Is a question of power Power itself must be abolished ---- and not solely because of the refusal to be dominated which is at the heart of all traditional struggles-- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consist of this double refusal power has ransacked all of the strategies of simulation: parody irony and self-mockery ------ Leaving the left with only a phantom of the truth the terms simulacrum, simulation, and virtual summarize this liquidation in which every signification is eliminated by its own sign, and the profusion of signs parodies a by now unobtainable reality. The Agony of Power, Jean Baudrillard ed.Semiotexte
During my trip to Puerto Rico coming from Cali , Colombia on the first days of December , I have 'encountered" all sort and most of unexpected situations , relations , reactions and context . On this mode for the unsuspected , I "improvised" or decided to improvise at a very inspiring "action " I happen to be taken to . The "action" consisted of PISO proyecto:http://pisoproyecto.org/ The context and the space was a "barrio" a "department for goof food" El Departamento de la Comida ( see link ) and its back streets . Musicians playing and singing navidad music taked us for a mini ride "pasa calle" as in the most traditional style where we stop at the front of the houses and sing along and clap with the neihgbors all desiring each other Felicidades , Happiness . Later we entered El Departamento, the PISOS where all placed close to each other, but separate in the front space at the entrance of the dept .
A woman stept and started to move... a bit later another also started on PISO .... people will look and drift with their eyes all around the shapes formes positions that those bodies where taking. At a point , I got a small call inside me : my dancer body , my improviser contact dance latest memories arising like forgotten hibernated seeds (it was at least 8 or 9 years since I had not interacted any more) called me to action.
Mi long journey as a Dancer has implied my own disappearance as such . Where have they gone so many thousands hours and millions of minutes of dedicated hardship of physical devotion to the Goddess of Dance ?
Pictures of me dancing in 1996 in Barcelona for a catalogue of my show that used visual installation and live performance too. I know there are here with me , as with the rest of my past , is past but it is also part of me now and part of the masses of experience that I have acquired during this long journey as an artist or actor or medium. At that moment I must say , that the so called "call" was also taking place , due to my sense of the comunal situation that PISO was generating , and because I had not forgotten that such setting was also given to the public too. (Any one is welcome ! said their invitation /announcement)I just felt like collaborate or to start so that others could follow ... No one knew my past as dancer , no one really really know who I am or what I have done (a person of my kind, that constantly practices disappearance as her main tactic , does not leaves many clues , many titles , materialised identities to wich any one can be guided) On the contrary , my almost complete exercice on disappearance does not leaves many clues to any one to actually pin me down. I felt free to jump on the PISO , and so I did . I taked it from where I am staying this times since a wile now.. minimal presence , standing still, no movement , small gestures etc etc....
doing PISO improvised encounters at El Departamento de la Comida in Santurce
My intention to actually encourage the public to imitate me did not succeed. Never the less ,I got to know Noemí Segarra , the "artifice" of PISO. She was keen in talking to me and asked me a few questions about my "dance context or relation".She had just stablished her self into her home land back from a life in New York and Venezuela and after some critical moment she had decided to expand her "framework" and went to Beta-Local and did a whole La Practica, wich is one of the few lines of work that Beta-Local provides from their Head Quarters in Viejo San Juan . During this experience , Noemí developed PISO proyecto and has also found a few colleagues to explore further and create what she now calls La Practica , of PISO. (see blog ) It is from that place and mind state , that Noemí was inviting me to be "guiding" her directed Practica de Piso for a few sessions. For me this experience , the connection with Noemí , to have found her at this point its been very refreshing and positive on a times where almost every where I just found deception, rejection or alienation . She is interested in the kind of issues that also appeal to me, and I am happy to find my self less alone . She is more committed , more "mover" still than me , even though she feels she has break and expanded "that dance" and she has, but when I say we have points of connection and common zones of interest etc etc I am not meaning we are at the same place too. My own "path" intricate and so unbearably light ,had left dance and movement to just life and some quotidian gestures or dances at a party . My movement and my been a dancer , is gone in to this inmaterial zone of concepts , narrations , tales and dreams. My latest works that comment on my movements are the "urban interventions" where I stand near a "place/space" found at walking around my own "barrio" in London . And I am wanting to continue the exploration and take it further. For my "passing /becoming PISO " I had photocopied a micro publication from the latest DOCUMENTA13 with the text from Michael Taussig about Field Work Note Books . I hade made my own pirate zine out of it and to made the copies and spread them around already felt subversive some how...
