jueves, 14 de junio de 2007

a performance by the artists :

Joelle Gruenberg : dancer
Erika Aguilar : actress
Roger Velasquez : musician
Rafael Freyre : mise en scène

By the support of :
Piet Zwart Institut (Rotterdam, Nederlands)
Anke Bangma - director
WP Zimmer (Antwerp, Belgium)
Carin Meulders - artistic director

and the collaboration of:
Troubleyn/Jan Fabre (Antwerp, Belgium)
Marc Geurden - coordinator

miércoles, 13 de junio de 2007

martes, 12 de junio de 2007

A PIECE OF OTHER LAND

This research has the aim to explore the experience of the journey and transitions to other spaces.
Specifically, as the starting point, I am very interested in exploring the experience of migration, as a journey to other territories in order to establish new relations between the own internal and the new external space. Moreover I want to research how to re-create a new common territory of relationships, interactions and intersections by the encounter with the other. I would like to use the Foucaltian concept of heterotopias, moving as a boat that crosses an heterogeneous space; a compound of different fragments of identities and cultures, in form of an archipelago of islands in a dynamic interaction. The space of the boat and the state of flowing provokes in the subject a process of errancy, a process of liberation of a fixed root – digging up roots -, when confronted to the uncertainty of the open space of the sea and the endless horizont.

“The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other…The tale of errantry is the tale of relations. Going beyond the impositions of economic forces and cultural pressures, Relation rightfully opposes the totalitarism of any monolingual intent…The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claim to sum it up or to possess it.” (Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, chapter Errantry, Exile)

My motivation for this work is based my own experience of trajectories and itineraries in the last five years, when I began to travel constantly out of my country, leaving my home, family and couple. From the peripheries towards the centers of power in the north part of the world. This was for me the beginning of a process of questioning of my own identity, as well as the relations of territories in a global scenario. It was also the first time I asked myself about my idea of home and it was the first time that I explore my past, the beginning of my family.
During this period I discover that the origin of my family was very fragmented and uncertain. Migrants from Italy, Portugal, Spain, that travelled to South America and mixed with the natives, creating a mixed culture. All this, is constructed part from my memory and part from my imagination. After those considerations I understood that my origin and the origin of my family was the journey: the bag, the farewell party, a process of deterritorialization, quoting the conceptsof Gilles Deleuze. This is the point of departure towards a process of expanding and creating new territories and collectivities.



I want here to quote Gilles Deleuze in order to gives insight into the concept of deterritorialization and flow:

“Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced limit, a decoding.” (Anti Oedipus. p. 232)
“Deterritorialization is the movement by which “one” leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight…We could say that the earth, as deteriitorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that D. can be called the creator of earth – of new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.”
(A Thousand plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, p. 561)

The aim of the journey-diary is to recover a “lost” vision and re-construct a fragmented narrative, a phisycal and mental flow: a journey. A vision that is the result of a fragmentary and random itinerary through different territories and influences. I want to use the metaphor of the space of the “archipiélago”, seen as a “chaos-monde”, where multiple cultures and times relate. Begining in my past, the origin of my family, towards the present moment, my actual state of migrant.
For this purpose, I decided to take as a point of departure of the journey a photograph of my grandmother moving from her born place (Ayacucho) to the capital city (Lima), as the starting point of my narrative, the first exodus, the first deterritorialization. By all this I want to explore the experience of the journey which is very present in my past and present biography. My wish is to map this process of transitions, passages and the creation of new territories and relations.



POLITICAL AND ECONOMICAL CONTEXT


“A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows…In other words, this is the fundamental action of a society: to code the flows and to treat as an enemy anyone who presents himself, in relation to society, as an uncodable flow.”
(Les course de Gilles Deleuze, http://www.webdeleuze.com)

“A conjunction of decoded and deterritorialized flows, this is at the basis of capitalism. Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities.”
(Les course de Gilles Deleuze, http://www.webdeleuze.com)



As a part of the process of research it was important for me to have a geopolitical frame that give me the possibility of a critical and political approach to my work and a new perspective. For that reason I made an interview to an especialist in economy,a teacher of the University of Amsterdam Giulgielmo Carchedi, with whom I made a video as part of the research. Here I draw some conclusions.
In the last decades, the transnational migrations between Latin America and the great centers of capital in the North hemisphere (EE.UU., Europe) has been growing in number and economic, political,social and cultural importance. Human mobility as conditioner of the social life is many times the rule more than the exception in many contexts in Latin American.
The transnational migratory flows reflect not only a form of more and more common life of an endless number of Latin American in the world, but also a political and economic factor of growing importance and preoccupation for national governments and international institutions, including transnational corporations that depend on the hand of cheap work of the migrant worker for sustenation of its economic project without having assume the costs of reproduction and formation that are loaded to the emitting country.
In addition of that, the migrants contribute to new processes of social, cultural and political transformation as much in places of origin (disarticulation of the family) like in the destiny places where they are inserted in new translocals and transnational contexts creating spaces of political negotiation, cultural and economic. A phenomenon of global and deterritorialized cultures.
In the context of translocal and transnational migration, spatial mobility does not take place in a political emptiness. Any spatial displacement, does not matter if for economic or political reasons, it is structured and mediated by power relations.
This vision is important for my research, because I include myself in a collective process of diaspora, namely the young generation in my country Peru, because of the lack of oportunities for development. The other important aspect drew from this reflection is the realization of my new social satus as "migrant" with temporary residence permit and with certain right restrictions. These new political status makes me belong to a new "comunity" of temporal imigrants.







