Re: [-empyre-] Luck of the Draw

[Tina Gonsalves <tina@tinagonsalves.com>]

Michel I agree with what you say. But, for me, the feeling of having a 
'voice' and the potency of that voice, changes daily for me. Some days 
I feel my voice is strong. Others not.

I do believe that pain, suffering, is something that links everyone. 
Everyone has been hurt , known pain.We are all vulnerable. I am a big 
believer that everyone has the authority to speak about Barelife. I 
have had times where all that I have depended on has stripped away. To 
cope, I lost myself in my practice, and tried to make sense of it 
through the act of creating. Some days I thought the work I produced 
was hopeless, other days brilliant. But those opinions also changed 
daily, and only time could allow me to judge the work. What I did have 
to do, was create, then not look at it for six months or so. If I kept 
re-working it, it slowly became sort of clinical and sanitized, sort of 
neutral.

I guess what I am trying to say is, is that my internal environment 
creates my perception of my external environment. It is always 
changing, always fluctuates. Some days, my voice is strong, some days 
it seems diluted. We are constantly affected by, and attuned to the 
world around us. Powerful emotions can simmer beneath the threshold of 
awareness, impacting on how I perceive and act, even though I have no 
idea they are at work.  In daily encounters, people automatically and 
continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices, postures, 
movements of others. Some happen in milli-seconds. In essence, we are 
carriers, dancing with each other in harmonized body language, 
infecting each other with our emotions. Through these behavioural 
patterns, as you suggested, hierarchical and social power structures 
emerge.

Today, searching for fashionable beauty and youth, plastic surgery has 
evolved to the point that people (with enough money) can receive 
augmentation to lips, penises, vaginas, breasts, waists and buttocks. 
Nerves can be cauterised, so the blushing action can be arrested. 
Through surgery, we can conceal the body’s involuntary responses, the 
ones which are meant to reveal emotional stress or elevation. Botox 
causes temporary paralysis of localized muscles, making the face lose 
expression, and therefore the reading of someone’s emotions harder. As 
flesh is sculpted with lasers and scalpels, faces and bodies become a 
dynamic, ongoing works in process - an amour to hide the bodies natural 
response to emotions. The face becomes harder to read, harder to show 
joy, fear - the face sort of becomes a mask.

My current work tries to look at this relationship of how the internal 
body changes the way experience the world, our daily experience, How 
the external changes our internal feelings. Why is it that some days 
there is a huge clarity and vision, and others days it feels dulled and 
diluted. As an artist, I feel I need to be aware to those daily changes 
in the way I look at the world, and how I make sense of it. I thinks 
its important to admit feeling hopeless and dull as much as its 
important to celebrate feeling strong, salient.

On 03/07/2006, at 11:36 PM, M White wrote:

> Tina, I completely understand your feelings about not
> having the authority (and ironically) position in
> relationship to bare life that allows you to speak.
> However, I also think that we should avoid the ways
> culture (I hope that I am not contributing to this)
> likes to silence certain people--particularly those
> that dissent. Many of us have noticed a tendency among
> people from other places to tell us that we are
> "lucky." "You are lucky that your stuff/house wasn't
> flooded" and "you are lucky to have a job," which
> somehow suggests we don't deserve one. Certainly,
> things could be drastically worse but suggesting that
> people are "lucky" also erases the ways they live in
> these situations and silences them. The suggestion is
> that their luckiness prevents them from
> "authentically" speaking about the experience. Most of
> the people saying these things are in fact "luckier"
> if such distinctions were useful. I want to avoid a
> tendency that I noticed at a feminist media studies
> conference (and that I associate with the continued
> cultural devaluation of women) where women tended to
> use the dismissive term "just" when representing
> themselves: "I am just a grad student," "just an
> independent scholar," "just an assistant professor," …
> It seem to me that art production provides one way to
> think critically about the world and that such tactics
> and potential forms of resistance should not be
> underestimated.
>
> I also wonder, what happens when the silenced, bare
> life, and the tortured try to speak/write/be visible
> and no one answers? Our lack of reply might be guilt,
> disinterest, feeling "lucky," being told we are
> "lucky" and that the event does not apply to us, or
> fear of contamination but this lack of acknowledgment
> has serious consequences. I know that I have been
> unable to answer and that worries me.
>
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Tina Gonsalves
http://www.tinagonsalves.com