We expend most of the first session talking , because as I recalled , in my times "dancers never talked " nor developed critique or where asked ro do so . Only one kind of "rol" will reserve such activities and this was the Choreographer. I explained to them where I was coming from , my Spain, with Franco, the Institut de Teatre with out Contemporary Dance department ( my class inaugurated this era ) . My trips to London, my disinterest on Martha Graham tech once I was very good at it ... my instinct for more than just dance ..my crisis the gap of almost 15 years and then my coming back again to Dance, this time to find people of my own generation that had developed stuff like "contact dance" 'release" and Improvisation..I also talked about AREA in Barcelona , and Monica Extremiana's great teaching and methods for structuring the "impro sessions" . And finally how I drifted out again from the whole dance world when I left for London 15 years ago. They also explained me from where they came from... and it is amazing how, (some of them could be my own kids by age) their main existence and presence and the main existence of PISO as project etc etc means that my "worries and crisis" where part of something bigger ( it always is) related to a generation and its limitations and its breaking points.
It was exciting to find out that people coming from photography or architecture where getting involved is such vanguardist project as PISO is .
Noemí Segarra picturing as part of the practica
relation between "pisadores" and the the others
Coral and Cristina embodying PISO
We meet up for two more times in wich we derived in different urban zones/ points and we all had our PISO moments in and out of it . I have asked them to please see if they could put down some text related , in any format or shape too so that we can publish a small zine ( just as the one I had give them the first day ) so we are waiting for this... mean wile
Ivan at motorway The experience that I am about to visually narrate , has activated many things , and has happened not for chance . thanks to Noemí Segarra for all this great times .
Coral Pisando on moving platform at La Laguna
Situation where we are perceived by the viewer photographer as mover and performer
Third and last session , where I ask to go to interact at La Placita , and The Fruit Market
me interacting inside a fruit market , my figure , the figure of fruits, body and objects
Felix picturing as practice and relation to Pisadores
me doing PISO with fruits with Gladys a lady from el Barrio clapping to "el son"
SEE ME// HEAR ME// FEEL ME Ephemeral Disturbance Psycho-Perceptive PAMM (Performing Arts Mirror Madrid) is a nonprofit art space without fixed headquarters but located in Madrid, opened for creation, diffusion, development, and spreading of performing arts, or projects of national or international performers, ready to work throughout guerrilla or resistance practices and under budget.
Los Detectives Salvajes : Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima
Mexican Embassy at La Residencia 134 London East End
Olmeco Gold Tablets
From Walter Benjamin text Mexican Embassy:
"I never pass a wooden fetish,gilded Buddha, or Mexican idol with out telling my self : that maybe the true God " Charles Baudelaire
" I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of aboveground caves in the mountains where an order had survived from the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a Gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. we joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on a wall of the cave a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this, the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left."
Walter Benjamin, "Mexican Embassy", from One-Way Street, in ReflectionsThe event Mexican Embassy tuck place Sunday 15 of January at Residencia 134 , Esther Planas studio flat in London , a place that has been also a "refuge" and short residence for various artist and friends for the past five years ... The idea was to have a few issues present and leave the spirit of the day take its time and lead the happening , as a guest, some had arrived early , they maybe had to cook or cut onions...some just talked to each other relaxed , but puzzled about what was supposed to happen.. this feeling of an imminent "thing about to occur " floated in the space making the non event a surreal paralel to Buñuel's The Exterminator Angel subject...
Some of the guest was too similar to Salvador Dali, the antagonist of Luis Buñuel , after he denounced Luis of been a "commi " to the authorities in New York forcing his ex-friend exile to Mexico and some how creating or starting the cause of what later would be some of the best creations that Buñuel delivered as a Film Maker as in his Mexican period..