INDETERMINATE NARRATIVE


itineraries to the void / a journey to unfamiliar territories

In order to reconstruct this narrative I discover the potentiality of making use of indeterminate narrative structures, that can articulated all this heterogeneous fragments.
I am interested in the character’s experience of the unexpected during the path, the route, by surpassing obstacles, conflicts, crossing borders, having temporal intense encounters. In the course of the journey things happen by random and coincidence, while the character is searching for something different, a kind of goal.

This is a narrative structure that has a direct reference to the Odyssey, written by Homer, where the main male character (Ulysses) make a journey towards a personal goal, but in the course he get lost, let by indeterminate forces and unexpected encounters.
In this stage I want to use the reference of three film directors that make use of this narrative structure in some of their films: Theo Angelopolus in the Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a day, Jim Jarmush in Death Man and Strangers Than Paradise and the film Le Mempris, by Jean Luc Godard.

I would like here to quote an interview with Jim Jarmush in the bonus track of the film Broken Flowers:
“…I like to make scenes where you have no idea what is gonna happen next, is not a formula. It is something that echoes trough my other films, because is such a valuable part of life to me which is randomness, just chance and coincidence. You know, you can plan things as much as you want, but the most beatiful deep things in our life are not racional, very usually emotional, or the connections with other people and those things are vey misterous. You see the universe moving in a way we don’t control.”
The mood of those films goes between sad, funny, absurd and serious moments. It “it is a sad and beatifull world, where love is always an impasse”, quoting Roberto Benini in Down by Law.

Further more, in the film Death Man, the main character decided to make a trip to the West searching for a person, for a better place, a better work, but without having success. In the words of Jim Jarmush, “is the story about a man who takes a journey which carries him further from anything familiar. It is a mythical journey, in which the character goes beyond the western civilization towards wild areas and have an encounter with another culture, an indian, who became the guide towards the end of his life, towards the realm of the death. From the very beginning the end of the film is revealed in a conversation that the character has in the train. This fact reveals again the “impotence” of the character in deciding the action, thus this passivity, this character can be considered a tragic hero. The main quality of the character is that of leaving the “known land” (home) and becoming a foreigner, an errant, a vagabond during the journey. But the odissey is towards himself, as an internal journey , full of mysteries and symbols. A journey as a way of purification, a passage towards the death.
This itinerant narrative structure underlines the flow through spaces, as well as the flow of time. The spaces that are crossed are physical and mental at the same time. Both internal and external journey were unfolded simultaneously.

The flow of time is another very important aspect present in this kind of narrative structure, where different times can coexist. Here I would like to make a reference on Theo Angelopoulos work, quoting a fragment of the documentary “A journey through time “, about the last single shot (plan secuence) of the film “Eternity and a day”.

“Cinema has the priviledge of being able to show past, present and future all at once. At the same time we see the end of a party celebrating the birth of a girl, and the journey of a man towards the death. Birth, death, past, future, present. The people in the scene belong to the past, but it is also a projection of the future. He is in the past and the present, but also projects himself in the future.
Any intervention, any cut could interrupt the flow of time, the impresión that time passes. I think that shots have a breath. And if you try to intervene, you disrupt their breathing.”

The framing of the flow of time is a crucial aspect of this kind of narrative, where the character “saunters” or “strolls” through different spaces. Taking the aspect of the flow of time into account, the musicality (sound) background become very important. In my view the music or sound, as another layer, gives the texture to this flow, underlining its course.

In the film Ulysses’ Gaze, by Theo Angelopoulos, the character decided as well to make a personal journey in order to recover the three wheels of the first film that was shot in Greece in 1905; a film of weavers in Avdella, a greek village.
This was the beginig of his journey through different cities (Sofia-Novi Iskar-Cerven Brag-Nikopol) crossing different borders in the region of the Balkans and Greece, and being the witness of social and political circumstances of those contexts.
Here the character aims to recover the first film, as a symbol of recovering the first gaze, the lost glance, a lost inoscence. During this odissey he has different encounters with womans, which he left in order to go on with his goal, the goal of the journey. Here is another important aspect of this kind of narrative structure, namely the temporary encounters with the other and the difficulty of the love or couple relationships. ¿Is the permanent state of deterritorialization the impossibility of creating relationship, temporary roots? ¿How to recreate a new sense of relation by this circumstances? In my view this is a question that arises from this characters and narrative structure.


This conflict is portrayed in the film “Le Mepris” of Jean Luc Godard.
Le mepris is based on the story of a scriptwriter that is contracted to re-write the script of the film the odissey. For this purpose he travels with her couple to the south of italy. The story unfolds in the landscape of the sea, where he must leave her couple alone while he is concentrated in his own enterprise. Like in the Odyssey of Homer, the woman is left behind, while the man is concentrated in his own enterprise. But here the relationship goes to an end, towards the feeling of despise.
Couple and relationship is a conflict point by this unsettled state of errancy.

The last topic I want to mention, involved in this kind of narrative is the question of the return, the question of “home”. The character in the state of errancy tries to return to Itaca, to reconnect to his orgin or departure point. I want to quote here an extract of the poetry Ithaca, by Kavafis.
Ithaca
As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
(…)
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
(…)

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
K.Kavafis

This feeling of nostalgia is very present in the characters of Theo Angelopolus, who portrays the sense of a lost home, a lost inoscence. Specially in the film “the suspended step of the storn” and “Landscape in fog” (Topio stin omichli), which I would like to quote.

“Our home.., we crossed the border and we still are here. ¿How many frontiers should we cross in order to arrive home? ¿You know what is the frontier? If I take a step... I am in other place or die. “

“Dear father: We write you, because we have decided to go to see you. We never have seen you before and we missed you.¿How could we wait so long? We travel as leafs blew by the wind. ¡What a strange world! Bags, cold stations, gestures and words that we don’t understand. And the night that scares us. But we are happy. Going forward.”




