64 Border Bodies

Titus Matiyane

Cities of the World

From the book Cities of the World, edited by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2007.

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TITUS.pdf — PDF document, 716Kb

Elke Zobl

TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF EVERYDAY FEMINIST PRACTICES

Where, in our adult-run, globalised and centralized media landscape can critically and politically thinking people –and especially girls and young women– express their voices and opinions without being censored or ridiculed? Where can we as self-identifi ed feminists from various backgrounds and contexts create, our own spaces and representations?

These questions have occupied me for a decade. I strongly believe in the concept of «Praxis» –which is the interrelation of theory and research, activism and political action. Consequently, I have been active as an artist, archivist, activist, and researcher, whereby my belief in anti-racist and anti-capitalist transnational grassroots feminism(s) is the red thread through all these roles. I understand feminism not only as an important theoretical undertaking and social movement, but also as a non-hierarchical, process-oriented, participatory collaborative practice that spans across borders.

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ZOBL_EN.pdf — PDF document, 280Kb

Itziar Ziga

WHYARE THE WHORES SHOUTING?

It is a stifl ing hot August day, and TV3’s midday programme is discussing whether prostitution should be abolished. (It still scares me to see the abolitionist turn that’s been taken in published opinion over recent years, when at the end of the last millennium we appeared, at worst, to be moving gently towards the labour regulation of economic/sexual exchange in Europe). In the studio today there is a sex worker and two other women whose involvement I don’t quite gather. I scarcely listen to fi ve minutes of conversation —if you can call it that. The two ladies don’t allow the guest whore on the programme —Cristina— to speak. I’m getting so annoyed that the temperature around me is raising, and so, in the end, I decide to mute the television.

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ZIGA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 128Kb

Remedios Zafra

-.).ˆ -connecting-doing-undoing (bodies)

Our bodies are not entirely our own. However much you might care for them, feed them, dress them up, put them to use, stroke them, kiss them, pornographize them and all the rest, our bodies are ours but not entirely so. And that is where history becomes politics. According to Judith Butler’s revealing description we are «from the start [...] given over to an Other»1, even prior to individuation we are predefi ned by the Other and the effect is the «social vulnerability of our bodies»; predefi ned as a way of symbolically proving what society expects of us with reference to the body: an organism, an image, a sex, an age, a face2, a gender, a discourse... something that nonetheless involves both a castration of the being and a «physical and social grounding»3. Levinas4 argues that it is not so much the advancement of the Other but the encounter with the Other that simultaneously instils a responsibility for the Other in oneself (a construction in the other), such that the subject is responsible for the Other even before being conscious of its own existence.

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ZAFRA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 59Kb

Gabriel Villota Toyos

Searching for the (filmed) truth of the dancing body

1. Isadora's fear and Annabelle's smile
Isadora Duncan apparently feared being filmed dancing. We may assume that hers was not that ancestral fear some primitive people are supposed to feel when faced with the anthropologist or explorer's lens, that their souls might be stolen. Nonetheless, we must accept that an equally irrational component of this fear —albeit one grounded on apparently logical arguments— was that her art might be ill-reflected in the pictures and her work consequently misunderstood. It is probably for this reason that despite Duncan’s great popularity and the fact that the filmmakers of the time were busy shooting all kinds of events and celebrities, no fi lmed record remains of her dancing (or at least none in which she can be identified beyond any doubt).

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VILLOTA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 193Kb

Beatriz Preciado

MUSEUM, URBAN DETRITUS AND PORNOGRAPHY

The art market wants porn, but it doesn't want porn when it comes from feminism. Everything needs to be kept in its place. The art world likes the odd splash of recycled pornographic codes, provided they are kept well away from their function of social critique, existing more as mere aesthetic residues. The Barbican likes Jeff Koons, and testicles (even hairy ones) are art provided they are drawn properly by solemn gentlemen. Paris Hilton’s nudity as sculpted by Daniel Edwards singularly transcends the sordid world of pornography, and a little bit of meat always helps highlight the YBAs’ transgression. Let's not demand too much from Western art historiography; it’s already had quite enough to cope with in recent years what with having to acclimatise itself to the critical interferences of different sexual, racial and cultural minorities. We've had Warhol, Mappelthorpe and Journiac (three men, incidentally, who knew how to draw testicles). We need to be epistemologically cautious and ethically patient if we’re not to waste all our effort.

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PRECIADO_EN.pdf — PDF document, 184Kb

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

Lost in Translation Transcultural Translation and Decolonialization of Knowledge

Article published in Ywww.translate.eipcp.net

Translated by Camilla Nielsen and Shirley Anne Tate

Encarnación:
Since the 1990s the Spaniards who live here today have no longer experienced this racism but at that time (I’m referring to the 1970s): «Oh, you’re the child of a foreigner, you reek of garlic» and they always insult you, you encountered teachers who rejected you because you couldn’t speak German, then there was this form of racism... and this leaves a mark on you even as an adult. Because you are in a different country and you don’t want to be here, because you are with your parents, and it is different, because you are not part of the society and before (in Spain) you were.

Carla:
Excuse me, that can also happen in your own country, when we are from different cultures, because that also happened to me. I am from a different culture and I used to speak a different language. My mother spoke a different language and I used to speak her language. I began school when I still spoke my mother’s language and then learned Spanish in school; when I was six I still couldn’t speak Spanish. It does not just happen to you if you are from a different country, it can also happen in the same country.

Dani:
In Latin America, in general, it happens. There is strong racism against the indigenous and black population.

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GUTIERREZ_EN.pdf — PDF document, 390Kb

Marina Grzinić

Processes of embodiment at borders: Tanja Ostojić and the minimal difference

A photograph titled Black Square on White was taken in the 1990s, featuring the black pubic hair of performer Tanja Ostojić styled in the form of a «Malevich» square (a black square centered in the middle of a white plane) and organized in a composition with her white skin, the Mound of Venus.
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is one of the most famous creations of Russian art in the last century. The first Black Square was painted in 1915, beginning a turning point in the development of Russian avant-garde. Black Square against a white background became the symbol, the basic element in the system of the art of suprematism, the step into the new art. Being one of the elementary forms, the square embodied the idea of collective work that was of great importance to Malevich.

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GRZINIC_EN_ES.pdf — PDF document, 256Kb

Alice Chauchat, Frédéric Gies

About The Breast Piece (praticable)

In this text, we propose a retrospective gaze on the work we did for a piece that we co-signed in 2007 and that Alice is performing: The Breast Piece (praticable). This piece focuses on breasts and representations of the female body. First, we will expose what brought each of us to do this work, as well as what brought us to work together on it. Second, we will expound on our working process for the piece, what was produced by the working methods we chose, and the discourse on the body that is the grounds for what we did.

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CHAUCHAT_EN.pdf — PDF document, 141Kb

Iban Ayesta

Corporeal Passions: Experiments in Visceral Writing

The Unknown Life of the Body
In Western tradition, the body has been considered an obstacle not only to intelligence but also to action. It is quite puzzling to think of the body not being relegated to meanings and representations. Paradoxically, if the body has a magical plenitude for active forces, it is also a passive agent waiting to be inscribed by particular logos. In the realm of social sciences a certain metaphysics setting dualisms between body and mind, subject and object, nature and culture, as well as presence and significance has been at work. The life of the body still remains unconscious and un-theorized. Gilles Deleuze, writing on Spinoza and Nietzsche, diagrams a philosophical reversal by posing a paralelism between body and thought.

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AYESTA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 167Kb