Re: [-empyre-] Tina on Bare Life and Exposure

Tina Gonsalves <tina@tinagonsalves.com> · Mon, 3 Jul 2006 21:07:03 +0100

Ana and michele - thanks for sharing your story. I have a hard time 
knowing to respond. My role here seems to be to talk from my 
experiences of being an artist, and my first response to reading your 
story is to wonder why I bother being an artist. Today, it seems rather 
inconsequential and irrelevant.
At the same time, for me, it often feels limiting to use verbal 
language to describe the experience of pain, vulnerability, exposure – 
how do you describe the feeling of the hollowness in your chest or gut 
when everything that protects you is stripped away? I guess for me, the 
act of creating an image, sound, video or through performance often 
enables me to recognize my own pain, and through an image, I might be 
able to translate those feelings so others can also recognize their own 
pain, hurt, vulnerability. In that way the work becomes some sort of 
conduit for viewers to recognize their own emotional feelings.   My 
video work is often created in fast and frenetic vulnerable moments. 
Often, they are left raw, messy and by not ‘refining’ them, I imagine I 
am allowing others to view my own personal flaws and vulnerabilities. I 
feel a little fearful when people view it, but some how that rawness 
feels a little more authentic, like its beginning to strip away the 
residues from the onslaughts that the world delivers, penetrate the 
sediments.. slowly breaking down the walls that keep much of life 
safely outside. When I work, the more raw it is, the more it returns a 
potent pleasure, a feeling of truthfulness, openness.  There is room 
for accident and mistakes. There is room for surprise.
I guess, in my installation and video works, I want people to become 
more sensitive to themselves, to their breath, their pulse, their 
emotional feelings. "vulnerability” and “sensitivity” is often regarded 
in a negative way, but with my work, I am trying to see sensitivity as 
an asset that enriches each day. Being able to cry, to share the pain, 
to engage more intensively in feelings. Be more compassionate.
In these moments when being an artist feels stupid, I look at Joseph 
Beuys comment about what it was to be an artist.  “You weren’t showing 
your magnificence and your wealth of ideas and your huge creativity, 
you were showing your vulnerability. And it was your vulnerability that 
people picked up on, the perception of your vulnerability as a person 
and as an artist that sparked the creativity in other people”.
But then again creativity seems a luxury when you just managing to 
exist. Actually, I don’t know where it fits in.
On 02/07/2006, at 11:38 AM, Ana Valdes wrote:
Dear Empyre! I has been lurking for a while and I has not been

participating very actively, I guess, for not having English as mother

language and feel my intents to express myself or my ideas can be made

in a poorer way through English.

I am a writer and cultural activist, born in South America but living

in Sweden since 28 years back.

My mother language is Spanish and now it's Swedish which is my best 
language.

Michele White's excellent text triggered in me an answer, most based

on the use of Giorgio Agamben. I am working with Agamben on the issues

of memory and reparative justice, the idea of the people who survived

Auschwitz as "witness", with the responsability of carry testimony on

what happened to them and to their fellow prisoners.

I was in a prison as political prisoner during four years and it's

still the fact which most distinctely made me reflect upon life and

existens, two quite different issues.

We merely lived during the time of the prison, our most elementary

needs were covered, we got food but it was often not edible, we slept

but always with lights on and the constant interruptions of soldiers

with gunmachines going berserk in our dorms and throwing away our

blankets.

We were not allowed to have books or newspapers or radio or

television, we were forced to work in the fields with dogs and patrols

watching us, we were tortured and humilliated.

But, did we exist or did we only live?

For me, and more clearly after these experience, to live is to be able

to full participate in society, with all your rights, the right to

exerce your citizenship (as Saskia Sassen and Will Kymlicka state it

in their essays about multicultural citizenship) and most important of

all, the right to dissent.

To me the right to dissent is the only one which is inalienable.

Ana

_______________________________________________

empyre forum

empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au

http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Tina Gonsalves
http://www.tinagonsalves.com