THE REAL IN FICTION

The fabulation is not an impersonal myth, but it is not a personal fiction either. It is a word in act, a word act by which the personage does not stop to cross the border that would separate its private subject of the public policy and produces he himself collective statements.
(p.293, The image-time, Gilles Deleuze, 1985,Paidós)


In contrast to the idea of a diary that is supposed to testify or documentate facts, i think in the possibility of surpassing a pure authobiographical or documental work, and exploring the ambiguous borders where a fiction begin.
For these reasons, I am interested in constructing a character that gives me the possibility of fabulation. I have decided to create two different “I”, the narrator (author) and “I” , the character.
By this operation I want to make use of a mobil point of view, in which the narrator can goes from his first person to the first person of the character. It is a movement from the inside of the character to the outside view of the narrador (author). Like in the painting “Las Meninas” from Velásquez, the author is located inside the frame. I am very inetersted in the movement between in/out the frame, in/out the stage, on/off, stage/backstage.
By this strategy a “ fiction” is created, but at the same time, is revealed as a construction, in other words, between the staged and the unrehearsed reality.
All this with the aim to map the complex movement and position of the character, sometimes inside the scene and sometimos as an spectator.
Or using Brecht terms, as an artistic strategy which gives me the possibilty of distancing, while I want to create the tension between the fictional charachter and the real context and circumstances that surrounds him. Furthermore I wouldl like to achieve a documentary dimension of a fictional construction, to investigate the fiction/non fiction borderline.


BORDERS CROSSING :
WEAVING NEW TERRITORIES & CARTOGRAPHIES
Towards a re-conceptualization of the idea of border/boundaries and territory

Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions.
Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and hights.

(p.11, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)


The aim of the journey-diary is to map a process of deterritorialization and territorialization.That means how I reconstitute or re-establish my personal subjective territory, in relation to a new different external space (cities and society).
On the other hand how I re-imagine my collective spirit of belonging, how I reconstitute "home".
My exploration tries to construct a "bridge" between different realities, on which i can cross and transit freely. By the experience of "free trasit", coming, crossing and returning several times the geographical borders appear in my personal experience a new "mobil" condition where home became an imaginary trans-local physical place that I reconstruct constantly. I would like to use the image of a "spider" that is constantly "weaving" her territory in different natural locations. The unfolding of lines of relations and lines of thought with the aim of creating a territory.
So, I am exploring how to pass from "nostalghia", the feeling of "desarraigo", fractured geographies, "unhomely", towards the reconstruction of a new sense of territory and to weave a new home and new hybrid imaginaries.
In this experience i would like to explore this territory of relation and imagination, which stimulates old and new objects of desire, which exorcise personal and collective memories of my country of origin and creates new future links and relationships in the new land: a see of networks.
I think it is the vital and imaginative experience of "transitions" the moving force of this operation. The subject (myself) interacts with the new public space and enviroment, and in the course of this process I have produced new personal subjective and collective statements. ("I"and "We")
Reterritorialization, opposed to policies of marginalization, is in my view related to smooth, connective and porous enviroments ("spongysness"), that are open to permeate new identities and promotes processes of cultural hybridization, transitions and interchange. Using the metaphor of the spider, a territory where new "spider fabrics" or ties can be attached. In this research I would like to explore the spatiality of this process, that take place in the body ( skin) and space (nature and urban enviroments).
The first aspect to be explored is the body as the tool of territorialization.The second aspect is the spatial frame work where de-and territorialization operates as a key aspect in order to understand this process.
The third aspect is devoted to re-drawings of "home", "the fictional and internal return to Itaca". How to reconstruct an individual and collective identity during the process of de- and re-territorialisation? How I used the past (memories) to make sense or re-imagine the present territory ?
Re-drawing home, is a part devoted to the exploration of the personal internal journey , where collective memories and questions during the process of dispora appears. Questions such as, What is home ? Do I want to return? Where I come? To which community i belong? How is life here ?
All this questions were explored by the use of drawings, that portrait and internal "journey", parallel to the external journey.





BODY ACTIONS
Transitions: Body in trance

What is more deep, is the skin (Paul Valéry)

To be sensuous,real,is to be an object of the senses, a sensuous object, and therefore to have object outside oneself which are subject to the operation of "one's senses".


There is said that sensuousness is the human perception through which alone objects are given to us. Objects can only be given to man in so far as they "affect" to him. Human sensuousness is affectibility. Human perception as sensuouness is receptive and passive. It receives what it is given, and it is depend on and needs this quality of being given. As a
sensuous being he is an affixed, passive and suffering being.

(p.12, Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse)

