DISOBEDIENT TRIBUTE TO "RASTREADORAS" IN MEXICO
AUGUST 2019 Rubén Ortiz invited me to the seminar “Escenarios de lo real” (Scenarios of Reality) at the Hellenic Center, to organize a disobedient tribute to the tracker women in Mexico. Since I was not too well acquainted with the scope of this situation that involves the whole country, I proposed to develop a field of investigation where the students would find their own points of view. Starting from them and with the outline that I normally develop for each disobedient tribute, we produced this action as affective-political task to accompany these women who disobey, resign themselves and accept the unacceptable. This tribute appeals to the disobedient actions of the female trackers to help us activate our own actions. The tribute celebrates the lives of those who are no longer there and of those who search for them, as well as the lives of those of us who are present. |
Act 1: Remembering
This act is to remember that, in the face of the multiple forms of experiencing the organized fear and the different forms of submission that we accept, we need to reconnect with our potential to rebel and disobey the unacceptable.
Act 2- Memory
This is an act of listening to the voice of the tracker women: to their disobedience, to negative to resign themselves and give up, in order to find the bodies of their dear ones.
Act 3- Disobedient Wishes and Gestures
Name, pronounce our wishes of disobedience and disobedient gestures. From the shortest to the tallest, (from the weakest to the strongest?) we make this invitation.
Act 4-Getting Rid of Fear
The trackers say that when they search they find treasures: the missing bodies. We want to maintain this image in a country where life has absolutely no value. This action exposes the fact that in order to disobey we need to free ourselves from fear
Act 5- Celebration
When trackers search, sometimes they do it under 52o. And there are people who accompany them carrying a roof to facilitate their task. We want to extend that roof, that protection here, celebrating the lives of those who are no longer there, the lives of those who search them, and our own lives.
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Act 6 –Thankfulness
We are thankful for the contribution of the tracker women in the construction of a civil society.
“We are here to pay a disobedient tribute to the trackers, these women who face inhuman forms of oppression and injustice. They and their relatives take the initiative and accompany one another in the search of their dear ones. They thus disobey the unacceptable as official discourse, as imagery of the terror spread throughout this country.
With our tribute we wish to honor these women who, with their actions, construct a civil society, affective bonds of accompaniment and also search for those who are not their own missing ones to show us that it is a problem that concerns everyone: they underline that we are interdependent beings. That we must be independent beings. Because the system’s violence has its multiple forms in the destruction of all kinds of biodiversity.
In order to rescue and valuate the legacy of these struggles, the action proposes to grant a new meaning to a gesture: the embrace. To visualize an “architecture” that has been in construction from the past to the present, the contribution of their struggles today, the way we learned them. The action suggests the imagery of reparation convoked by the poetic-political symbol of the painting “The Embrace” by Genovés, an artist from Valencia. It consists of an invitation to become involved with it, which will be made by the participants of the workshop to be conducted by Paula Valero in the International Seminar of Living Arts and Social Field, in La Mutant Hall.
DISOBEDIENT TRIBUTE
TO ROSA PARKS April 7, 2019. In the context of the Feminist Festival: The Woman’s Voice. Palm Island. Canary Islands. This event was a tribute to Rosa Parks, the Afro-American woman who granted impulse to the civil rights movement in the United States by refusing to give her bus seat to a white man. I started out from that gesture, from no longer wanting to cede your place. To carry out the tribute I proposed a workshop with the women who had been invited to the festival, mainly Afro-descendants. It was conceived as closing of the festival, to celebrate the contribution of all women to the social field. |
The action contained an appeal to our inner “Rosa Parks”, and I posed the guests the question that always activates the disobedient tribute: What would you like to disobey in life, and why, for whatever reason (work, social condition, etc.) have you not been able to do it up to now?
After naming all the things they wanted to disobey, I proposed to “liberate” them from fear, which is the key that prevents disobedience. With flowers and plants they “liberated” and “cleansed” one another from fear, while playing music.
Next I proposed to play the game of the chair, where someone always remains without a seat. “In life, at some point we will remain without a place, so instead of competing to get a seat, those that have it must share it with whoever remains without one.” At the end, one chair remained for at least 30 participants, and a large group embraced in order to share that sole place.
DISOBEDIENT TRIBUTE TO OUR SILVIAS
Sylvia Rivera and Silvia Reyes From and to all our Silvias The action was a tribute to the disobediences of Sylvia Rivera, coinciding with the anniversary of her death, and to Silvia Reyes, one of the first visible and combatant trans women in the historical LGTB rally in 1977. It was an action to reload our bodies with memory in the face of the constant attacks to our own subjectivity and to the expropriation of our wishes. |