At some point, the host of the Embassy, after having cook Hot Hot Chocolate....got a visit from Luis Buñuel spirit.... The video shows fragments of the event...starting with the medium session and followed by the reading of Walter Benjamin's dream Mexican Embassy by Pablo Leon de la Barra, acting as him self , mexican curator diletante ...finally by late night ...a bolero wanted to be played and heard....the great guitar playing of Puerto Rican musician and performer Daniel Moncada make it possible.The installation at Residencia 134 , is a project by Esther Planas related with her supposed first solo show eternally delayed by various odd ( maybe that God) reasons in Mexico DF ....Preparing the show, there where issues found and issues compiled as for raw material to be later distilled and synthesised ...
One very relevant text and the title of the event , is Walter Benjamin's Mexican Embassy, a description on one dream he once had...
The idea of myth , travelling as to re-discover and re-trace.
The idea of an Embassy, a space where all things "that nation" , could happen inside.. the little portion of magic territoire where one could pray at other's God's
If we understand God as religion and religion as culture, opposed to ritual as folklore
in the way The West has managed to represent the Otherness of such places as the lands where due to different politics of Colonisation at least one can still walk next to the real owners and natives of the territoire...
The knowledge of Planas ancestors living somewhere on the country... as a note about a grand father doing his first communion at one very complicated to pronounce address.. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and specially the idea or "her room" at the convent, a place full of books and instruments where to studie and write and play...The dream about Peyote rituals that have been narrated to her by friends travellers, a pop video clip that was shot on location in the towns of Garcia, Xilitla, and the Icamole Desert in Mexico ...The notes, films compiled, about Caridad Mercader and her son The Killer of Trostky , Las Aventuras de Olmeco Beuys , by Pablo Helguera, plus a whole stream of conscience like references to other works , lectures and material that has been found along the journey of preparation for a show that it maybe never touches Mexican ground...
The context is the residence /studio/ house of Planas and there lots of works hung related to this project, Gold Monochromes , Mayan Magic Penetrable, Ritual Dress, unfinished Panels ...
The event is about a call to the spirits of such ancient Gods from "a petite coin du monde anglaise " as if in a Mexican Embassy more close to the sort Des Esseintes would have created at his house than a real one...
The idea of Mexico trough out the topics of narration and memories of all sorts of non Mexican people , The Visitors, The Colonisers, The Exiled...The Ultimate Outsider Dream.....
Las Aventuras de Olmeco B by Pablo Helguera
sequence of stills from Luis Buñuel film
El Angel Exterminador
Mathias Goeritz Golds
Esther Planas and Marco Rountree Cruz
Capital Pedro Planas en Jalapa , Mexico
The film ( part one)
Salvador D and beautiful surreal hair of guest....
face book page ..........
Freud's Mexico
Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis Rubén Gallo
Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. Here, Rubén Gallo reveals Freud's previously undisclosed connections to a culture and a psychoanalytic tradition not often associated with him. Freud found a receptive audience among Mexican intellectuals, read Mexican books, collected Mexican antiquities, and dreamed Mexican dreams; his writings bear the traces of a longstanding fascination with the country.
In the Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles. Gallo writes about a "motley crew" of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world: the poet Salvador Novo, a gay dandy who used Freud to vindicate marginal sexual identities; the conservative philosopher Samuel Ramos, who diagnosed the collective neuroses afflicting his country; the cosmopolitan poet Octavio Paz, who launched a psychoanalytic inquiry into the origins of Mexican history; and Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine monk who put his entire monastery into psychoanalysis.
After describing Mexico's Freud, Gallo offers an imaginative reconstruction of Freud's Mexico. Although Freud himself never visited Mexico, he owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants—including Trotsky's assassin—on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; and he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger. Freud's Mexico features a varied cast of characters that includes Maximilian von Hapsburg, Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramón Mercader, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera—and even David Rockefeller. Gallo offers bold and vivid rereadings of both Freudian texts and Mexican cultural history.
About the Author
Rubén Gallo is Director of the Program in Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. He is the author of Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT Press, 2005).