An important part of the journey diary is a photographic documentation of body actions, positions and itineraries through different public spaces within the "new" cities (Rotterdam and Amsterdam) and body actions in my private space.
In my view this actions aimed to re-establish temporary a territory by the use of the body, to reconstitute a sense of place by means of body actions, rituals and itineraries.
The moving body is used as a tool to reconstruct the sense of belonging and as a physical placement in space.
In my view, the body of the migrant articulates its transformating potential by the fact to cross physicaly geographic, political, social and cultural borders. The movement and the displacement of a body within this field of power, that is borderland, or the transnational zone, has the potential to des-estabilize the notions of `town, culture, territory' and to transform and appropiate it into a new territory.
Here I wouldlike to make a link to theatrical space: the stage can also be regarded as a field of powers, where the actor embodies the human force with all its complexities and is confronted to other kind of forces: the collectivity, the state, the family, nature . By this interaction of forces and relationship in the time and space is creted the dramatic structure. Entering on stage is an act of crossing a border towards "another space" that can be regarded as a ritual space (ficitonal space), where his/her identity is re-established and a new territory of relationships is created. This new identity or territory are autonomus. I mean, they are not linked or making a references (or representation) to something exterior, on the contrary, the power of the theatrical "madness" consist of the potencial of the reality on the stage. The reality of the stage as an space, the reality of the body and action.
Returning to the body, that body - the body disciplined and classified, belonged to the disciplinated regime of state, nation (imposing rules and restrictions) can be re-trained in order to become competent in dominion of other forms and styles. In that sense any corporal practice that aims to explore different “corporalities”, have a transformating potential, that opens the possibility to reform the same body and that way to change the place in that the body located us. In other words, the body put into action, has the power to deconstruct the objectived body. Here again, I see migration and performance as two strategies to put our corporality in movement and to re-organize our position in space.
Forme me it was not only important the position of the body, but its tactil relation to space.
One discovery during the work, was the importance of the body contact and skin, as a tool to reconquer and explore the new space. Touching different skins (woman body, fruits, trees skin,meshes, scars, body fluids) and touching with my body the earth surfaces was a medium to reestablish a sense of place organicly and emotionally.
In the whole photographic documentation it is present a search for natural or organic surfaces (earth,water, grass, trees) and porous material with wich i look for a contact. In opposite to "gloosy" or flat surfaces, I was searching for folded and spongy, porous structures that allow me the feeling of interchange, penetration, inmersion and re-appropiation with the possibility of "connecting" and the sense of proximity, against the feeling of alienation, dis-placement and distance.
The public spaces of both cities (Amsterdam and Rotterdam) where places where I found difficulties to re-establish a sense of place. I found exceptional spaces with connectivity, spongysness and inmersive possibilities. Places or events where I could find a "fold" to hide,to penetrate or rest, like an animal refuge or nest, an animal that cuts out a territory and build up a house. Establishing a home, as primordial animal act of re-creating a territory. Here I want to quite Gilles deleuze and Felix Guattari ,
"Nature is like art because it conjugates in all ways these two living elements: Home and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the large infinite plane of composition, the small and the big refrain" (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, p.176)
Lots of the new public spaces where "open" (like Rotterdam Schwourgplein) or transparent, like shopping malls, in order to provide control and cleaning. City gardens, like the Westerparc in Amsterdam and Museumplein in Rotterdam were some exceptions. The search for a permeable and penetrable spaces was one of my goals.
From other point of view the sound was also very important aspect in terms of inmersion, as my body look for special kind of sounds to re-territorialise. The sound space was very important. Again a certain "porous" and "vibrating" sound structures as the moving of leaves, criket- , frog- , bird-sound or flows of water or even ondulated voices allow me to experience this re-placement, a form of inmersive enviroment with connective structures. Because of such connectivity with my senses wakes up my imagination and memory. In those places of strong connection I could experience this internal movement, i call it "resonance". As an musical instrument the body resonates internaly, an efect of the total conectivity and afections.
As a metaphor for my artistic work I would like to use the metaphor of to "shake" reality, to make it vibrate as a tremor, to put in trance.
I want to make an analogy between migration and performance, migrant and actor, where the migratory movement seen as a metaphor of crossing disciplinary and identity borders in order to enter in a dialogue can be compared with the movement and the space of the performance.
To see performance as an art of crossing the boundaries between the real and the unreal, by introducing the realities of the body. In my view a performance manages to do away with the distance between reality and representation. The current barrier barrier between reality and the representation of reality is lifted momentarily.
At the end of the first stage of exploration I recognize some main concepts for the work with the body:

ritual body
sensitive body
disciplinated body
physical body
instinctual body
collective Body
metamorphosis and transitions on stage

The second parto f the exploration, with the collaboration of a dancer and an actress, will be developed not more by the use of photography, but as a performance. For that purpose i decided to explored in this second stage the main ideas of :

The body in framed and unframed experiences.
The actor as a migrant, the migrant body and the body as a territory.





SPACE AND SPATIALITY : OTHER LAND
Spatial concepts and models


Events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of the edges, or on the edge. (…) By sliding, one passes from one side to the other side, since the other side is nothing, but the opposite direction. (…) It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure: her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens on the border.
(p.12, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

At this part of the research I began to explore space models that establish a new politics with bordes and - between the framing and unframing - creating a fluxus and transitions between the inside and outside, the public and the private, the natural and the architectural, internal and external, in summary: a new political relation.
I discover that this “in between” or border area has the power of transforming relationships. My exploration directed towards this interstice or intermediate area and moment: the in between moment as the "blue hour" between the day and night, the watch and dream, between two stable points. This undefined and transit territory became the main interest. For that reasons I began to explore this "passage states" with the use spatial models. I began to develope different spatial configurations where I found this phenomenon of transtitions and interchange.
Parallel to the exploration with the body, In the first part of this work, I began to research with space models, related to concept of transition, passages and territory. I began to develope architectural models of paper and drawings. By this process I began to discover new posibilities for spatial configurations, developing two main concepts. The next to articles were the result after the third part of the exploration, the performance, OTHER LAND, which I developed with the cillaboration of a dancer, an actress and a musician. After this experience I had more clear some territorial (global) relationships that this reflect on.


Spatial conclusions :
From block spaces to other lands

"...I live in a paradise, that is also a prison." (Rafael Freyre)

"...the true paradises are the lost paradises." (Antonio Araujo)

" The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images... The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life."

(Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle)



In my view, new forms of individual control are appearing again in the global scenario. The model of the prison and panopticum with a clear definition of perimetric borders and intentions become already archaic. The new spatial prototype appear now more ambiguous in form and intention, namely as mixed spatial configuration that combines: inmaterial "soft " borders with a seductive systems of mediatic delirium. But enclosure and surveillance remains in the backstage of the production of such spaces for the display of power, authority and the regulation of time. (border regime, city walls, state borders, custom borders, surveillence cameras, tax borders, citizenship, immigration restrictions, electronic sensors, etc). Beyond its physical appearance the psychological, emotional and symbolic effects of the border -as an imaginary line - is infinitletly more powerful.
The consolidation of the economical blocks (EUROblock, DOLLARblock, YENblock) in the global market - that aims in expanding its own logic as an imperialistic space model - have contributed in the establishment of such concept of space, influencing directly every scale of spatial configuration.
The world space is shaped by the market, that produces nowadays spaces in form of "economic artificial enclaves". Such spatial configurations can be regarded as "synthetic paradises" of capital concentration in form of inaccesible oasis (like VIP-places) that became irresistible in the imagination of the "excluded" of the blocks (non-european, non-american) who are constantly seduced by this "image", becoming obsessed in their dream of exodus towards the "paradise". From the hell to the paradise, from the rural to the metropolitan, from the underdeveloped countries to the market centers in the nothern world, from the periphery to the center, the block space "appears" as a magnet for attraction, as an image of promised land for the realization of all possible individual dreams.
Such logic is based on the creation of artificial spaces for the hedonistic consume, delirium and seduction, that in itself hides the seeds of social control for the subject (the consumer) and capital concentration. The consumer enter in a cycle of production (work) and consumption of objects of desire (a rolex, a bmw, a prada skirt, etc.) . All the technology of the space aims and serve to optimize and facilitate this transactions and experiemce this life style.

The global city become the most symbolic and emblematic example of this spatial celebration; the city that connect the subject to the global, the city as an enterprise, as a spectacle, a shopping mall, a generic space for the accumulation of all possibles forms and shapes of consume. Each brand become and ideology and each shop a new temple for each indivudual desire.
Block Spaces are materialized in the global cities; spaces in form of social condensers, incubators of social desires for the synthetic materializations of private dreams and for the glorification of the metropolitan ideal and life style.
This shaping of artificial dreams, artificial experiences of freedom and pleasure for the subjec - managed by the market with the use of media - is the technology of such space. Spectacle, spa, swimingpools, theaters, highrise, leisure, shopping-malls, exotic restaurants, strip-tease, casino, gardening, design, tourism and entertainment grow in the fertile soil of such space, devoted for the "free time" of the worker. The market control such spaces where the subject can free himself but at the same time contributing to the consume. The space of the block, as an artificial generic space in alliance with the media, produces artificial realities, a phantom reality. The block space can be defined as a strip for the accumulation of synthetic Idylls, walled oasis under a generic grid.
Surveillance and market are the two sides of a coin. 
This can be regarded as a from of control and repression of the subject - the alienated spectator- against their own production of reality, of space for the eros, space for their own fantasies and freedoms, as well as spaces for the liberation of the pathos. This other space for personal and collective freedom and interchange is left in the voids and gaps of the system, as a waste land, an other land.

Other Land is opposed to Block spaces. They unfold forces of de-concentration, avoiding monumentalization and homogenization of space and fixation of signs. Other lands are connected to the differentiate topography, the social, the ecological enviroment, are porous systems of interchange: a set of relations located in the borders, in the perimeters of defined dominant identities and states, that tend to grow, colonize and expand their own logic. Like an "in between area" of spaces, promoting coexistence, contact zones, protecting diversity, micro-economies and multiple logics of relations. Other land is a non defined area, an interstice, based on crossed border relations, spatial promiscuity. A sea space in form of a mixed archipielago with the potential for non mediated encounters and reconections to the individual and collective body: a carnaval, an non-mediated, non-artificial reconnection to the whole body: individual and social.
The idea of border is replaced by the concept of "skin", as a surface of relations for transborders dynamics. A not homogene transparent surface, on the contrary, a diversity of porosity, translucency and differentiate grades of opacity.
The border see as a space, a new centrality protecting non-defined, not colonized, wild areas: terrain vague, voids or in between spaces for unstable, unprogrammatic, unexpected activities, between the urban space and the architectural object, between the external landscape and internal gardens. Other Land is the backstage of the power.


From transactional spaces to trans lands

The world space is nowadays configured by transactional spaces. The speed of the flows of goods and money transactions and the flows of digital information and population shape the panorama of this century as well as redefine the space. The flow of mediatic imagery by means of the technology aims of expanding markets and gaining consumers, more than connecting localities and weaving new forms of relations and interchanges. The relation to the enviroment, as an explotative relation, as well as to the worker, as an alienated worker, are the basis for the market economy, as a system in sate of permanet expansion, transformation and colonization of new monetary territories. 
Such force and flows, have as the main vector for this movement the aim of an economic transactions, most in forms of unequal exchanges and money speculation. The logic of the market as a totalitarian logic of this century makes use of the technology of speed of flows (the ship, the boat, the internet, the airplane, staircases, the elevator, cars) in order to optimize the surplus. All this technology at the service of the mobility for economical transactions.

