand og genoplivede celler, vand, der vågner op. Jeg genkendte mig selv, mærkede. Til dørhåndtaget langsomt bevægede sig ned og døren op, sært sløvt, akkompagneret af mine stadigt hektiske hov.
Hov hov. Hov hov! Hov!! Og dér gled den modvilligt i igen. Ssschlapp, klunk. (2)
Frankfurt Lufthavn, fredag d. 17. juli, 2009
___________
(1) It was not because i was naked, it was the irony of the situation reaching a moment of complete and unwanted exhibisionism after a series of situations that only made the powerlessness grow and concluded my full surrender.
(2) So, I was standing in this handicap toilet with a feeling of freedom, no itching clothes, shoes or socks. Only water, water on my skin, water to revive, to make me wake up. I recognised myself, touched. And here the door handled slowly went down and the door up, unhurriedly, but followed by my increasingly loud; Hov, hov hov! HOV! And that, that was when the door unwillingly closed again. Ssschlap, klunk.
Since Gavin Butt gave his talk Should we take Performances Seriously? at the PSI 14 conference in Copenhagen and since I saw the nutrition guru Anne Knudsen Larsen on the front cover of the Danish weekly Søndagsavisen I have been thinking; which one of these moments of “kissing fish performance” is most odd?
So, we are watching this Antonioni movie, I tre volti. She looks like my mother, as young. We’re in an auditorium. There’s a cat on the floor.
It’s her lips, the lower one is ”dripping.” She’s calling her mother, she asks her to come. She’s alone, perdida en el mundo, sentimentalismo puro (a mí, no funcione). She asks her to come. In German. She’s a young German girl in Italy trying her way as an extra, as an actress.
The quality is bad, there are no subtitles. But how she looks like my mother.
”Why are you suspicious, I have the impression that you are very cold? Why do you want to be an actress?”
After the film he talks about participation, about a moment of fascination between a public and 3 melodrama actors. They believe, the public. Like my sister. We once went to a theatre to see Medea. When Medea killed her to kids, raised the theatre knife and stabbed them, my sister screamed. She believed. Her husband, a film director, always says she’s the best public ever, because she really believes. Yesterday she had her second kid and she never watches the tele at night in order to sleep undisturbed by the reality the tele brings her.
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Neorealismus – that the actors participate. The moment where the actors believe, act what they are acting – or the other way around.
The gesture of pointing to the screen and saying to his wife; ”look, look, look what’s gonna happen!” Cada vez – otra vez, it happens again for the first time.
We don’t just perceive fictional worlds from without, we live with them, sharing their sorrows and joys. We are perfectly aware they’re fictional, but from within they look real.
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Now the cat is cuddling his leg.
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El participación en la obra del arte es constitutiva. The artwork exists in this tension, in this difficulty of being within these two, inside and outside, real and fictional, of being constitutive.
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Ambigüedad con el arte
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(Inspired by the lecture “Quasi. Antonioni y la participación en el arte” by Alex Düttmann at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago)
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day
12.35: Hans Ulrich Gumbricht quoting (whom I heard to be) Pablo Morales. Universidad Diego Portales, Facultad de Comunicación y Letras.
Filed under: Santiago stories, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language
There he was, again: ”You can do better than that. Bring interesting thoughts to the fore. Don’t think you have to please people.” This time we were sitting on a terrase viewing Valparaiso at night. I had invited both of them for a Pisco Sour. I looked at the lights, the sea and the dark reflections moving in the cold summer wind. Soon it would be autumn, in April. This was just another thing I had to get used to; inversion of rythms that meant clashes and conflicts between my body, it’s stubborn habbit of orchestrating itself by seasons, daylight, weather. Now I could only submit and it, my body, didn’t like it.
I registered his presence next to me, how he was attentive for an answer, or more, a response. ”But I cannot do that, you cannot expect me to be clever on behalf of being displaced, uprooted.” … ”I’m exhausted, I’m trying, but I really don’t know what to do. I can only register, I can only take in; I can smell, look and listen as far as my body lets me do it.” … “And just to let you know, to register is a phenomenological methodology; always first register. And this, I want to follow.” (1)
Now our voices were loud, in front of us was a smiling face, a smiling, but investigating face. What are they doing, why are they word fighting? Why this clash?
