[-empyre-] more transitional objects

micha cárdenas mmcarden at usc.edu
Wed Jun 20 13:26:44 EST 2012


Lauren said "The idea of a transitional environment for the relating
that always involves losing the habit that appears to be sovereign, for
producing change without the melodrama of a trauma that appears to be a
sufficient coding, is what Jennifer’s piece is about: making."

taking a cue from lauren, i am accepting the fact that after 3 days
with La Pocha Nostra in an intense physical performance art workshop,
words seem foreign... I feel like I have been in that transitional
environment she describes, where the participants are open to
transformation and shaking off the habits of the regime of the
sensible.

so to offer more prompts, a few transitional objects which may raise
affective spectres:

the virgen de guadalupe - http://www.flickr.com/photos/28994831@N08/4233429694/

diana taylor writes in the Archive and Repertoire how the Virgen de
Guadalupe was used by indigenous communities in Mexico as a way of
maintaining their religious practices under the imposition of
Catholicism, as they simultaneously worshipped the Virgin Mary and
their own ancient gods. She writes  "The 'satanic invention' that
Sahagún alludes to... allows one deity to be worshipped not only under
the guise of another but at the same time as another-- a form of
mlutiplication and simultaneity rather than surrogation and
absenting... The multicodedness of these practices transmits as many
layers of meaning as there are spectators, participants and
witnesses." Can we think of the Virgin de Guadalupe as a transitional
object? If there is a zeitgeist (in the US? in academia?) around the
changing nature of structure, can we understand previous forms of
resistance to colonialism through transitional objects which are
multicoded as useful models for our own precarity in the multiplicity
of realities that are proliferating and shattering as neoliberalism
collapses or transforms?

love letters between enslaved poets -
http://phillisweekly.tumblr.com/about ,
http://phillisweekly.tumblr.com/

clothing with wireless networks embedded into them -
https://vimeo.com/43213227 , http://autonets.org/

bull horns, fetish outfits -
http://dani-demilia.blogspot.com/2012/04/she-bull.html

the breast of a transgender woman, organs grown at will, partially
formed organs - http://vimeo.com/17326288

pills, drugs, hormones, prescribed hormones, becoming something else -
http://vimeo.com/3874238

[perhaps much of my art practice involves close engagements with
transitional objects]

telephones, communication technologies - zach a reference I am always
inspired by for thinking the unquantifiable and innumerable is Avital
Ronell, who writes in the telephone book "Let it be said in
conjunction with Max Brod's speculations, that the telephone is double
breasted, as it were, circumscribing itself differently each time,
according to the symbolic localities marked by the good breast or the
bad breast, the Kleinian good object or bad object."  and "the phone
as a missing mouth, displaced genital, a mother's deaf ear [Jack and
Bechdel] or any number of M.I.A. organs such as the partial object ear
transmitting and suturing the themes of Blue Velvet."

needles and stitching - the transitional objects video speaks to me of
the rich possibilities for queer embodiment that can emerge from a
simple needle and thread.

data and affect - on patricia's discussions of big data and latour, i
offer my friend and classmate VJ Um Amel's brilliant work bringing
together millions of tweets and hashtags with the affective resonance
of video and sound of the arab intifadas:
http://vjumamel.com/video-blog/, http://www.r-shief.org/


-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org


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