Trance Land is a spatial concept that explores other potentials in the flow. 
The state of flowing, transitions and errancy has the potential of expanding the territory of relations, beyond monetary transactions. Trance land is a space for liberation. Being free temporary from a fixed root, gives the possibility of exploring new territories and relations. Such state has the potential of transformation for the subject, who experiences a process of de- and reterritorialization. 
The journey through other spaces for temporary periods of time, driven by aspirations, love, material need or practical necessity, creates a new complex geography where people weave new relations between new territories and unfamiliar cultures, with the potential of creating new spatial and social configurations for encounters, to recreate the sense of home in the modern capitalistic cities, as places of congestion, anxiety and paranoia for the individual, places for the "unhomely" modern condition.
The landscape becomes the sea, the space the boat or the bag and the actor a traveler, who is in the state of passage.
"Passing through", and "crossing borders and frontiers" through paths and highways, like a contemporary Ulysses, a warrior trying to return home (Le Retour d'Ulysse) 
To be a la dérive (drifting), quoting Guy Debord as a technique of passage through varied ambiences and microclimates. It involves playfull behaviour and awarness of psychigeographical (urban) effects, by letting oneself be drawn randomly by the attractions of the terrain, the social morphology and the encounters they find there.
Through surfaces, terrains for walking, wandering, sliding: reconnected to the earth and sea, to the primar state of nomadim.

While being lost, disoriented and errant a threshold between different cultures and spaces is created. By this, the " lost traveler " in "strange" places has the possibility of reconsidering his vision of origin and home with great moments of nostalghia . Home become the final goal: the return to Itaca.
The body in trance, terra in trance, other land and loss place are the different angles of the same crystal ship.



RE-DRAWINGS OF HOME
bag-home : Visions

After the whole main research was done, as one of the main conclusions, I arrived to the concept of returning “home”, as the last part of the journey. Under this intention was hidden the wish of re-drawing a personal territory of belonging.
At thismoment I was trying to linking the act of drawing to the one of thinking and to a specific territory: drawing a line of thoughts and drawing a territory.
The act of drawing, including the wrinting, seen as moving and thinking, as a knowledge and experience tool. Those connecting dots allow me to create an image of the world, and to reestablished a territory. Drawing may allow me to rethink it or imagine it in different ways.
 Drawing is to take note, to sketch, to plan, to make pirouettes; drawing is finally to make a move while traveling.
I also discover in the technic of the drawing, that allow me a continuous and partly unconscious creative process. Ideas, feelings or impressions can materilized with a very fast and economic technic. Concepts and visions can be turned into diagrams and forms. Moreover after the act of repeting the same drawing again and again, it brought me into a process of destilation and concentration of ideas. I also saw the action of the drawing itself as a performative act, a movement in space, a drawing of a line.
The pen or pencil, was the tool to leave the trace of an action and moment in time and space., as the moving body crossing the space.
The drawing and re-drawing of same motives several times, as an obsession, since I am abroad my country was one of the first phenomenons that inspire me to begin this work. In one moment I was in possesion of thousands of drawings that i made every day, automaticly. All this was a very unconscious process, because i never thought in making an art project with all this materials. Was after having accumulate so much material, that I decided to create a Project, namely the journediary.
In my view, the drawing is an operation of re- and deterritorialization, as they contantly recreate imaginative interior territories. By the drawing I have the experience of appropiation and reconstruction of a territory. Most of my drawings make a reference to emotional states, ideas, memories, fantasies and obsessions. All they recreate a kind of artistic universe, an space where my identity and vision is constatly re-established. In one hand they can be seen as a subjective impression, but in otherhand they trie to make links to collective statement. The acumulation of all this signs in paper tries to reconstitute a body or recreate a body with all this fragments. The body, as an individual and collective body, an attempt to re-draw home, to unite all the fragment of a dispersed body.
The journey diary, as well, becomes a container of different types of memories and fantasies, a collector of heterogeneous forms whic can have a sense only in relation with all the parts.
The obsessions of drawing architectural spaces, body positions, animals, plants, abstarct compositions, chairs, landscapes were in my view trie outs to shape an identity, to create an internal territory connected to a collective spirit: home.
In the distance I a have memories of my country and collective global signs which make it recognizable in relation to other cultures.
The challenge for me is not to search home (Peru) in the past, but to recreate the traces, and ruinous vestiges imaginary in the present and future, as a coming country.
So i consider that my tries to return to home are always failing, as home is a place you can't return, but only as recreating it in the present.
Despite all the material lackness, precariousness, historical defeat, emotinal negativism and political uncertainity rooted in the peruvian society - where most of the young generation migrates abroad - , my position is to confront all this lackness with imagination, is like making a miracle or exorcising the curses.
The idea of the journey can be conceived as an itinerary of knowledgment and pain.
There is a contradiction between two feelings. On the one hand the search for adventures, new experiencies and knowledgment and on other the nostalghia and love from home and family. This both feelings creates the space of an internal conflict. As in the novel the Odissey, by Homer, tha character has the will to return to Itaca. The state of errancy on a ship in the marine landscape becomes the metaphorical place for the odissey, the place of being lost. And the desire of exploring the other worlds became stronger than his love for Penelope, his attachment to home.
I see the interminable trip of Odiseo as a human itinerary, but not only for searching the Itaca-mother country-home, but the human Itaca-natural-mystical-origin, Itaca that finally is not found, because does not exist or is not possible to return ?
The odissey as a serch in other territories and than to return, as an interminable passage.