Today, I learned that ”soy” does not only mean I am in Spanish, but also spoken word and woven material in Dogon language. (2)
Yesterday, a woman told me she by chance had read my story on returning to Denmark. She really liked it. It made her hair rise. ”It’s Sisi who’s writing this!” She didn’t know I liked to write. Or, like to write.
That’s another thing. I’m learning a language. A new language. One day I wrote in my diary: ”Today I said the rr-sound correctly for the first time.” I felt like a baby registering its own first word. It’s on this stage I find myself, like a fragile being without words in a new world. How does he want me to reflect, to bring interesting thoughts to the fore?
What felt in the fore, in front of me, was a wall. I met it everytime I went out. ”So, what are you doing here?” ”Do you know Spanish? Oh, you’re learning. You really have to improve your Spanish to get somewhere.” (I know that, I’m not stupid, why do you think I’m spending my savings on private lessons?) ”What would you like to do here?” ”Oh, you came here because of love? I suppose that’s good, I mean, or what….” ”Do you have any plans for your future?” (What do you think yourself, I do, of course, but how can I make plans in a situation I cannot control, a situation I don’t know?)
One night I told someone that my future doings would not only depend on me, but also on the place, Santiago, my new city. She got aggressive, it did not depend on the place, but on the attitude. One can make it everywhere, it only depends on one’s attitude. I retrieved from that discussion. Didn’t care and didn’t dare. Too much, just let me be, don’t look at me, don’t reflect me, I don’t want to face myself.
Today, an other woman told me: ”There’s a difference between seeing oneself as a link in the net and being subjected to comparisons of oneself to others.” (3) It helps me to retrospectively answer back that other woman, the aggressive one. I don’t want to compare myself, “to make it.” But maybe this is what people see in me, a Western woman coming here to make it?
Traditionally, I cannot be an other woman as I’m from the West, from Europe. I have red hair and milk white skin with a bit of freckles. I cannot be Other. My body tells the world so. And yet, I feel so other, so otherly other. It’s nice. And it’s completely horrible – like when the nasty speaker in the conference wants secretely to know about that wonderful woman in the back. Viejo verde (4) was a clever response of an other older woman. She’s been in the business for some years. She has found her way.
This is what I’m trying to do; find my way. I get small confirmations on the way. Like reading this sentence: ”To be an other among others can be a profoundly transformative experience.” (5) This is what i want. I want to be transformed, I want to experience, to live and to love. And this is what I am doing, what makes me so utterly happy. But also what rubs off so otherly many sparks, so much heat that it’s not only nice and warm, but hot like hell.
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It was today he played the song that said I love you badly. We were sitting in the same room in front of each a table. Writing and reading. Concentrated. The refrain made us look at one another. This is why we’re here, we’re here because we love, badly, too much. We sleep close, we eat close, we bike close, even our desks, our books, our clothes want to be close.
And here we are, now, again, he’s looking at me, with a smile. An investigating smile. Why is she so concentrated, what is it that she’s writing? He hasn’t known me always, he’s still learning. But he knows. He approaches me and kisses me. Just in time, at times, I guess. (6) Outside, Santiago is turning dark, the cars are flickering together with light from commercials. Champagne and socks. The Madonna is still there, on the hill, holding her hands over the city together with the 80’s cell phone shaped building. We have to finish, we have to go out there, to become embraced by noise, smell, pollution and the many encounters, between people, in nets, among others, among each others. Once again, I ask the tissue of neighbourhood to grasp me when I’m falling. I think it likes me, I think it’ll grap me, rescue me and give me a hand everytime something pushes me over the limit. Up, again, we’re here, we’ll hold you, as you’ll hold us.
1: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1992, p. viii: ‘It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing.’
2: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1989, p. 128.
3: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Films Featured at Documenta. An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar. June 26, 2002. Page last visited May 10, 2009.
4: Viejo verde means an old man who likes young women in Chilean slang.
5: Minh-ha, 2002.
6: Bowie, David. “Cygnet Commitee” in Space Odity, 1972.
