Short essay on the month of September, the Chilean flag, and the great writer Gabriela Mistral.
September; en glædelig måned. Barbecues og nationaldag, ekstra ferie og ekstra løn og dermed tid og økonomi til familiernes fejring af nationen. Der sælges flag i hver en butik og selvom taxaerne ikke længere skal køre med dem ved lov, så gør de stadig. Flaget, “La estrella solitaria” (den enlige stjerne), symboliserer i blå, hvid og rød Stillehavet og himlen, sneen på Andes-toppene og blodet fra uafhængigheden i september 1810. Det er den, vi fejrer, uafhængigheden, omkranset af en blid forårsduft i skæret af frugttræernes fine hvide blomster – euforiske over, at vinteren også i år skulle ende.
September markerer en anden historisk begivenhed. Den 11. september 1973 blev den daværende demokratisk valgte præsident Allende dræbt og hærchefen Pinochet overtog magten hjulpet af USA med 17 års diktatur til følge.
Så i september er der ekstra grund til at tænke over nationen og flagets hvide stjerne, der symboliserer magten; præsidenten, kongressen og domstolen. September måned får især yngre ryster til at lyde og sker det på gaden, slåes de hurtigt og hårdt ned af politiet. Tåregas uddeles med rund hånd og selv menig mand ved, at citron tager den spidseste sviden.
Også nationale ikoner fejres. Iblandt dem er poeten Gabriela Mistral, selvom Chile først anerkendte hende efter 1945, hvor hun som den første latinamerikaner modtog Nobel-prisen. Trods sine frigjorte holdninger til emner som uddannelse, ægteskab og køn elskes hun som den moderlige poet.
Men i år mudrer en uventet nyhed billedet. En brevudveksling imellem Gabriela Mistral og Doris Dana, hendes amerikanske sekretær, har vist, at forholdet var noget varmere, end hvad passende var – og er. Gabriela Mistral var lesbisk. Reaktionerne har været mange og kraftige. Skandale! En homoseksuel fyr i omgangskredsen var dog glad; Gabriela Mistral var ikke MOR, hun var en HOT LESBIAN! At være homo- eller biseksuel er stadig ikke almindeligt accepteret, så man spørger sig selv midt i den blå/røde/hvide eufori; hvad er det vi fejrer?
Den enlige stjerne på min himmel i det chilenske flag er Gabriela Mistral. Hun er da for sej, som hun stadig puffer til konservative kræfter nede fra gravens dyb.
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:
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.
-
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.
Check the new SUM #3 magazine for contemporary art – an international magazine in danish and english published by U-turn Quadrennial for Contemporary Art and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
this time the theme is on re-enactment and i’m participating with an article on Black Audio Film Collective/biography/re-enactment.
the magazine is available in selected bookshops and museums.
enjoy!
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, Kunst / Art, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language, never written books - or telling titles
Hvad jeg gerne ville skrive om på bloggen lige nu:
En intro om at læse en intro, der udreder et kludret og endeløst forgrenet stamtræ, som vokser og vokser og bare bliver ved og ved og er kortlagt bagest i bogen, så man bladrer frem og tilbage og repeterer på vejen, men forstår kun lidt – min intro ditto.
Om det hemmeliges potentiale som værende det ultimative skabelses-frirum i en kunstnerisk kontekst
Om Walid Raad, “performance as faith” og Raads fascination af enkeltpersoner i historien.
Om at vågne op og ikke vide hvem man er eller hvor man er, men være sikker på, at det er juleaften.
Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a blog. Or maybe I should say; Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a block. A writers blog/ck. A couple of hours later I received this email:
Sisi
chatting with you today, I had the idea of writing in the blog about resistances and voices, intuition, breath. Is there a nice passage on the voice that I can have a look at? There is the Michel Serres book here, Genesis, going to have a look.
bawse from the office
Miro
I answered:
yes, i have something for you, i’ll scan it, kisses, s
I went upstairs to the scanners at my university and there I found two pictures with their white back facing me. I decided to scan them without knowing what they depicted – it may be a sign!
It was not, or maybe it was. A sign of campus life and a happy youth; snapshots (or not, it was paper photographies) to be send to friends or family abroad.
cut
The passage I wanted to scan for M is from The Black Beach by Edouard Glissant. I hadn’t been thinking of this text for two years until i read the words resistances and voices, intuition, breath in M’s email. I hope the silent ghost on Glissant’s beach will provoke some thoughts. They both gave me a reason to post a block.
(I imagine two young women (one at the corniche in Beirut and one on the beach in CPH) walking in resistance and silence, listening to the breath and voices of the sea)
article by jose ossandon in the chilean online magazine plagio
article by mathias kryger in the danish newspaper politiken
both beautiful examples of precarious writings
In spring 2008 I travelled to Beirut together with artist Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfelt to attend the international forum on cultural practices; Home Works IV organised by the Lebanese Association of Plastique Arts, Ashkal Alwan. Inspired by the experience of leaving Copenhagen and coming back we wrote the article Fin de Copenhague 2008, which you can find in the magazine Internationalistisk Ideale edited by Marie Kølbæk. Look for page 47.
Later, in June 2008, I participated in the seminar Art and Research : New Interfaces held by the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies in collaboration with Goldsmiths College of London and Freie Universität, Berlin. The seminar was intense and thought proviking – still lingering in my mind.
This was my abstract:
Abstract for Art and Research: New Interfaces. Copenhagen, June 5-7, 2008
The writer as producer
Walter Benjamin described the ”author as producer”. To inhabit the position of a producer brings forth the potential of the political. To produce is understood as creating a text that will make people take a stand. It also means that the writer is the producer of something – a written text. In academia we are taught to produce texts, but not to understand ourselves as a producer. The elimination of the border between art and research could be a way to open toward the space of creating producers. Artists have for a long while learned from theory and academia, while academics are just about to learn from artistic processes in their reasearch and writings.
My own practice as an academic is shaped by the non-existence of a space for the academic producer. I therefore place myself between three fields:
Academically I work on biographical representations of historical persons within contemporary art. I look at the ways in which contemporary artists convey the life of a person in relation to literary theory on biography, the notion of re-enactment and the archive.
Personally I have over a 12 year period collected letters, stories, publications and interviews about my female ancestors. It is a project on its own and has similar traits of the artworks I am writing about.
Outside of academia i collaborate in an ungoing art project with an artist on two imaginary female theorists. I also have a writing collective with an art theorist where we are working on a writing workshop for art writers.
This paper will touch upon the consequences of such a devided practice. Inspired by the art scene in Beirut, Lebanon, and a writer/philospher/artist such as Jalal Toufic I will look at why we should and how we can create a greater space for the writer as producer both within academia and the art scene in the future.