Bibliography

Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Transpositions, Rosi Braidotti, 2006
The image-time, Gilles Deleuze, 1985
Anti Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze
Narratology, Mieke Bal.
Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse
The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze
Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal
Pasajes–Heterotopias-Transculturalidad, Alfonso de Toro
Heterotopias, Michele Focault
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76 : Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis
Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of Architectural Form,
Robert Venturi
Dispersión: A study of global mobility and the Dynamics of a Fictional Urbanism, Diego Barajas, Berlage institute
Identity, Intimacy and Domicile, Notes on the phenomenology of home, Juhani Pallasmaa
Warped Space, Art, Architecture and Axiety in Modern Culture, Anthony Vidler
The architecture of Image, Juhani Pallasmaa
Constant’s New Babylon, Mark Wigley
The production of Space, Henri Lefevre
Jim Jarmusch, Itinerarios al vacío
Theo Angelopoilos, La mirada de Ulises.
Sculpting Time, Andrei Tarkowski
The Odyssey, Homer
Lost Paradise, John Milton
Il ritorno del guerriero, Lettura dell’ Odissea, G. Aurelio Privitera
Dioniso a cielo aperto, Marcel Detienne
Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett
Helio Oiticica, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Estetica da ginga, Arquitectura de las favelas, Helio Oiticica, Paola Berenstein
On Nostalgia, Ramune Krikstanaityt
Places of performance, the semiotics of theater architecture, Marvin carlson
Szenisches Verhandeln, Brasilianisches theater der Gegenwart: Reise durch Raume
Jan Fabre, Corpus, Observations of a creative proces, Luk van Den Dries
A journey through other spaces, Tadeusz Kantor
Tragedia Endogonidia, Romeo Castellucci
Poetry Ithaca, Kavafis

lunes, 11 de junio de 2007

FROM TRANSACTIONAL SPACES TO TRANCE LAND

The world space is nowadays configured by transactional spaces. The speed of the flows of goods and money transactions and the flows of digital information and population shape the panorama of this century as well as redefine the space. The flow of mediatic imagery by means of the technology aims of expanding markets and gaining consumers, more than connecting localities and weaving new forms of relations and interchanges. The relation to the enviroment, as an explotative relation, as well as to the worker, as an alienated worker, are the basis for the market economy, as a system in sate of permanet expansion, transformation and colonization of new monetary territories.
Such force and flows, have as the main vector for this movement the aim of an economic transactions, most in forms of unequal exchanges and money speculation. The logic of the market as a totalitarian logic of this century makes use of the technology of speed of flows (the ship, the boat, the internet, the airplane, staircases, the elevator, cars) in order to optimize the surplus. All this technology at the service of the mobility for economical transactions.

Trance Land is a spatial concept that explores other potentials in the flow.
The state of flowing, transitions and errancy has the potential of expanding the territory of relations, beyond monetary transactions. Trance land is a space for liberation. Being free temporary from a fixed root, gives the possibility of exploring new territories and relations. Such state has the potential of transformation for the subject, who experiences a process of de- and reterritorialization.
The journey through other spaces for temporary periods of time, driven by aspirations, love, material need or practical necessity, creates a new complex geography where people weave new relations between new territories and unfamiliar cultures, with the potential of creating new spatial and social configurations for encounters, to recreate the sense of home in the modern capitalistic cities, as places of congestion, anxiety and paranoia for the individual, places for the "unhomely" modern condition.
The landscape becomes the sea, the space the boat or the bag and the actor a traveler, who is in the state of passage.
"Passing through", and "crossing borders and frontiers" through paths and highways, like a contemporary Ulysses, a warrior trying to return home (Le Retour d'Ulysse)
To be a la dérive (drifting), quoting Guy Debord as a technique of passage through varied ambiences and microclimates. It involves playfull behaviour and awarness of psychigeographical (urban) effects, by letting oneself be drawn randomly by the attractions of the terrain, the social morphology and the encounters they find there.
Through surfaces, terrains for walking, wandering, sliding: reconnected to the earth and sea, to the primar state of nomadim.

While being lost, disoriented and errant a threshold between different cultures and spaces is created. By this, the " lost traveler " in "strange" places has the possibility of reconsidering his vision of origin and home with great moments of nostalghia . Home become the final goal: the return to Itaca.
The body in trance, terra in trance, other land and loss place are the different angles of the same crystal ship.


LIMA/MADRID/ANTWERP/

domingo, 10 de junio de 2007

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

This text, entitled "Des Espace Autres," and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.

Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.

In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.

In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space,

Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.

Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types.

HETEROTOPIAS

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.

In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the "honeymoon trip" which was an ancestral theme. The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere" and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.

But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.

As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.

Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these' marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the,, rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge,

Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.

There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family's quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.

Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.

The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

sábado, 9 de junio de 2007

QUOTATIONS

What is more deep, is the skin (Paul Valéry)

Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions.
Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and hights.
(p.11, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

“only the similarities differ and only the differences look like” (C.Lévi Strauss,p.249 Conversations,Gilles Deleuze,Pre-textos)

Events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of the edges, or on the edge. This is, indeed,the first secret of the stammerer or of the left-handed person: no longer to sink, but to slide the whole lenght in such a way that the old depht no longer exist at all, having been reduced to the opposite side of the surface. By sliding, one passes from one side to the other side, since the other side is nothing, but the opposite direction. If there is nothing to see behind the curtain, it is because everything is visible, or rather all possible science is along the length of the curtain.
It suffices to follow it far enough, precisely enough, and superficially enough, in order to reverse sides and to make the right side become the left or vice versa. It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure: her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens on the border.
(p.12, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

This is the case –even more so- in Through the Looking-Glass.Here events, differing radically from things, are no longer sought in he depths, but at the surface, in the faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies, a film without volume which envelop them, a mirror which reflects them,a chessboard on which they are organized according to plan. Alice is no longer able to make her way to the depths. Instead, she releases her incorporeal double. It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal..
(p.12, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

To be sensuous,real,is to be an object of the senses, a sensuous object, and therefore to have object outside oneself which are subject to the operation of "one's senses".

