--empyre- soft-skinned space--[an important array of inquiries, ana. looking forward.
to earlier question about the position of the performer/re-performer in the art
of testimony... the act of re-presenting, including first person,
autobiographical accounts, is to make space in which paradox can stir - to move
out of the single, reduced space to a plural, public space where differences
(of interpretation, experience) can occur. the live experience of the performer
is - interesting - but secondary. an impactful play/testimony can be rendered
by actors thinking about their laundry. can be.
picking up from yesterday and finishing thread, I think: Event as description
is marketing; plays of description sell specifically what has already passed
away. Sell death. Sell us what we’ve already bought and has already been worn
down, worn away (trailers for movies that in essence, we’ve already seen)...]
9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a cliché – we had
already seen it. Looking at the live broadcast: “This must be a movie; this is
just like a movie” but really – “This is just like a movie trailer.” Genocide
testimonies (of both perpetrators and victims) can quickly fall to cliché –
rote chit. It is imperative that we don’t respond to the bad art of terror or
art stunted by trauma with louder, counter terroristic or re-traumatizing
clichés. This runs the risk of keeping the disaster alive, Frankenstein
fashion, as a patchwork of clichés, sanctioned by a fortified culture of the
beautiful, important, death-affirming cliché. (Torch makers living luxe; the
monster is out.) When policy (as pushed through political rhetoric) holds the
form of cliché as the highest measure of expression, we fasten to cascades of
clichés out of misdirected love of beauty. 9/11, genocides, disasters at our
doorsteps are truly
awful; we understandably resist holding them by the scruff of the truth or the
sleeve of the awful (which are complex, unresolved, and inculpatory) – we would
rather love these things, honor them with the government coinage of cliché,
bank them, protect and preserve them even at our own expense, horde them and
not spend them, pile them to account, so that we may feel as if we are
beautiful for recognizing beauty.
These beheading videos are bad art. They are clichéd and static. Someone thinks
they’re beautiful We must not be tricked into endorsing their esthetic with
equally aggressive tropes which are beheadings in other modes – shooting a
western with the same script used for a science fiction film.
Or we may leave our lives and return to a home we don’t own… we may confess to
prodigality, we may admit to bankruptcy. We may move to the circumstance that
recognizes us rather than collecting our recognitions, that speaks our name
rather than invoking it. – all our recognitions, and not how we are recognized.
Contemplation – pursue light (bear light – torches; do all you can do), wait in
light (the light shines on you), the light shines through you. A script is not
the equipment for light (not a blueprint – it is its own occasion). It is not a
source of light. It is where we go blind in the sun.
Isis is anti-contemplative; it defers contemplation out of unexamined
weariness. Let somebody else do the work of opening to God, I will wait in
stasis for stasis.
On Wednesday, November 5, 2014 11:40 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I am Alicia Migdal, Uruguayan writer and film critic.
Yesterday night I attended the worldwide premiere of the Italian film by
Ermanno Olmi Torneranno i prati (The grass will be back). It was showed at the
Italian Cultural Institute in Montevideo. It was showed to remember the hundred
years of the First World War. A poetic elegy from the trenches of that war wich
was supposed to be unique and not repeatable.
I want point out an index of topics I aim later to develop further, thinking
about this actual universe of annihilated erotization by death and violence:
1: the bare life, the biopolitic and the permanent state of exception, as
adressed by Giorgio Agamben.
2: the femicide in Mexico and Argentina
3: the childkillngs (infanticidio) as consequence
4: My life efter: the work with the biographical data of the children and
grandchildren of the Argetinian dictatorship set up by the Argentinian
playwriter and director Lola Arias. She worked with clothes, objects, images
and materials from the concrete past of parents and grandparents.
www.lolarias.com.ar/010_bio_ing.swf
Ana Valdés contributed with the experience of former political female political
prisoners in the representation of Antigona Oriental directed by Marianella
Morena in Montevideo.
5: The life is worthless from the suicidal students killing their comrades in
the American universities.
6: the war against the drugs in Mexico, to live is an accident (or hazard, or a
coincidence, sorry the word