There is said that sensuousness is the human perception through which alone objects are given to us. Objects can only be given to man in so far as they "affect" to him. Human sensuousness is affectibility. Human perception as sensuouness is receptive and passive. It receives what it is given, and it is depend on and needs this quality of being given. As a
sensuous being he is an affixed, passive and suffering being.
(p.12, Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse)

Let me propose Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, also known as Doubting Thomas, as an emblem for the project of getting at the depth of surface, of teaching skin-depth.
(p.27, Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal)


Indeed, now that Jesus has simultaneously become the younger man over whose favors (acces to the hole in his body) the three other men vie, the teacher who shows what lies under the skin, and the connoisseur of the beauty of the flesh, the painting becomes full of holes, folds, and creases. Jesus’ suggestive leg at the lower left becomes slightly coquettish. The finger of the lucky Thomas, already inside, is thrice repeated, in Jesus thumb index, and a little finger, going into other folds, other creases of his own body. Opennings are suggested all over the work’s surface, beginning with Jesus half mouth open.
The representation not only stages the three men waiting for their turn, in a suprème reversal of power relations between old and young, when desire comes to threaten social with erotic power. It also stages the intrincate connection between desire and vision.
(p.37, Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal)

viernes, 8 de junio de 2007

DIONISO

DIONISO

God of the wild nature
toro, cavalli selvaggi, leopardo, leone, buio

god in delirium (Mainomenos)
Lo strano Straniero
agos(macchia), orgia, mania (follia), epidemia,xenos,
rhyton (vaso dionisiaco per bevande) pharmakon
choreia (danza) katharsios (el dio che libera) Lysios

a journey to the end of the night


...personaggio di errabondo e di eterno straniero...Attorno a cui si costituisce il tiaso, la piccola banda infeudata solo a se stessa che si organizza al ritmo della trance al servicio di Bacco. p.19

...Dioniso si presenta sempre sotto la maschera dello straniero. È il dio che viene dal di fuori: arriva da un altro luogo. p15

...la mania come uno stato che sta tra la malattia e la colpa. La follia rientrava nella competenza dell'indovino, del mago e del purificatore secondo tecniche concorrenti o miste: incantesimi, erbe medicinali, danza caribantica o sangue purificatore versato sulla testa. Nel delirio, nella mania dionisiaca c'è qualcosa dímpuro, direttamente imputabile al fatto di essere fuori di sè...Una sorta di macchia che ne reclama unáltra,così presente nella fosca pazzia da Licurgo ad Agave: l'ímpurità generata dal delitto, le mani sporche dell'infanticidio. p.31

...Una maschera emerge dal profondo dal mare, un viso sconosciuto appare in mezzo allo spazio marino che è una sorta di al di là. È un'immagine che propone un enigma, un'effige da decifrare, una potenza ignota da identificare...Diverso nel senso che c'è su questo volto qualcosa di strano e di straniero, in conformità del doppio significato del termine xenos. Quello di straniero, in primo luogo: che non designa il non-greco, il barbaro dal linguaggio incomprensible, ma il cittadino di una comunità vicina. Il xenos è tale per via della distanza che separa due città:nei loro sacrifici, nelle loro assemblee, nei loro tribunali. Per essere chiamato xenos uno straniero deve dunque appartenere al mondo greco idealmente costituito dall'insieme degli uomini che hanno << lo stesso sangue, la medesima lingua, santuari e sacrifici comuni>>

..È il Dioniso katharsios, il dio che libera, Lysios, com'è chiamato a Tebe. Di nuovo è in compagnia della madre Semele, ma in un tempio situato presso le porte della città, nel luogo detto le Porte delle figlie di Preto. Un Dionisio dei limiti dello spazio urbano che domina dalla sua posizione di Cadmeios: potenza delle <> p.35

...Dioniso trascina Licurgo fino ai limiti della sua follia e ritorce contro l'ínvasato il suo desiderio di violenza e di delitto... p.22

...Dioniso si presenta come un demone straniero, un xenikos daimon, un idolo trasportato nel suo cassone da un re altrettanto straniero, doppiamente xenos... p.17

...Attraverso la maschera che gli conferisce la sua natura epifanica di Dio che senza posa oscilla tra la presenza e l'assenza. È sempre uno straniero, una forma da identificare, un viso da scoprire, una maschera che tanto lo nasconde quanto lo rivela. p.18

...<< Dei pescatori di Metimna pescarono con le loro reti in mare aperto una maschera (prospon) di legno d'olivo. Il suo aspetto aveva qualcosa di divino, ma anche di strano e di straniero che non si addiceva, d'altra parte... p.15


...Bacco è un dio viviente, a Dionisio, invence,oggi si associa una sfumatura vagamente dotta. Quando da qualche parte si beve, a ogni libagione la sua giovanezza si rinnova... p.3

Dioniso che afferra brutalmente la sua preda facendola oscillare, trasciandola nella follia, nel delitto, nella sozzura...nella parusía dionisiaca p.5

...il dionisismo si presenta come una 'epidemia'...come un épidemia di danze convulse...E per certo la follia dionisiaca porta in sé una capacità di contagio grande...
p.9,10

Dioniso è per eccellenza il Dio che viene: appare, si manifesta, viene a farsi riconoscere. Epifane itinerante, Dioniso organizza lo spazio in funzione della sua attività deambulatoria.La sua effige cade dal cielo, il suo battello si staglia allórizzonte del mare;alla testa di una pattuglia di donne dà l'assalto alla porte della città... (p.11)

Dioniso, divinità senza posa, forma eternamente mutevole, non è mai sicuro di essere riconosciuto, perchè porta in giro, tra città e villagi, la strana maschera di una potenza che non somiglia a nessun'altra...L'andar errando gli è troppo connaturato perchè il suo arrivo, quel suo andare e venire, possano confodersi con quelli degli altri. p.12